WARTIME HOUSING: AN EXHIBITION IN 10 SCENES
The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art
Volume 9, Number 4, May 1942
Eliot F. Noyes
The Museum of Modern Art: WARTIME HOUSING: AN EXHIBITION IN 10 SCENES. New York City: Museum of Modern Art, 1942. First edition [The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Vol. IX, No. 4, May 1942]. A nearly fine staple-bound booklet with faint shelf wear. Checklist of Circulating Exhibits for April-May 1942 laid in. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Poster reproduced on cover by Jean Carlu.
7.25 x 9.25 staple-bound booklet with 48 pages with 47 black-and-white illustrations. Includes a facsimile of a letter by President Roosevelt to the Museum of Modern Art regarding their exhibit, which was "presented at the Museum of Modern Art, sponsored by the National Committee on the Housing Emergency, and prepared in cooperation with the National Housing Agency. April-June 1942." Exhibition designed and assembled by Eliot F. Noyes, Director of Department of Industrial Design with the help of Alica Carson, assistant, and Don E. Hatch, architect, as special consultant. Also includes a one-sided insert for Circulating Exhibitions: April-May 1942.
Architects include Eero Saarinen and George Howe, Oscar Stonorov and Louis I. Kahn.
Eliot F. Noyes, Director of the Museum’s Department of Industrial Design comments on the purpose of the exhibition as follows: “During the next year or two, hundreds of thousands of new houses will have to be built for workers in war industries. In this program lie great dangers for, with the vital need for speed, long-range planning tends to be sidetracked, and what is built hastily now may become slums and ghost towns of tomorrow. The people of a community can do much in plan- ning the future growth of their town; if they fail to do so, they fail in their responsibility as American citizens.
“What we are trying to show in this exhibition is very simple. If you add a wing to your house, you plan it very carefully, and have architects, plumbers, electricians, and all sorts of specialists to consult with you about it. If you add a wing to your community, it should be planned just as carefully with experts advising just as thoroughly. Many communities will be adding wings these days to house the hundreds of thousands of war workers. [Museum of Modern Art press release, April 22, 1942]
From a synopsis of Clarissa Ceglio's paper "The Material Rhetoric of Sensory Persuasion in MoMA's ‘Wartime Housing' (1942)" [available on the .edu website for Academia]: "To see an exhibition as ugly as Sin, as shocking as a Coney Island horror house, small-town mayors, housing officials, clubwomen and school kids trooped into Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week," reported Time magazine in May 1942. The show itself went by the staid title "Wartime Housing." The museum had, according to Time, "caged and displayed the 'Housing Crime.'" The crime in question concerned the shortage of housing for workers and their families who had flocked to centers of wartime production in search of employment only to find themselves living in overpriced, substandard accommodations or, worse, railroad cars, tents and grain bins. Concern for the migrants' welfare and fear of social chaos ran second to meeting production quotas for implements of war deemed essential to national defense and victory."