Victoria Rosner
| Victoria Rosner is Dean of the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study and Professor of Humanities and English. Her most recent book is Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life (Oxford UP, 2020). Rosner’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and others. She is a past winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize (for Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life [Columbia University Press, 2005]), and is the recipient of the 2022 Docomomo Advocacy Award of Excellence for her research on women architects. |
Can good design make people happier? Early 20th century architects and writers believed it to be possible. Modernist designers sought not merely to create environments that were useful and beautiful, but to forge a radical new way of life with the potential to expand collective well-being. Their ambition led to a wholesale re-conception of the spaces of the home and a commitment to better living through an emphasis on efficiency, cleanliness, and decluttering. Modernists sought a life, as Virginia Woolf put it, “without smell, waste, or confusion”. Is this where happiness lies? Withal, these values remain embedded in contemporary design today and continue to shape our understanding of the emotional impact of built and designed environments.