May 22, 2025 | 1970s, Week 8
Summary:
The reading, The Lens of Race: Whiteness and Architectural Photography at Case Study House #22 by Dianne Harris, explores how photography and architecture play a part in reinforcing and upholding racial barriers. Harris explains the power of race, and racism, and the power that photos have on this. She describes how these aspects of architecture, along with other factors, play a part in how our culture views race. She describes how modernism was mainly aimed at the middle class, mostly white people. This house can be seen as a representation of this. Many of the pictures feature well-dressed, white men and women within different spaces. The women were featured to help make the house feel “…‘visibly comfortable and accessible’ (At least for the target audience)”. This quote sums up how photography affects race, with the purpose of the photo to evoke a feeling, but to one specific audience(race). Harris exploring the architecture and placement of the house, talking about its position above the city, ultimately symbolizing the “social dominance” and “privilege” implied by this house.
Connection #1: House Beautiful
In House Beautiful, I was looking through the magazines to look for advertisements, and I could only find white women and men in these ads. It makes you think that the target audience for this magazine and these ads were mostly white people. This, similar to the reading, shows the upholding of racial disparities, lacking representation of other races. These are just other “architectural” photos, based on certain products(gas range), that do this.
Connection #2: Redlining
I think that the idea of redlining relates to this topic and reading. Redlining is now an illegal practice that prevented black people from owning homes in certain areas. It involved the FHA determining the risk for investment in different neighborhoods, often based on race. This still has an effect on people today, as some neighborhoods still have this zoning. I think that public/city planning is just a zoomed-out way to look at architecture, and this was another aspect that affected racial barriers in the United States.
Fig 1 Ad for a gas range featuring a white woman
House Beautiful, May 1970, pg. 87
Caption: The new Roper self-cleaning gas range cooks and cleans-automatically.
Fig. 2 City of Richmond zoning map, showing the levels of risk by color. (1923) https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/19/911909187/in-u-s-cities-the-health-effects-of-past-housing-discrimination-are-plain-to-see
May 22, 2025 | 1910s, 2020s, publication date, reaction paper, Week 8
Takeaways
Through looking through the article “The Lens of Race: Whiteness and Architectural Photography at Case Study House #22”, I found the authors main argument to be how architecture photography can show glimpses into different social factors represented in interiors at the time they were taken. Specifically, the authors main concept they analyze is how these photographs can promote a specific “reality”, revealing and reinforcing racial issues. Throughout the article, the author gave two key examples that strengthened their argument.
The first example is how the Case Study Project aimed to bring higher living standards to the masses. The problem with this is that most middle-class homeowners at the time were assumed to be white, due to years of redlining. As a result of this, the famous image of the Case Study House #22 still carries that assumed reality to it, even if the original intention wasn’t malicious. The second example to author give is the choice of including the two white women in the photograph. Having this feature added to the image shows another underlying meaning, with the women being elevated in the seemingly perfect home overlooking the chaotic streets of Los Angeles.
Application
Past Case
Figure #1: A curtain ad using an image of a living room.
House Beautiful, 1919, p.125 A
Everybody’s Planning New Curtains This Fall
For my past example, I chose a curtain ad from the 1919 edition of the House Beautiful magazine. When looking at the image used for this advertisement, there were some immediate similarities to the Case Study House from the reading. The first obvious one is the use of white women as the main subjects. This leads back to the same specific reality that is being shown in the Case Study House. However, looking closer at the image, it is also important to consider the context of women being used for this curtain ad, as this further shows the reality of women overseeing the decorating of the interior.
Current Case
Figure #2: Image of a home overlooking a landscape.
Photo from apalmanac.com
For my current example, I chose a modern-day showcase of the similar themes being shown in the Case Study House. In this image, the elevated view is being shown, giving the feeling of the homeowner being in higher power than the outside landscape. One big difference here is that instead of a city, this architecture photograph uses nature. This shows that while there is a shift in what these photographs are trying to invoke, there are still some similarities.
May 22, 2025 | Week 8
Reading Summary/Takeaway
In The Lens of Race, Dianne Harris examines Julius Shulman’s iconic 1960 photograph of Case Study House #22, arguing that architectural photography—specifically this image—plays a role in reinforcing racial and social hierarchies. Harris claims that the presence of two white women in the photo is not just aesthetic but symbolic of white privilege, tying the image to larger systems of racial exclusion in postwar housing. She believes images like this subtly promote whiteness, class, and gender norms through visual culture.
While the article makes some interesting points about how architecture is represented, it feels like an overreach to say a single photograph is complicit in white supremacy. Shulman was a photographer capturing a moment and a house—not making a political statement. It’s a stretch to view this image as a cultural weapon. That said, it shows how differently scholars interpret architecture, even in ways that may seem unrelated to design itself.
Application (150–300 words)
A more current example where visual messaging is clearly intentional would be the branding used by companies like Apple or Tesla. Their marketing reflects minimalism, sleekness, and aspirational wealth. But unlike Harris’s analysis, these campaigns are aimed more at consumer behavior than cultural exclusion. They may represent affluence, but it doesn’t feel like a social critique is necessary to understand their impact.
Looking at a historical House Beautiful case, the June 1957 issue featured an article on the “Family Room of the Future,” showing a white middle-class family in a modern home. This clearly reflects the values and demographics of the time—no doubt about that. But is that inherently harmful? The magazine was catering to its readership, just like brands do today. If anything, the designs showcased stability, comfort, and the American dream during the postwar period.
While Harris raises questions that may be valid in cultural theory circles, it seems like a stretch to read racial oppression into every photograph of midcentury design. In a class on interior architecture history, it feels more productive to study spatial design, material innovation, and layout—less so cultural re-interpretations that rely heavily on modern identity politics. It’s not wrong to analyze images critically, but it also shouldn’t overshadow the architectural value itself.
House Beautiful Historical Case
This Magnavox Stereo Theatre ad from a midcentury House Beautiful issue encapsulates the era’s vision of the “ideal American living room.” The image showcases a white, middle-class nuclear family comfortably seated around a cutting-edge entertainment system—symbolizing not just technological advancement but domestic harmony and aspirational modernity. The room is minimal yet tastefully arranged, emphasizing clean lines, neutral tones, and functional furnishings that reflect the mid-century modern aesthetic popular in 1957.
The scene communicates more than interior design; it performs a cultural ideal. The television console—massive by today’s standards—is a visual anchor, suggesting that media and leisure were central to postwar domestic life. The family’s attentive posture reinforces traditional gender roles: father upright, mother elegantly posed, and children neatly arranged. Like many images from House Beautiful during this period, the family is entirely white—reinforcing the racial exclusivity of the postwar housing boom and the consumer market it served.
This photo, though seemingly benign, visually reinforces postwar values of conformity, consumerism, and domestic order—offering a snapshot of the social world that modern design was both responding to and reinforcing.
Figure 2. An image of a white family watching TV in a modern living room. House Beautiful. March 1960. Page 31. The Magnavox Stereo Theatre.
Comparison: Then and Now
Both the 1957 House Beautiful ad for the Magnavox Stereo Theatre and modern branding from companies like Apple or Tesla present carefully curated environments that promote aspirational lifestyles. In the House Beautiful example, the midcentury family room is framed around a sense of comfort, order, and cutting-edge technology, but it also reinforces a narrow vision of the American dream—white, nuclear, and consumer-driven. Likewise, Apple and Tesla’s branding continues this tradition of aesthetic-driven marketing, showcasing minimalist environments and affluent users, though now with a more global and ethnically diverse presentation.
However, unlike Harris’s reading of the Shulman photograph—which suggests these visual messages were complicit in white supremacy—the link between race and representation in today’s branding is more indirect. While both eras use visuals to promote ideals of status, lifestyle, and identity, the modern examples do so in a broader commercial context that is less racially explicit. What remains consistent is how visual culture—from magazines to digital media—shapes our perception of who belongs in spaces of innovation, leisure, and prosperity. The question is whether we should always interpret these visuals as politically loaded, or simply reflective of targeted marketing to dominant consumer groups of their time.
May 22, 2025 | 1970s, 2020s, Week 8
Reading Summary/Takeaway: In this article, Diane Harris explores how race and whiteness are so deeply embedded into the built environment and further architectural photography. Harris utilizes Julius Shulman’s 1960s photograph of the Case Study House #22, or the Stahl Residence, to illustrate the overwhelming representation of white architects and human subjects in architectural photography. The photograph is one of the “most famous architectural photographs of the 20th century,” capturing a house designed by a white male architect and inhabited by white female subjects. The photograph was intended to capture a vision of the ideal domestic life, however, it ignores the struggles that other races faced in postwar America.
Harris argues that Shulman’s choice to depict white females in the photograph illustrates the deep-seated racism in architecture. Because architectural photographers rarely include people, Shulman’s choice to depict white females is particularly significant as it demonstrates his vision of who should inhabit the space. Harris also argues that the floor-to-ceiling windows that allow for a supreme view of the city of Los Angeles further contribute to the “iconography of whiteness, class status, and gender norms.” This photograph not only depicts the architectural form of the home but furthers associations of home ownership and class with white people.
Application:
Historical Case: This furniture advertisement (Figure 1) from a 1971 issue of House Beautiful depicts an “ideal” family that is white, with a mother, father, and three children. The photograph captures the parents doting on their children in their summer house, further establishing associations of wealth, home ownership, and domestic life with white people. This advertisement captures similar ideals to those depicted in Shulman’s 1960s photograph of Case Study House #22, as both represent a comfortable, carefree, everyday moment in the home of a white family.
Figure 1. An advertisement for Simmons Hide-A-Bed-Sofa in the summer home of a young white family.
House Beautiful 1971, Vol. 113, Pt. 2
“A summerhouse sofa has to seat people with wet hair and bare feet. It also has to sleep two. Comfortably.”
Current Case: In the 21st century, we increasingly see home and design advertisements that depict diverse groups, unlike the “ideal” white nuclear families depicted previously. This furniture advertisement (Figure 2) on West Elm depicts a black father and son in a playroom. The depiction of a black family is intended for consumers of all races to envision themselves in the space, further redefining what the “ideal” home and family life looks like in the 21st century.
Figure 2. This furniture advertisement depicts a black father and son in a playroom.
“Independent play(room)” West Elm, https://www.westelm.com/pages/features/playroom-upgrade/.
Comparison: These furniture advertisements, one from 1971 and the other from 2025, demonstrate how the image of an ideal home has evolved in the past few decades. The 1971 furniture advertisement (Figure 1) depicts a white family, further establishing associations of wealth, home ownership, and domestic life with white people. In comparison, the 2025 furniture advertisement (Figure 2) depicts a black father and son in a playroom, demonstrating a diverse household with the same means as a white family. In general, these advertisements demonstrate the steps consumer society has made towards equality through the representation of diverse groups.
May 21, 2025 | 2020s, reaction paper, Uncategorized, Week 8
Summary
In “The Lens of Race: Whiteness and Architectural Photography at Case Study House #22,” Dianne Harris argues that architectural photography played a central role in naturalizing whiteness as the default racial and cultural identity in mid-century modern architecture. Through her analysis of Julius Shulman’s iconic photograph of Case Study House #22 (also known as the Stahl House), Harris reveals how race, though seemingly absent, is implicitly encoded through the image’s composition, context, and subjects. The photograph famously depicts two white women seated in the illuminated glass-walled house overlooking the Los Angeles nightscape—an image that presents whiteness as synonymous with modernity, leisure, and cosmopolitan success.
Harris supports her argument by situating the image within postwar American visual culture, where media representations consistently excluded people of color. She also critiques how architectural history has ignored this racial framing, perpetuating an assumption that modernism is a raceless or universal style. By identifying how whiteness operates as an unmarked norm, Harris urges readers to critically reassess architectural photography’s ideological role.
Current Case: Soho House West Hollywood
Figure 1. Outdoor lounge area of Soho House West Hollywood, emphasizing exclusivity and curated modernity
Credit: Soho House West Hollywood | Members’ Club in Los Angeles
At Soho House West Hollywood, a contemporary members-only social club, architecture and photography continue to perform cultural work similar to that analyzed by Harris. While the design embraces “global modern” aesthetics—mid-century furnishings, clean lines, and floor-to-ceiling windows—the branding and imagery often center white bodies in a curated space of luxury, comfort, and cosmopolitan identity. Marketing materials frequently depict white creatives enjoying cocktails or reading in private corners, reinforcing a subtle racial narrative of who belongs and who benefits from modern architectural spaces. Although Soho House claims to promote inclusivity, its visual language still signals whiteness as aspirational and normative.
Historical Case: Glass-Walled Living Room in the Hills
Figure 2. Modern hillside home emphasizing light, openness, and leisure
House Beautiful
Original caption: “A light-filled room open to the California night—ideal for relaxed entertaining.”
This mid-century House Beautiful image from 1952 closely mirrors the aesthetic and ideological functions of Shulman’s Case Study House #22 photograph. It presents a white nuclear family within a sleek, glass-walled home in the Hollywood Hills. Like Shulman’s image, it frames the house as a pinnacle of postwar success, visually aligning whiteness with progress, serenity, and architectural innovation. The setting suggests effortless integration with nature, but the absence of any racial diversity signals a deeper narrative: the exclusion of non-white individuals from both physical and symbolic access to these aspirational spaces.
Comparison
Both the Soho House and the House Beautiful examples utilize architecture and photography to construct narratives about race, privilege, and belonging. They deploy similar formal techniques—elevated viewpoints, interior-exterior continuity, modern furniture—to create desirable lifestyles. But while House Beautiful makes this imagery explicit in promoting a white domestic ideal, Soho House cloaks its racial codes in cosmopolitanism and creative class branding. Harris’s framework helps decode these images, making visible the persistent role of whiteness in shaping how modernity is imagined, marketed, and remembered.
May 21, 2025 | 1950s, 1960s, 2020s, reaction paper, Week 8
Summary
Systems of power are pervasive and insidious, and nothing escapes their touch, including architectural photography. In “The Lens of Race: Whiteness and Architectural Photography at Case Study House #22,” Dianne Harris argues that architectural photography reveals an implicit, though not necessarily and intentional, bias towards whiteness and masculinity. By using the famous photo by Julius Shulman as an example, Harris examines the framing of race, gender, and wealth, through the context of the image: a direct result of the “white flight” which was hugely entangled with the growth of the suburbs in the middle of the twentieth century.
In presenting the house in the photograph as an ideal, both literally and figuratively above the rest of the city, and populating it with only white subjects, Shulman, despite his own left-leaning tendencies, framed whiteness in a similar light. Moreover, it also projected ideas about gender and family: the women focused inward, in white dresses, innocence and domesticity in one, and the man facing away from the camera and out over the landscape, like a lord surveying his lands from the top of his castle.
Harris’ main point is that these framings are not apolitical or neutral, and that to take them out of context is to do a disservice to our own understanding.
Critical Response
Harris argues that the framing of architectural photography is informed by, and reinforces ideas of white supremacy. I would take it a step further: it’s impossible to celebrate Modern architecture in any way without being in some way complicit in racist systems of power. There’s a quote by journalist Austin Walker that I think about a lot: “[Modernity] offers the gift of progress, but imperial futures are only ever stolen presents.” What does this mean in the context of Modern architecture, though?
Couldn’t it be argued that the popularization of the “international style” of Modern architecture is a form of cultural imperialism? When it was decided that this (western European) style is the future, that it’s for everyone, that it’s universal, regardless of culture, doesn’t that inherently denigrate anything that doesn’t fit the (white, male, heteronormative) mold as being lesser? Maybe it’s not as explicit or as violent as in Adolf Loos’ writings, but no matter how nicely it’s phrased, that meaning is inescapable.
I think this is exemplarized with the 1932 MOMA exhibition, curated by Philip Johnson, who was undeniably a white supremacist and a nazi sympathizer. If people like him were involved in deciding what Modern architecture is, then I don’t think it’s possible to separate it from those ideals. It’s possible to chip the cornice off a building and leave it otherwise intact, but the same can’t be said for the foundation.
Application
There are people (usually the ones who benefit from the existing systems of power) who ask “why does [x] have to be political?” when presented with the history of something, the way it’s been shaped by systematic oppression, or when questions of representation come up. It’s a shortsighted question, synecdoche for what is fundamentally a deeply incurious worldview. Everything made by humans is political, because everything is a result of ideology. Design is certainly no exception, as shown in figures 1-3.
Figure 1: House Beautiful September1956: Samara Paneling
Figure 1. Image from the September 1956 edition of House Beautiful, entitled “Samara Paneling”
Figure 2: House Beautiful October 1956: the most beautiful sheets in history!
Figure 2. Image from the October 1956 edition of House Beautiful, entitled “the most beautiful sheets in history!”
Figure 3: House Beautiful January 1964: A Successful Palladian Transplant to Barbados
Figure 3. Image from the January 1964 edition of House Beautiful, titled “House Beautiful January 1964: A Successful Palladian Transplant to Barbados”
Each of these advertisements/articles reveals a Eurocentric bias. In figure 1, African wood is a resource to be exploited for use in Modern, western European styled homes. In figure 2, the classical Greek themed ad has an implicit meaning that “the most beautiful” is the Greco-Roman style which was influential on western European architecture. In figure 3, the Italian villa is depicted as the “perfect” fit for the home of a white person living in Barbados, entirely disregarding the validity of any local vernacular style.
None of these examples plainly state that their ideology is rooted in oppressive systems–that’s why we call them systems. They’re deeply rooted in western cultural norms, values, and institutions. It’s almost impossible not to be affected by these ideas, as Harris pointed out in the reading.
Sometimes, though, it’s not as subtle. Very recently, within the last week as I’m writing this on May 21st, 2025, Nottoway Plantation, in White Castle Louisiana, burned down. Nottoway Plantation was the largest extant Antebellum plantation, and was a tourism destination and a popular wedding venue, which, yikes.
Figure 4. Nottoway Plantation burning
Figure 4. Fire crews mover a line around the fully engulfed the Nottoway Plantation on Thursday, May 15, 2025 in White Castle, La. (Michael Johnson/The Advocate via AP)
The “why does everything have to be political these days” crowd might not see the harm in a site in which 155 enslaved people were held, but that’s a level of historical revisionism which is not only disrespectful, but dangerous, as Ashley Rogers elaborates on in figure 5.
Figure 5. Excerpt from “‘Let it burn’: Fire that destroyed massive plantation mansion drew some celebrations.”
An Excerpt from “‘Let it burn’: Fire that destroyed massive plantation mansion drew some celebrations.”
URL: https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2025/05/let-it-burn-fire-that-destroyed-massive-plantation-mansion-drew-some-celebrations.html
Nottoway Plantation, and the entire architectural style of Southern US plantation houses, are living symbols of atrocity. This is decidedly less subtle than the framing choices and implications found in Case Study House 22, or in figures 1-3, but they’re all derived from the same ideology. Is it any wonder that those who suffered under these systems celebrated the burning of the plantation, as seen in figure 6?
Figure 6. Dr. Mia Crawford-Johnson and friends watch the plantation burn
Image from Dr. Mia Crawford-Johnson’s Instagram, captioned “Went and watched @nottowayplantation burn to the ground! #TheAncestorsAreRejoicing #NottowayPlantation”
URL: https://www.instagram.com/p/DJsow90tvay/?img_index=5
