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Living Between The Lines: How Japanese Crafts Taught Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, And Eileen Gray To See Modern Domestic Space, Regina Nabil Emmer

Art & Art History ETDs

Histories of European and U.S. modernism conventionally accept that Enlightenment rational thought set modern architecture’s terms and criteria in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Rationalism privileges visual and material properties; distinguishes between art, architecture, and craft; and identifies space with the structure that frames it. It normalized the view that buildings stand fixed, independent of our interaction with them, and perpetuates assumptions about what physically defines domestic space. Consequently, Japan’s significance for modern domestic space in Europe and the U.S. has been interpreted as structurally evident. Simultaneously, the architecture of European and U.S. modernists who did not think like rationalists …