Design and the Politics of Knowledge in America, 1937-1967

Anna Vallye

Using the American careers of Walter Gropius and Gyorgy Kepes as case studies, this dissertation addresses the intersection of art and architecture with the reciprocal politics of knowledge production and state formation in the mid-twentieth century United States. Inasmuch as the careers of Gropius and Kepes--wartime émigrés from Germany and Hungary, respectively--retrace the narrative of importation and assimilation linking interwar European modernism and its post-World War Two American legacies, this project also implicates that larger narrative and its constructions. Avant-garde practices in the Weimar Republic orbit advanced a model of design as a practice of knowledge, ideation or "expertise," which found fertile ground in the new political conditions of postwar America. The intersection of design practices with practices of knowledge production reconfigured design from material...