Christina Cogdell – författare

In 1939, Vogue magazine invited commercial designer Raymond Loewy and eight of his contemporaries-including Walter Dorwin Teague, Egmont Arens, and Henry Dreyfuss-to design a dress for the "Woman of the Future" as part of its special issue promoting the New York World's Fair and its theme, "The World of Tomorrow." While focusing primarily on her clothing and accessories, many commented as well on the future woman's physique, predicting that her body and mind would be perfected through the implementation of eugenics. Industrial designers' fascination with eugenics-especially that of Norman Bel Geddes-began during the previous decade, and its principles permeated their theories of the modern design style known as "streamlining."In Eugenic Design, Christina Cogdell charts new territory in the history of industrial design, popular science, and American culture in the 1930s by uncovering the links between streamline design and eugenics, the pseudoscientific belief that the best human traits could-and should-be cultivated through selective breeding. Streamline designers approached products the same way eugenicists approached bodies. Both considered themselves to be reformers advancing evolutionary progress through increased efficiency, hygiene and the creation of a utopian "ideal type." Cogdell reconsiders the popular streamline style in U.S. industrial design and proposes that in theory, rhetoric, and context the style served as a material embodiment of eugenic ideology.With careful analysis and abundant illustrations, Eugenic Design is an ambitious reinterpretation of one of America's most significant and popular design forms, ultimately grappling with the question of how ideology influences design.

The motto “Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution” was part of the logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held in 1921. However, by the 1930s, the disturbing legacy of this motto had started to reveal itself in the construction of national identities in countries throughout the world. Popular Eugenics is a fascinating look at how such tendencies emerged within the rhetoric, ideology, and visual aesthetics of U.S. mass culture during the 1930s, offering detailed analysis of the way that eugenics appeared within popular culture and images of modernity, particularly during the Depression era.The essays in this generously illustrated collection demonstrate how, after the scientific foundations of the eugenics movement had been weakened in the 1930s, eugenic beliefs spread into the popular media, including newspapers, movies, museum exhibits, plays, and novels, and even fashion shows and comic strips.Popular Eugenics shows that eugenic thought persisted in science and culture as well as in social policy and goes a long way toward explaining the durability of eugenic thinking and its effects on social policy in the United States. Popular Eugenics will be of interest to scholars and students in a broad range of disciplines, especially American literature and history, popular culture, media studies, and the history of science.

The motto “Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution” was part of the logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held in 1921. However, by the 1930s, the disturbing legacy of this motto had started to reveal itself in the construction of national identities in countries throughout the world. Popular Eugenics is a fascinating look at how such tendencies emerged within the rhetoric, ideology, and visual aesthetics of U.S. mass culture during the 1930s, offering detailed analysis of the way that eugenics appeared within popular culture and images of modernity, particularly during the Depression era.The essays in this generously illustrated collection demonstrate how, after the scientific foundations of the eugenics movement had been weakened in the 1930s, eugenic beliefs spread into the popular media, including newspapers, movies, museum exhibits, plays, and novels, and even fashion shows and comic strips.Popular Eugenics shows that eugenic thought persisted in science and culture as well as in social policy and goes a long way toward explaining the durability of eugenic thinking and its effects on social policy in the United States. Popular Eugenics will be of interest to scholars and students in a broad range of disciplines, especially American literature and history, popular culture, media studies, and the history of science.

A bold and unprecedented look at a cutting-edge movement in architectureToward a Living Architecture? is the first book-length critique of the emerging field of generative architecture and its nexus with computation, biology, and complexity. Starting from the assertion that we should take generative architects’ rhetoric of biology and sustainability seriously, Christina Cogdell examines their claims from the standpoints of the sciences they draw on-complex systems theory, evolutionary theory, genetics and epigenetics, and synthetic biology. She reveals significant disconnects while also pointing to approaches and projects with significant potential for further development. Arguing that architectural design today often only masquerades as sustainable, Cogdell demonstrates how the language of some cutting-edge practitioners and educators can mislead students and clients into thinking they are getting something biological when they are not. In a narrative that moves from the computational toward the biological and from current practice to visionary futures, Cogdell uses life-cycle analysis as a baseline for parsing the material, energetic, and pollution differences between different digital and biological design and construction approaches. Contrary to green-tech sustainability advocates, she questions whether quartzite-based silicon technologies and their reliance on rare earth metals as currently designed are sustainable for much longer, challenging common projections of a computationally designed and manufactured future. Moreover, in critiquing contemporary architecture and science from a historical vantage point, she reveals the similarities between eugenic design of the 1930s and the aims of some generative architects and engineering synthetic biologists today. Each chapter addresses a current architectural school or program while also exploring a distinct aspect of the corresponding scientific language, theory, or practice.No other book critiques generative architecture by evaluating its scientific rhetoric and disjunction from actual scientific theory and practice. Based on the author’s years of field research in architecture studios and biological labs, this rare, field-building book does no less than definitively, unsparingly explain the role of the natural sciences within contemporary architecture.