Domesticity Under Siege: Threatened Spaces of the Modern Home

About the Author Mark Taylor is Professor of Architecture at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. His primary research focus is the history and theory of the modern architectural interior with an emphasis on cultural and social issues. He has published several books including Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (2006), Interior Design and Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2013), Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Flow: Interior, Landscape and Architecture in the Era of Liquid Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is co-editor of Domesticity under Siege: When Home isn't Safe (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2022) with Georgina Downey and Terry Meade.Georgina Downey is an independent scholar and Visiting Fellow in the Graduate Art History Program at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She lectures on a sessional basis at the South Australian School of Art and the University of Adelaide, and she has recently served on the Board of the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. Her writings have appeared in Interior Design and Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2013), the proceedings of the Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association (IDEA) Conference, Brisbane 2010, theAustralian and New Zealand Journal of Art, the Journal of Australian Studies, the Journal of Australian Cultural History, Broadsheet, Artlink and Photofile. She is the editor of the recently published collection of commissioned papers entitled Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns(Bloomsbury, 2013). Product Description Theories of the domestic stemming from the 19th century have focused on the home as a refuge and place of repose for the family, a nurturing environment for children and a safe place for visitors. Under this conception, domestic space is positioned as nurturing and private, a refuge and place of retreat which gave rise to theories of 'home as haven'. While, arguably, some social conditions might suggest this is the case, Domesticity Under Siege exposes a different world, one in which the boundaries of nurturing domesticity collide with both outside and inside agents.Whether these agents are external military forces, psychological trauma or familial violence, they re-position meta-narratives of domesticity, not through identity politics or specialized subgroup experience, but relative to the actions of the world around an inhabited domain. That is, when home is constituted as a private realm, a place where individuals or groups can reside in 'safety and comfort', it is argued as a place in which the individual exercises control or power. However, there are many occasions when forces act upon the home and threaten aspects of safety and comfort, often through such things as ruination, violence, mortality, and infestation.Organised around four thematic sections, 'Microbes, Animals and Insects', 'Human Agents', Wars and Disasters as Agents' and 'Hauntings, Eeriness and the Uncanny', chapters provide a range of approaches to the home which challenge notions of 'haven' and reflect major causes that have played an important role in undermining the modern home. Examples and case studies explore the domestic screen, hoarding, hauntings, violence and imprisonment in the home, wartime interior art, the Hanover Merzbau and Wolfgang Staudte's 1946 film Die Mörder sind unter uns ('The Murderers are Among Us').