Kathleen James-Chakraborty – IV Congreso Internacional Cultura Y Cuidad, Granada

House Beautiful, established in 1896, was the first shelter magazine, that is a publication that focused on introducing readers, most of whom were women, to new ideas regarding architecture, interior design, and gardening. Its audience, in other words, comprised the consumers rather than producers of domestic architecture and closely related fields. While its role under the editorship of Elizabeth Gordon, at the helm from 1941 to 1964, in shaping the taste for particular strands of modern architecture in the United States has been closely examined, less attention has been paid to the ways in which its previous coverage balanced attention to both international trends and what its editors saw as national tradition or to the degree to which it empowered middle class and wealthy American women to make informed choices about the appearance of the environments in which they lived. The first journal to publish the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and to introduce American readers to that of Henry van de Velde, it was also in the forefront — well ahead of the Museum of Modern Art — in alerting Americans to what became known as the International Style. But its educational mission also encompassed teaching its readers about the historic and contemporary crafts traditions of places as diverse as Mexico and Iran. Understanding the role House Beautiful played in American architectural culture before 1941 enables us to reconstruct the degree to which American women, including the many who wrote for it and whose designs appeared in its pages, as well as those who read it, and who were often explicitly addressed as fellow women, had agency in relation to what was at the time the almost exclusively male profession of architecture. It also enables us to understand the degree to which this agency made them citizens of the world, often before they acquired the right to vote. It thus also challenges the idea that modern architecture migrated along lines defined largely by the travels of male architects and the publication and exhibition of their work in venues that largely targeted other architects. Although this happened from within the frame of capitalist consumer culture, and although the editors largely targeted fellow white readers, the division between editorial and advertising content was often quite apparent, and the image of domesticity presented in its pages proved to have more widespread appeal. There may as well be lessons to be learned from its success that can enable the current profession to engage more successfully with its publics as well as how to better diversity its ranks.