I was at a social science history conference last week in Gothenburg, where one of the talks was about women as mediators of energy transitions. For example: from gas heat to electric refrigeration or from telephone switchboard operators to rotary dials. The importance of this history, as explained by panelist Ruth Sandwell, is that stories of energy transition have often focused on the men with the social and financial capital to invent and popularize technologies, Thomas Edison, James Watt etc. But the stories of women and the domestic labor that actually brought these technologies and energy regimes into people’s homes and lives are equally as important.
Key to these histories is, Abigail Harrison Moore’s research into women’s decorating advice in the end of the 19th century, particularly the 1881 book The Art of Decoration by professional decorator and advice writer Mary Eliza Haweis. Moore shows how Haweis portrayed electric light as an exciting technology but one that needed to be treated with care. The angle and shading of an electric bulb had to be treated carefully so as to not wash out the faces of a room’s occupants or unintentionally draw attention to less attractive physical features. The coloring of a room’s walls and its furniture would have to be adjusted, moving away from greens and blues that electric light would make too vibrant and toward warmer and lighter tones.
Moore’s characterisation of Haweis shows women to be the masters of the domestic space, carefully designing and curating each new technology and addition to provide the best aesthetic and economic impact. To this end, Moore provided an anecdote from the time where a woman’s husband attempted to scold her after looking at the bill for a grocery expense and the woman responded by showing him exactly how much money she was saving the household by her careful management of the home’s lighting, heating, and other energy use.
This all had me thinking about another energy transition almost 100 years later which triggered its own architectural and design movement. The rise of the automobile in the United States profoundly changed domestic architecture and no architect was more invested in that coupling than Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright, and many of his 20th century colleagues like Le Corbusier, sought to completely rethink the home from a purposeful design perspective. Wright wanted to create homes and neighborhoods like the Hudson Valley’s Usonia that integrated automobile energy seamlessly into its design and Corbusier sought to strip domestic architecture down to its raw functional elements, reinventing it as “a machine for living in.”
I admire the work of both of these architects and love walking through their quirky design-fetish spaces, but after hearing about the research of Moore and her colleagues, I couldn’t shake the idea that this midcentury home revolution was some sort of masculine reclamation of domestic space.
Corbusier’s minimalist and functionalist design is gorgeous, but the meticulous stripped-back design makes it an impossible space for a family to really make their own. Wright’s Usonia homes are elegant and verdant, but it’s telling that most of their current owners have had to renovate them to expand their miniscule kitchens.
Even further, these 20th century architects were going beyond the building itself and planning entire communities and cities. Wright’s homes are reliant on the winding roads of his automobile-centric suburbs and Corbusier’s green cities used electrification to centralize almost all energy consumption, from transportation, to heating, and lighting.
Usonia 1 floor plan, complete with teeny-tiny kitchen
Looking at these two histories of domestic energy transition: the woman-to-woman networks of the late 19th century and the masculine architectural reclamation of the home in the 20th century, I wonder how we can find a new model for our current domestic energy transition. What does a queer home look like energetically? Can we collectivize resources and integrate power grids while still leaving room for aesthetic individuality and more casual peer-to-peer (or queer-to-queer) knowledge sharing?
Personally, my queer dream dwelling has a functionalist kitchen big enough to eat in with all of our friends. There’s a bus or tram nearby with free fares and bike racks. The front room has well-insulated windows that let in lots of natural light and open up on sunny days so I can wave to you across the way.