Poker-Faced Houses: Towards a New Paradigm, a lecture from Alice Friedman

Alice Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor of American Art at Wellesley College and a Visiting Professor at the Modern Interiors Research Center at Kingston University, London. Professor Friedman is the author of numerous books and articles on gender, sexuality, and the social history of architecture, including House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (University of Chicago Press, 1989), Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (Abrams, 1998; Yale paperback 2007) and American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (Yale, 2010). Recent publications include a study of Richard Lippold’s mid-century modern sculptural installations, and a series of articles on queer domesticities and the members of the American ex-pat lesbian circle in Paris in the period between 1920 and 1975.

Friedman is currently working on a book titled Poker Faces/Private Spaces: Houses for Unconventional Clients, 1907-2017. Through a series of case studies, the book examines the ways in which architects and their most “unconventional” clients—men and women who stood apart from social norms by virtue of their sexuality or alternative ways of living—used hybrid designs and unusual planning strategies to create public facades (both literal and figurative) that shielded private enclaves behind blank walls or deceptively traditional exteriors.