Matsumoto Modern

3 units

Between 1948-1961, the Japanese American architect George Matsumoto designed more than 30 award-winning residences in North Carolina. The houses -- demonstration homes for General Electric and Westinghouse, vacation houses sponsored by Women's Day and the Douglis Fir Plywood Association, and homes for clients interested in new ideas in architecture -- served as prototypes for domestic living inspired by postwar logics of mass production. The experimental homes provided opportunities to challenge norms and amplify particular design aspects through focused investigations of the potential of new materials, innovative construction systems, or provocative formal capabilities. Like the more well-known Art and Architecture magazine's Case Study House Program on the West Coast, Matsumoto's houses aspired to be functional, beautiful, and affordable while providing a model for modern American domesticity. Students in the course will undertake archival research for selected George Matsumoto-designed modern homes throughout the semester. Course work will include experimental, analytical drawings; archival research and writing; museum-level physical models; and other representations of residential work by Matsumoto. The resulting work is anticipated to be included in a future publication, an exhibition, and as a featured part of the larger research project Beauty in Enormous Bleakess: The Interned Generation of Japanese American Designers, which aspires to tell an urgently needed new chapter in design and architectural history that acknowledges the signal contributions of Japanese Americans to post-war culture and cultural life.