From Ration Cards and Refugee Camps: Bureaucracy, Domesticity, and the 'Bleak House' that Modern Architecture Built During and After World War I

Histories of architecture and WWI have often placed wartime advances in mechanization and standardization at the center of analysis, emphasizing how they opened new fields of inquiry in the aftermath of global conflict. These accounts, many written by leading apologists for interwar modernism, have concluded that materials and technologies breathed life into a period that was itself deemed a new beginning. This notion of a distinct break with the past and a start to a promising new era veils, obscures, and erases the violence and atrocities of the war. In a context where, as we argue, the social and material repercussions of World War I continued well into the 1920s, Elizabeth Povinelli, Sharika Thiranagama, and Jim Sykes’ writings on the concept of the ‘bleak house’ are illuminating. They posit that war characterized not only by obviously violent acts but also by the creation of ‘exhausted social worlds’. The perceived fracture between the wartime and postwar worlds served a particular purpose in rationalizing massive suffering. Indeed, the interwoven bureaucratic, militaristic, ... War I formed the very basis of interwar architecture culture. Amidst the wreckage, designers, economists, planners, and military personnel forged not a new world but an extension of wartime physical and mental geographies disguised in utopian community building.