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• Queer Moderns: Max Ewing's Jazz Age New York - 2025 Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
• American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture - 2010 Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
• Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History - 2006 Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
• House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family - 1989 University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

• Wellesley College website - https://www.wellesley.edu/people/alice-friedman

  Alice Friedman
  Grace Slack McNeil Professor Emerita of American Art & Professor Emerita of Art

  Contact
  Email:
  afriedma@wellesley.edu
  Department
  Architecture
  Art
  Interested in building an interdisciplinary, feminist approach to architecture through research, teaching, and public education.

  As Grace Slack McNeil Professor of the History of American Art at Wellesley College, my research and teaching focus on modern architecture and the history of design in the United States. I am particularly interested in mid-century modern architecture, in the culture of the United States in the years following World War II. Broadly speaking, I am concerned with the social and cultural history of architecture, with an emphasis on issues of gender, patronage, and the history of taste, both in the United States and in Europe, 1750 to the present.

  My lecture and seminar courses focus on modern architecture and design, engaging students in an interdisciplinary analysis that emphasizes the significance of culture, conventions, and values in the making of buildings, interiors, and urban spaces. Through my work as founding director of the Architecture Program, Wellesley has built a distinctive and internationally recognized approach to architectural education, one in which each student creates her own program of study, choosing from courses in studio art, the history of architecture, digital media, and architectural design (through cross-registration at MIT).

  In the McNeil Program for Studies in American Art, which I direct, we focus on three areas of study, including the art and architecture of New England; modern architecture and design in the United States; and the art and architecture of the Americas. We run internship programs for students that enable them to gain experience in historic preservation, museum studies, and archival research.

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  Alice T. Friedman

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Alice T. Friedman
  Born September 28, 1950 (age 74)
  Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
  Known for Art history, architectural history
  Alice T. Friedman is an American architectural historian and the Grace Slack McNeil Professor Emerita of American Art and Professor Emerita of Art at Wellesley College.[1] She specializes in modern architecture and the history of American design, concentrating on the issues of gender and sexuality in architectural patronage.

  Education and career
  Friedman graduated with a B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1972; an M.Phil. from the Warburg Institute, University of London, in 1974; an M.A. from Harvard University in 1975; as well as a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1980.

  Friedman taught at Wellesley College from 1979 to 2023.[1] She served as the Co-Director of the Architecture Program from 1983 to 2022 and the Director of the McNeil Program for Studies in American Art and Architecture from 2005 to 2022.[1] She has also taught in a visiting capacity for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University (at the Graduate School of Design), and the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University in London.

  While at Wellesley College, Friedman was awarded the 2021 Pinanski Teaching Prize.[2] She was named a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2020.[3]

  In addition to teaching, Friedman has served as an advisor to museums, including the Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian Houses Project at the Currier Museum of Art (2020–21) and “Floating Palaces” at the National Building Museum (2013–15). She also curated two exhibitions at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College: “Consuming Passions: Photography and the Object” (1998) and “Home is Where” (1996).

  Friedman has written four books: House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (University of Chicago Press, 1989), Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (Harry N. Abrams, 1998, and re-published in paperback by Yale University Press, 2007),[4] American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (Yale University Press, 2010),[5] and Queer Moderns: Max Ewing's Jazz Age New York (Princeton University Press, 2025).[6]

  Friedman’s work has influenced the study of architectural history in significant ways, as recognized by The American Academy in Rome,[7] [8] The New York Times,[9] Women Writing Architecture,[10] and the European Iconic Houses Network.[11] For over forty years, Friedman has served as a lecturer and critic in the United States and Europe, including, most recently, at Princeton University School of Architecture,[12] the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas,[13] and University of Toronto.[14]

  Awards and fellowships
  LGBT Studies Research Fellowship, Yale University (2023)
  Pinanski Teaching Prize, Wellesley College (2021)[2]
  Fellow, Society of Architectural Historians (2020)[3]
  Rea S. Hederman Critic in Residence, American Academy in Rome (2019)[7]
  Arcus | Places Prize for Scholarship on Gender, Sexuality and the Built Environment, U.C. Berkeley, College of Environmental Design (2014–15)[15][16]
  Radcliffe Institute Exploratory Seminar Grant: “Sacred Space in a Secular Nation of Believers” (with Professor Wendy Cadge, Sociology, Brandeis University) (2012)
  Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts (2010)[17]
  Honorary Fellow, Boston Society of Architects (AIA) (2005)
  Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities (1995–96)
  Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1995)[18]
  Selected articles
  "Feminist Architectural History 2.0" (with Nora Wendl), in Dana Arnold, ed. Women and Architectural History: The Monstrous Regiment Then and Now (Routledge, 2024), 131–150.[19]
  "Interior Decorator is Dead," The Art Bulletin 106, no. 1 (March 2024), 34–38.[20]
  "Brother and I in Bed: Queer Photography at Home in New York," in John Potvin, ed. The Senses in Interior Design: Sensorial Expressions and Experiences (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023), 69–85.[21]
  "Barbie Queen of the Prom," in Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky, eds. Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023).[22]
  "Dancing Across the Threshold: Privacy and the Home in the Time of Covid-19," in Penny Sparke, Ersi Ioannidou, Pat Kirkham, Stephen Knott, and Jana Scholze, eds. Interiors in the Era of Covid-19 (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).[23]
  "Public Face and Private Space in the Design of Contemporary Houses," in Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White, eds. The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Routledge, 2020).[24]
  "F the U-Haul: Janet Flanner's Paris and the Varieties of Lesbian Domesticity," in Brent Pilkey, Rachel Scicluna, Ben Campkin, Barbara Penner, eds. Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression (Routledge, 2017).[25]
  "Girl Talk: Feminism and Domestic Architecture at Wright’s Oak Park Studio,” in David Van Zanten, ed. Marion Mahony Reconsidered (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).[26]
  "Frank Lloyd Wright and Feminism: Mamah Borthwick's Letters to Ellen Key," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 2 (June 2002), 140–151.[27]
  "Architecture, Authority, and the Female Gaze: Planning and Representation in the Early Modern Country House," Assemblage no. 18 (August 1992), 40–61.[28]
  Bibliography
  Queer Moderns: Max Ewing's Jazz Age New York, Princeton University Press, 2025. ISBN 978-0-69126-734-0
  American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture, Yale University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-30011-654-0
  Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History, Harry N. Abrams, 1998; Yale University Press, 2007 ISBN 0810939894 ISBN 978-0-30011-789-9
  Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family, University of Chicago Press, 1989. ISBN 978-0-22626-329-8
  Dream Houses Toy Homes exhibition catalogue, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1995.
  Spaces of Faith (edited with Anne Massey), Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture, volume 6 issue 3 (2015/16)

By Alice T. Friedman. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998, 240 pp., $39.95 hardcover.

Architecture has long nurtured the myth of the great form-giver, a male (inevitably) who combines aesthetic inspiration with technical know-how to engender a masterwork in stone or steel. In this century, one of the foundation texts is surely Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), whose heroic protagonist is loosely modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright. In the novel, the Wrightian character is vindicated for refusing to compromise his architectural principles to social demands. A poster for the movie, made shortly after the novel was published, depicts the hero (Gary Cooper) towering over the supine figure of the wealthy and powerful femme fatale who ends up (after he rapes her) as his lover and soulmate (Patricia Neal). The caption reads, "No man takes what's mine." Ironically, Rand's subsequent attempt to engage Wright to design a house for herself came to naught.

In her new book, Alice Friedman takes a more probing look at some relationships between modern architects and women clients, starting with Wright's collaboration with Aline Barnsdall on the design of one of his most important domestic projects of the twenties, the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles. The case studies Friedman brings together in this handsomely illustrated volume - some of which appeared earlier in different form, others published here for the first time - virtually chart a new field, and it is a rich one. Friedman's subject is actually threefold: first, the influence of visionary clients on the new architecture of this century; second, specifically that of women clients; and third, the house as a site of cultural construction and gendered representation. While the question has often been posed as to what a "feminist architecture" might look like, the overlapping subjects treated by Friedman begin to suggest concrete answers about how architecture might respond to specifically feminist demands, or at least cater more sensitively to the domestic needs of women.

In the case of the Hollyhock House, the encounter between two strong-willed and original personalities resulted in a highly imaginative solution to a domestic complex that was also intended to function as the centerpiece of an avant-garde theatrical community. Located on a 36-acre hill-top site in Hollywood, the Hollyhock House, begun in 1919, melds the architectural massing and motifs of the American Southwest and Central America - pueblos on the mesa and Mayan temples - with a graceful courtyard plan derived from classical Greek amphitheatres.

Barnsdall, a wealthy Chicago heiress and a progressive feminist, had studied acting in Europe with Eleanor Duse and entered the milieu of the most important European art theatres. Returning to Chicago in the second decade of the century, she came under the influence of the anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman, whose book The Social Significance of Modern Drama propounded that the mission of the American theatre was to impel audiences to confront the realities of social and political injustice. Shortly afterward Barnsdall moved to the West Coast, where she became entranced with the beauties of the southern California landscape and decided to build an "art park" combining open-air performance spaces and public gardens with a residence for herself and her daughter.

Wright's passionate commitment to ideas of art, community and the natural landscape, as well as his early contact with feminist ideas, presaged an ideal collaboration. Instead, the development of Barnsdall's "California Romanza," which dragged on for nearly a decade, was fraught with conflicts, exacerbated by Wright's refusal to bow to the "meddling" advice of the various theatrical consultants Barnsdall called in. Ultimately the only part of the ambitious project to be realized was the residence, which Barnsdall abandoned shortly after its completion, donating it to the city of Los Angeles as a headquarters for the California Art Club. Nonetheless, the Hollyhock House represents a unique reconfiguration by Wright of the domestic environment. Inspired by a remarkably independent-minded client and a hybrid private/public program, it obliged Wright to depart radically from the essentialist attitude toward "hearth and home" that characterizes most of his houses before and afterward.

Succeeding Chapters of Women and the Making of the Modern House relate the histories of other innovative domestic programs that challenged architectural conventions, helping to shape canonical buildings. Organized roughly chronologically, Friedman's narratives interweave a set of variations on the theme. In the Schroder House in Utrecht, Holland, built in 1923-24, the collaboration between Gerrit Rietveld and Truus Schroder, a young widow with three children who shared both an intellectual and romantic relationship with her architect, yielded an unprecedented domestic environment. A built manifesto of the Dutch De Stijl movement, the diminutive house is at once didactic in the way it is treated as a laboratory for aesthetic and social experimentation and ebullient in its free plan and use of' primary color.

As Friedman's essay (written with Maristella Casciato) establishes, Schroder's proximity to progressive Dutch intellectual circles through her sister, An Harrenstein-Schrader, with interests ranging beyond art and left-wing politics to Theosophy, meditation, free love and women's rights, led to a comprehensive rethinking of domestic space in relation to household labor, child care and sociality. On the upper floor where the main living space is located, planes of red, blue, yellow, black, gray and white create a vibrant three-dimensional composition accommodating an open and communal family life while also serving to zone the space into smaller areas that can be closed off with sliding and folding wooden partitions, recapturing the intimacy of traditional Dutch interiors. Sparsely furnished with Rietveld's tables, cupboards, beds and chairs, also in primary colors, the house presents itself as both a total work of modern art and a place permeated with optimism and joie de vivre. After the house was completed, Rietveld maintained an office there, and later, following his wife's death, lived in it with Schroder. For Schroder, the liberating experience of the house led to her professional collaboration with Rietveld on future projects.

In her discussion of another of the most famous houses of the twentieth century, the Villa Stein-de Monzie by Le Corbusier at Garches outside Paris, built in 1926-28, Friedman's claim that the unconventional requirements of the client(s) had a substantial impact on the brilliant achievement of the design (beyond idiosyncrasies of functional organization) is harder to sustain. In fact, from a functional standpoint, this house commissioned by art patrons is notable for its lack of wall surface on which to hang paintings. A planar white "machine for living," it is rather a polemical statement of Le Corbusier's "five points of a new architecture": free plan, free facade, columnar support system (elevating the main level of the house above the ground), horizontal windows, and roof terrace. Still, the fleshing in of the unorthodox household that commissioned this residence affords fascinating background, illuminating the avant-garde social milieu of postwar Paris and the architecture to which it gave birth.

The clients for the house were Sarah and Michael Stein and their friend Gabrielle de Monzie. Michael, the brother of Gertrude Stein, was a wealthy expatriate American art collector, while Sarah was a devotee of Christian Science, a movement founded in the late nineteenth century by Mary Baker Eddy, dedicated to spiritual renewal and healing through positive, "scientific" thinking. Eddy's philosophy had special appeal for forward-thinking women like Sarah Stein and Gabrielle de Monzie, who, in seeking an architect for their house, saw affinities between it and the esprit nouveau embodied in Le Corbusier's architecture.

While there is no evidence that either woman had any influence on Le Corbusier's aesthetic conception of the house - in fact, the architect seems to have been given carte blanche, more or less, beyond the basic requirements - no doubt the problem of designing a shared residence for a childless couple and a single mother would have had the effect of further radicalizing his ideas about the organization of the modern dwelling.

An altogether different story is that of the weekend house commissioned by Edith Farnsworth from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1945, completed in 1951. The acrimony that developed between Wright and Barnsdall did not prevent each from retrospectively acknowledging the mutuality of the "proud" achievement of the Hollyhock House; the Farnsworth House was a far more notorious failure, at least from the client's viewpoint.

Farnsworth, an unmarried Chicago physician and woman of some cultivation, had met the German emigre architect socially and became enamored of his rigorous formal sensibility. Ultimately, the architect's disregard of her requirements of privacy, comfort and budget in the interests of preserving the aesthetic purity of his design amounted to a creel breach of trust, in Farnsworth's view. The pristine one-story steel and glass box, raised off the ground on a plinth, turned out to be unbearably oppressive for her. Inside, she felt like a caged animal on the prowl, mercilessly exposed to the view of the public - which came to ogle the unconventional dwelling - and embarrassed, along with her guests, at having to sleep in a space divided only by freestanding partitions.

Mies apparently specified pink suede Barcelona chairs for the living room, which Farnsworth interpreted as a degrading reference to her femininity (or lack thereof); she did not care to have the house, as she put it, resemble a Helena Rubenstein salon. Whose house was it, anyway? And more inexplicably, how did a sophisticated client like Farnsworth get hoodwinked into relinquishing so much control over her own destiny?

The chapter on the Farnsworth House also treats a related house of the same date, Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Despite the extensive commentary that the latter building provoked, including the architect's own, Friedman's interpretation of Johnson's retreat for himself, ostensibly inspired by Mies' design for Farnsworth, may be her most original. She very convincingly argues that this transparent pavilion built by a wealthy gay architect is a form of theatre, an ironic comment on the sentimental image of the American family home of the 1950s, and - inasmuch as the gated precinct also contains a "vulgar, ultrafeminine" Guest House a stone's throw away - a camp parody of conventional ideas of privacy and normalcy.

Remaining chapters of the book focus on a modest house by the California modernist Richard Neutra for the art professor and critic Constance Perkins and a house in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, built by Robert Venturi for his mother, a widely acclaimed icon of postmodernism. The conclusion reflects on changes in notions of domesticity ushered in by post-sixties feminism and changing economic conditions. Friedman speculates on their effect on the design process, looking at two houses recently commissioned by women clients, both professionals and single mothers.

Although Friedman considers a couple of houses designed by women architects-Eleanor Raymond and Eileen Gray - in her introduction, and mentions the contribution of Denise Scott Brown in the context of the Venturi house, it is a pity that none of her major chapters focuses on a design by a woman architect. Nor does the book address, except implicitly, the way class (or ethnicity) intersects with gender in architectural patronage. But for those privileged to afford it, Friedman not only affirms the desirability of having a "room of one's own" designed by a sensitive and enlightened architect; she also expresses basic optimism about the value, both personal and social, of participating in its making.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Source Citation
Source Citation
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Ockman, Joan. "Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History." The Women's Review of Books, vol. 16, no. 2, Nov. 1998, pp. 22+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A21275610/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b524aea0. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.

Friedman, Alice T. American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture. Yale Univ. 2010. c.262p. illus. photogs. index. ISBN 9780300116540. $65. ARCHITECTURE

Through the dual lenses of architectural and social history, this learned study probes the aesthetics of revolutionary postwar building designs stoked by mass media, advertising, consumerism, and society's confidence in the power of institutions to improve lives. Friedman (American art, Wellesley Coll.) analyzes the midcentury's rekindled obsession with glamour, defined as magical, sensual, and theatrical, in chapters on Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra's Kaufmann Desert House, Eero Saarinen's corporate architecture, Morris Lapidus's Miami Beach hotels, and, somewhat surprisingly, Frank Lloyd Wright's Temple Beth Sholom in Elkins Park, PA. References to equally representative designers, such as Marcel Breuer, Edward Stone, and Charles and Ray Eames, appear throughout the text. Friedman is an informed and fulsome guide to the era, articulating and placing its aesthetics within the contexts of earlier and later styles. Teeming with photos and reproductions of period magazine and corporate ads, this attractive work is printed on quality paper. VERDICT Seriousness sets in once past the dust jacket featuring Slim Aarons's Poolside Gossip. Useful to art, architecture, design, and cultural history students and scholars as both an overview and a criticism of specific buildings.--Russell T. Clement, Northwestern Univ. Lib., Evanston, IL

Clement, Russell T.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Clement, Russell T. "Friedman, Alice T. American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture." Library Journal, vol. 135, no. 14, 1 Sept. 2010, pp. 106+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A236806351/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=70cddccd. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.

Friedman, Alice T. American glamour and the evolution of modern architecture. Yale, 2010. 262p bibl index afp ISBN 9780300116540, $65.00

Friedman (Wellesley College) examines and celebrates the complete transformation of modern architecture in the mid-20th century from its bare European roots to its rich American growth. Modern architecture was born in the 1920s in France, Holland, Germany, and Russia as a profound representation of spiritual insight, secularized setting, and industrialized production. When it moved to the US after WW II, modern architecture settled into a widely popularized and wildly consumerist society that was allegedly steeped in democracy but actually steeped in capitalism. The results were telling, succinct, formal, monumental, and illustrative. This volume covers the background and foreground of this important epoch in design history. Fully informed, richly illustrated, and presented in scholarly fashion, it likely will be a lasting, epochal work for decades. Written by the Grace Slack McNeil professor of the history of American art at Wellesley, it bears the weight of a deep background in both art and architectural history, and is best suited for advanced readers with significant intellectual capacity. Summing Up: Essential. **** Advanced upper-level undergraduates through professionals/practitioners.--P. Kaufman, emeritus, Boston Architectural College

Kaufman, P.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Kaufman, P. "Friedman, Alice T. American glamour and the evolution of modern architecture." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 48, no. 3, Nov. 2010, pp. 488+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A249221198/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=64cd2d75. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.

Alice T. Friedman

American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

272 pages. 125 black-and-white plus 40 color illustrations.

ISBN 978-0300116540, $65.00 HB

Review by Gretchen Buggeln

At the outset of Alice Friedman's wonderful and important book American Glamour, the author captures the complexity of her subject. Because "Mid-Century Modern" architecture contains "widely divergent" examples, she writes, "it is impossible to create a meaningful historical category or a style label that will have lasting value" (5). A surface similarity--buildings that have that "postwar modern" feel--at closer observation dissolves into a surprising multiplicity of forms, materials, and audiences. "The difficulty in relating specific buildings (and in many cases their furnishings as well) not only to each other but to modern architecture as a movement," Friedman writes, "has proved a formidable challenge" (5).

Those of us who have attempted to make sense of the ordinary buildings of this period will quickly recognize these problems. Although we might not want to drop structures into style categories, we have our own definitional problems. What exactly marks something as "vernacular" or "commonplace" in a period when well-trained architects might capture the campy glitz of Hollywood or replicate Mount Vernon on a suburban street? What really distinguishes a Levittown ranch house from a modernist pile in the Hamptons, or a suburban grocery store from a resort hotel? Should we make distinctions based on cost, function, client, or reception? What holds the architecture of this period together, and where do we find the tensions and fissures?

Sidestepping stylistic and typological questions, Friedman has given us an interdisciplinary work that draws disparate architects and buildings together under a central idea--glamour. In part, Friedman uses this concept as a means to recover the significance of American buildings that, although designed by high-profile architects, met with severe criticism in the architectural press because of their engagement with popular culture and their frank, middle-class consumer appeal. Friedman shows us how the cool, rational humanism of the modern movement was overtaken by a "yearning for a humanization," resulting in an architecture that offered both psychic and physical comfort (30). By focusing on how these spaces harmonized with postwar dreams and ambitions, she explains why they were successful in their own day and why they continue to appeal today. Glamour, she argues, is found less in the form of these diverse buildings than in the "experiences and moods" they suggest, and their shared approach to "representation, image-making, and audience" (5). These cosmopolitan buildings show "an increasingly self-conscious approach to the styling of architectural imagery through siting, framing, lighting, and handing of surface details." They appeal to the "viewing habits ... and sensory expectations shared by a broad cross section of American consumers accustomed to looking at photographs and watching movies" (5). Friedman suggests that we look at these buildings as the consumer objects they were, because "their success or failure lay as much in the image and experience they delivered as in their function or use" (6).

Friedman's emphasis on the importance of the experience of these glamorous buildings leans heavily on their storytelling capabilities, particularly the way that architectural photography shaped and enhanced the encounter with designed spaces. She begins with Julius Shulman's iconic photograph of two women perched on sleek modern furniture in the glass-box living room of Pierre Koenig's Case study House No. 22, hovering on the edge of a hillside overlooking the sparkling evening lights of Los Angeles. This image, and so many like it, offered an architecture that promised freedom, personal transformation, and glamour. Indeed, the lavish and beautiful illustrations in this book contribute to Friedman's argument as much as the text.

The well-known architects here considered--Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, Eero Saarinen, Morris Lapidus, and Frank Lloyd Wright--all identified with international modernism. Yet, Friedman notes, there is something about their work that is particularly reflective of the context of a "new, glamorous, and powerful"--confident, even superior--1950s postwar America (8). These highly visible modernists attended also to vernacular building and craft traditions, history, and the theatrical, colorful decorative motifs found in popular culture. We see Philip Johnson as a brilliant man whose ideas were constantly in flux, who by the 1940s was already looking for a modernism sensitive to emotion and historical memory. Friedman's discussion of Johnson's luminous and open Glass House (1950) on his Connecticut estate reveals his exploration of layers of architectural and landscape history--eighteenth-century English gardens, American vernacular traditions, Miesian internationalism--as an expression of a new sort of American, monumental architecture. His secretive Brick Guest House (1953), on the other hand, reveals "a sensuous alternate world of dimly lit luxury" (57), with its columns, vaults, low platform bed and pink silk wall covering that suggested a magical, fantasy experience. Johnson's designs for the Four seasons Restaurant in Mies's Seagram Building in New York City (1958) added style to the cool modernist structure, accentuating the glamour and allure of corporate power.

In her chapter on Neutra's Palm springs Desert House (1946), Friedman demonstrates how Neutra's cutting-edge modern houses were attentive to the comfort, health, and pleasure of their occupants, providing what he called "livability" (94), not just utility but gratification. Friedman argues that high-end architects like Neutra cleverly incorporated the domestic desires of the middle classes into crisp modern designs, creating spaces that were at once comfortable and glamorous. The Desert House, for instance, "borrowed numerous features from the informal, middleclass houses of the 1930s and '40s" as well as from European spas, evident in its open plan and easy blending of indoors and out (86-87). She claims that Neutra's embrace of popular culture and use of widely available new technologies and materials made his houses "infinitely reproducible," hence commercially successful (86). Slim Aaron's circa-1970 color photograph "Poolside Gossip" presents the Desert House as a setting for perfectly clad and coiffed women living a life of sunny, casual elegance, an image manipulated to project a mysterious, exclusive, "almost impossibly beautiful" place (87).

The next two chapters engage larger-scale projects, the corporate designs of Eero Saarinen, and the resort hotels of Morris Lapidus. Saarinen excelled at "corporate image-making," using a notable mix of technological innovation and historicism. He brought glamour to the Warren, Michigan, General Motors plant (1945-56), particularly in his luxurious, colorful, dramatic interiors, and he captured the motion and exciting possibility of travel in his TWA terminal at JFK airport (1962). Of all the examples in this study, glamour is most obviously present in Lapidus's Miami Beach hotels (largely disdained by critics), for which he pulled out all the stops, creating opulent, magical, entertaining spaces. Lapidus's background in retail design made him conscious of the need to sell the hotel experience. His commercial success hinged on his belief in an "architecture of emotion" and keen knowledge of his customers (184).

Friedman's final case study, Frank Lloyd Wright's fascinating Beth shalom synagogue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania (1959), brings religious buildings into the glamour paradigm. She argues that this building type "offers the fullest and most complex engagement with the cultural values and aesthetic qualities associated with the concept of glamour," and Beth shalom is indeed glamorous, as Friedman defines it. Other religious buildings, such as Corbusier's Chapel at Ronchamp or Walter Netsch's Air Force Academy Chapel, bolster her argument. Yet these particular buildings perplexed the religious establishment and were not representative. The most popular synagogue architect of the day was Percival Goodman, who worked frequently in a "bland" sort of "contextual modernism" (220). Here we begin to see the limits of Friedman's forceful argument. Religious spaces of many styles and eras enable theater and procession, evoke emotion, and use imagery; that alone does not make them fit the glamour mold. Among religious architects and clients a strongly divergent attitude took shape, one in which individualism, optimism, and faith in the future were tempered by communal imperatives, an ethic of service, and suspicion about what human beings do when left to their own devices.

Understanding the extent of the appeal of "glamour" architecture and the criticisms of its commercial, secular nature will help determine the applicability of Friedman's thesis to a broader range of postwar architecture and give rise to opposing narratives. To what extent, for instance, did the glamour mentality extend to the quotidian lives of Lapidus's tourists once they returned to their suburban, Colonial Revival homes? Where did private, consumerist fantasies come up against other cultural imperatives, such as civic identity? Friedman herself, it should be noted, is careful to acknowledge the ambiguities and ambivalence inherent in the consumer culture of the postwar years. By emphasizing the consumer experience, American Glamour highlights the need for substantial reception studies of this architecture that will move beyond rhetoric and dreams to the actual experience of midcentury buildings.

With the rapid rise of scholarly and popular interest in midcentury modern architecture, this brilliant and energetic work is as timely as it is excellent. Friedman gives us an attractive framework to consider and test against other historical sources. Reading this book is a rich sensory experience that connects us to another time and place and gives us a fresh and enlightened view into its constructed spaces. Scholars of vernacular or common buildings should especially take note: Friedman reveals these high-end architects as they engaged history, vernacular traditions, and popular culture. They were not simply poaching in those fields in a kind of proto-postmodern eclecticism but were deeply embedded in the same conversations about clients, architecture, and experience. It was clearly not only categories of style but the boundaries between "academic" and "commonplace" architecture that were in question at midcentury, and this fact calls for us to reassess our categories.

Gretchen Buggeln holds the Duesenberg Chair in Christianity and the Arts at Valparaiso University. she is the author of Temples of Grace: The Material Transformation of Connecticut's churches, 1790-1840 (2003) as well as numerous book chapters and articles on religious architecture and artifacts, museums, and American religious history. Her current book project, churches for Today: Modernism and suburban Expansion in post-World War II America, is an exploration of 1950s and '60s modern-style churches in the Midwest--their architecture, their architects, and their congregations.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 University of Minnesota Press
http://www.upress.umn.edu/journals/buildingslandscapes/buildland.html
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Buggeln, Gretchen. "Alice T. Friedman: American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture." Building & Landscapes, vol. 19, no. 1, spring 2012, pp. 130+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A295325488/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e5adf5b3. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.

Friedman, Alice T. QUEER MODERNS Princeton Univ. (NonFiction None) $49.95 5, 27 ISBN: 9780691267340

A confluence of artistic rebels.

Art and architecture historian Friedman creates a vibrant portrait of queer bohemia in New York and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, drawing extensively from the correspondence of musician, writer, and photographer Max Ewing (1904-34). Born into a wealthy family in Pioneer, Ohio, Ewing was doted on by his parents, who encouraged his interests in the arts and accepted his sexuality. When he moved to New York in 1923, they supported him with an allowance of $3,000 a year, ample funds for an apartment, piano lessons with an eminent teacher, and an energetic social life. His circle of friends grew to include a host of well-known writers and artists, many of whom he met through Carl Van Vechten, whose works Ewing had long admired and who became his mentor, and writer, activist, and arts doyenne Muriel Draper, for whom Ewing became escort, confidant, and constant companion. At her salons and parties, he met luminaries such as Lincoln Kirstein and Walker Evans, George Gershwin and Noel Coward. Van Vechten, who championed avant-garde and African American arts, was especially significant in Ewing's involvement in queer culture; after Ewing drowned himself in 1934, Van Vechten gathered and donated his papers to Yale's Beinecke Library. Friedman charts Ewing's career as he morphed from performer and pianist to sculptor and photographer; she reports on his friends, lovers, and artistic collaborators in the U.S. and abroad and recounts his lonely, troubled last years. Profusely illustrated with artwork, memorabilia, and photographs--many from the Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits that Ewing created in his walk-in closet and his Carnival of Venice photography project--Friedman's appreciative biography vividly conveys the spirited ambience of the interracial, international community of queer outsiders and intellectuals among whom, for his short life, Ewing thrived.

A richly detailed cultural history.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Friedman, Alice T.: QUEER MODERNS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785110/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0ce9a22a. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.

Friedman, Alice T. Queer Moderns: Max Ewing's Jazz Age New York. Princeton Univ. May 2025. 288p. ISBN 9780691267340. $49.95. FINE ARTS

Starstruck, ambitious pianist Max Ewing moved from the tiny farming town of Pioneer, OH, to New York City in 1923, gleefully landing in the middle of the queer artistic avant-garde bohemia of the roaring '20s that extended across the Atlantic to Paris and Venice, and across the country to Hollywood. Letters to friends and loving parents, stuffed with tales of social conquests and breathless star sightings, are the backbone of this book, along with innumerable expressive photographs he took of the people in his world. This combination provides an intimate ground-level view of his milieu and of the person he hoped to become during a time of crushing repression alongside wild expression. Ewing freely comments on virtually every famous person he meets but reserves expressing his true self for the queer circle he befriends before his tragic death in 1934. VERDICT Friedman (emerita, American art, Wellesley Coll.; American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture) skillfully illuminates a world usually hidden behind a curtain of societal restrictions. This remarkable book will be a welcome addition to LGBTQIA+ and art history collections.--Janies Woods Marshall

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Marshall, Janies Woods. "Friedman, Alice T.: Queer Moderns: Max Ewing's Jazz Age New York." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 4, Apr. 2025, p. 99. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835171017/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8c74832e. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.

Ockman, Joan. "Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History." The Women's Review of Books, vol. 16, no. 2, Nov. 1998, pp. 22+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A21275610/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b524aea0. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025. Clement, Russell T. "Friedman, Alice T. American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture." Library Journal, vol. 135, no. 14, 1 Sept. 2010, pp. 106+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A236806351/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=70cddccd. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025. Kaufman, P. "Friedman, Alice T. American glamour and the evolution of modern architecture." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 48, no. 3, Nov. 2010, pp. 488+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A249221198/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=64cd2d75. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025. Buggeln, Gretchen. "Alice T. Friedman: American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture." Building & Landscapes, vol. 19, no. 1, spring 2012, pp. 130+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A295325488/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e5adf5b3. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025. "Friedman, Alice T.: QUEER MODERNS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785110/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0ce9a22a. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025. Marshall, Janies Woods. "Friedman, Alice T.: Queer Moderns: Max Ewing's Jazz Age New York." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 4, Apr. 2025, p. 99. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835171017/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8c74832e. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.

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