Andrea Vesentini is a cultural historian specializing in American architecture and urban studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Humanities and Cultural Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London, where he also taught literature and cultural studies. He has been working since 2016 for the Architecture, Visual Arts and Film departments of La Biennale di Venezia. He presented his research at several universities and institutions such as London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and Science Museum, the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, and the Amsterdam Centre for Architecture. His first book, Indoor America: the Interior Landscape of Postwar Suburbia, has been published in 2018 by the University of Virginia Press.
There is no question that suburbs are one of the defining features of the U.S. urban landscape, as well as the place where most Americans have spent their lives since the end of World War II. The interiors of cars, single-family houses and shopping malls are the everyday environment inhabited by the majority of the population. Indoor America looks at these all-too-familiar spaces through a novel point of view that twists the cliché of lawns and backyards to chronicle how suburbia grew into a landscape of interconnected interiors. As such, it is a cultural history that takes as its primary focus the postwar era, roughly from 1945 to 1969, a time that coincides with the apex of the suburban exodus.Although there is a great number of books on the history of suburbanization, none has focused on the predominant role that interior spaces play in the daily life of residents, and how this state of things came to be. The rise of suburbia since the end of the war is thus retold by placing the pursuit of interiors at its center, exploring how all such spaces, from automobiles to indoor shopping centers, functioned as escape capsules affording a higher degree of segregation and insulation from the perceived threats of urban life. Needless to say, the fears that drove people out of the city and into the protective network of suburban interiors often stemmed from the inability to deal with an increasingly racially mixed city, the tensions that this diversity entailed, and the profound social changes of those decades.In the book, interiors are understood in the broadest possible sense: the domestic space of single-family houses, of course, but also cars, shopping malls, with detours into the fallout-shelter craze of the nuclear age, air conditioning, and plans for completely enclosed cities in the late 1960s. The narrative is structured as a journey across all such defensive shells. It starts from the increasing popularity of the closed-body car in the 1920s (when private transportation became the norm) and ends on the macro-interiors of indoor city proposals, such as the unbuilt Minnesota Experimental City project, Walt Disney's EPCOT, and Paolo Soleri's Arcologies.
Andrea Vesentini Indoor America: The Interior Landscape of Postwar Suburbia The University of Virginia Press344 pages, 7 × 8 inches ISBN 978 0813941585
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