Did You Hear That One About Neutra and Williams? Architectural Spreadability in a Post-Truth Context

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Notes

Notes

1 Paul R. Williams, The Small Home of Tomorrow (Hollywood: Murray & Gee, 1945), 66.

2 Paul R. Williams, “I Am a Negro,” American Magazine, July, 1937: 162.

3 Richard J. Neutra and Paul R. Williams, Table, US Patent 2,329,213, filed September 5, 1941, and issued September 14, 1943.

4 Neutra VDL House, “The Camel Table was designed and patented in 1943 by Richard Neutra and Paul R. Williams,” Facebook, September 15, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/neutraVDL/posts/10159168011874095.

5 Barbara Lamprecht, Richard Neutra Furniture: The Body and the Senses (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2015), 85n35.

6 Dana Goodyear, “Hotel California,” The New Yorker, February 7, 2005: 68–73.

7 David Gebhard, “Paul R. Williams and the Los Angeles Scene,” in Paul R. Williams, Architect: A Legacy of Style, by Karen E. Hudson (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 27.

8 In her 1993 biography of Williams, Hudson describes a version of the story that hews more closely to the version written by Williams himself. See Karen E. Hudson, Paul R. Williams, Architect: A Legacy of Style (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 14. However, in a 2012 interview with NPR, Hudson asserted “He taught himself to draw upside down so white clients wouldn’t be uncomfortable sitting next to him.” See Karen Grigsby Bates, “A Trailblazing Black Architect Who Helped Shape L.A.,” All Things Considered, NPR, June 22, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/06/22/155442524/a-trailblazing-black-architect-who-helped-shape-l-a. While it is certainly possible that both versions are true, the point is that each is measured differently with respect to historical accuracy, and each also conveys a slightly different meaning that engages different aspects of racism.

9 Williams, “I Am a Negro”: 162.

10 Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York University Press, 2013), 27, 199–201. In developing their concept of spreadability, the authors build on media scholar John Fiske’s concept of “producerly” texts, which are characterized by a looseness or incompleteness that allow them to be slightly altered in order to be more meaningful to a specific audience. Fiske, in turn, relates this concept to Michel de Certeau’s concept of “making do.” See John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010), 86, 146–147.

11 Barre Toelken, Dynamics of Folklore (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1996), 37–39.

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Doug Jackson

Doug Jackson is an architect, writer, and educator. His work interrogates contemporary assumptions about architecture in order to posit new notions of its ontology, its subjects, and its possible performances. He is the editor and primary author of SOUPERgreen! Souped-Up Green Architecture, published by Actar in 2017, for which he was also awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. He is also the editor for the Journal of Architectural Education issue on “Environments.” Formerly a Partner at the office of Jones, Partners: Architecture, he is now the principal of the Doug Jackson Design Office. In addition, he is a professor of architecture at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA, where he teaches design and theory courses, and coordinates the undergraduate thesis program.