Domesticating

the Desert and

other Modernist
Housing
Rachel Engel & Nell Geer
 Palm Springs and the Nomos of Modernity
Prefabricated Steel Houses, Automation, and Settler Colonialism in Postwar America, 1943 – 1968
BY MANUEL SHVARTZBERG CARRIÓ

Date written-

2018

Time period focus-

1943-1968
Architects of New Palm
Springs

+ Who they
are/what they did

+ Reservation land

+ US Steel Corp

Richard Harrison (right),

Donald Allan Wexler (left)

 Donald Wexler and Richard 1962
Harrison designed a tract of
thirty-five prefabricated steel
homes in Palm Springs,
California, in collaboration
with the United States Steel
Corporation (U.S.Steel) and
Rheem Manufacturing, two
of the nation’s largest private
corporations

The homes, however, were sited on

reservation land, and through their
automated construction procedures,
they displaced laborers from the local
building industry, most of whom,were
African American and Latino workers
living on the reservation.
“Architecture provides a set of practices
for materially enclosing territory while
simultaneously constructing the epistemic
divide between “savages” (specific
dehumanized beings, dispossessed from
specific places and histories) and
“civilization.”
Page 170, Palm Springs and the Nomos of Modernity
But this system, despite its slick steel and
techno-managerial allure, was never a real
solution to the housing problem at mass
scale. It wasn’t just that its cost was only
accessible to middle-class families.
How does this relate to

today?
Manifesto for an Indoor Man: The Awakening of the Playboy’s
Domestic Consciousness
Paul B. Preciado
“Playboy” brought men indoors. It made it OK for
boys to stay inside and play...In what would later
become an ironic collusion with feminists such as
Betty Friedan, Playboy critiqued the staid
institutions of marriage, domesticity and suburban
family life. Suddenly bachelorhood was a choice, one
decorated with intelligent drinks, hi-fits and an
urbane apartment that put white picket fences to
shame. Sophistication had become a viable option
for men…” page 31
“…Playboy deployed a range of audiovisual media in order to
pursue what was essentially a political and architectural goal (not
all pornographic, and only secondary media-related): to stir up
male sexual liberation movement, to arouse the American man’s
political awareness of the male right to domestic space, and to
construct an autonomous space free of the sexual and moral
laws that governed heterosexual marriage”