International scholars from architecture, design, urban planning, and interior design here reappraise modern life in the context of practices of dwelling over the span of the postwar period. Reassessing culture and the economic and political effects on civilian life, this collection looks at what role material objects, interior spaces, and architecture played in quelling or fanning the anxieties of modernism's ordinary denizens.

Introduction Part 1: Psychological Constructions: Anxiety of Isolation and Exposure 1. Taking Comfort in the Age of Anxiety: Eero Saarinen's Womb Chair 2. The Future is Possibly Past: The Anxious Spaces of Gaetano Pesce 3. Scopophobia/Scopophilia: Electric Light and the Anxiety of the Gaze in American Postwar Domestic Architecture Part 2: Ideological Objects: Design and Representation 4. The Allegory of the Socialist Lifestyle: The Czechoslovak Pavilion at the Brussels Expo, its Gold Medal and the Politburo 5. Assimilating Unease: Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime-Postwar Bauhaus in Chicago 6. The Anxieties of Autonomy: Peter Eisenman from Cambridge to House VI Part 3: Societies of Consumers: Materialist Ideologies and Postwar Goods 7. "But a home is not a laboratory": The Anxieties of Designing for the Socialist Home in the German Democratic Republic 1950-1965 8. Architect-designed Interiors for a Culturally Progressive Upper-Middle Class: The Implicit Political Presence of Knoll International in Belgium 9. Domestic Environment: Italian Neo-Avant-Garde Design and the Politics of Post-Materialism Part 4: Class Concerns and Conflict: Dwelling and Politics 10. Dirt and Disorder: Taste and Anxiety in the Homes of the British Working Class 11. Upper West Side Stories: Race, Liberalism, and Narratives of Urban Renewal in Postwar New York 12. Pawns or Prophets? Postwar Architects and Utopian Designs for Southern Italy. Coda: From Homelessness to Homelessness