Architecture and Design

After World War II, designers grappled with a rapidly changing economy and environment as new materials and technologies, influences from art, and the advent of television and automobile greatly impacted architecture and the design of objects, particularly within the domestic environment. The 1950s represented opportunities for broad freedoms in both reinventing the American home and in inventing new facets of that home brought on by modern life. Perhaps no bigger influence was felt than in the suburban United States and the building boom spurred on by GIs returning from war and their substantive investment in building new dwellings to house their families.

Changes in the home included bigger kitchens more openly connected to the rest of the house; individual bedrooms for each family member; a stronger emphasis on horizontal room arrangements; the provision for attached carports; as well as whole new room types oriented around television, entertaining, and a new era of recreation -the rec room or play room and the family room or den. Formal parlors and dining rooms, central halls, and contained service areas yielded to open plans, mixed-use rooms, and a freer relationship between served and service spaces.

The immigration of designers and architects from Europe before, during, and after World War II spread the tenets of Modernism to the United States, and these newly American designers proved to be central definers of mid-century Modern. Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Marcel Breuer, each prominent designers at the Bauhaus in Europe, took positions at design schools -Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1940, Gropius and Breuer in architecture at Harvard in the late 1930s. Eliel Saarinen and Eero Saarinen, father and son, found their way by the mid-1940s to Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, dramatically changing the design programs at that institution and training countless Modernists.

All of these designers, and others, shaped the face of design and defined what was appropriate through their own work and through the students they taught. As those students graduated from various design schools, they constituted a whole new generation of designers who attempted new variations on Modernism in defining American architecture on a world stage. Greensboro architect Edward Loewenstein was among them.