Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Diedrich, Lisa | Nganang, Patrice | Kaplan, Elizabeth Ann | Friedner, Michele.
Date
2017-05-01
Keywords
Comparative literature | Architecture, Bunkers, Preppers, Safety
Department
Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77204
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
How does “safety†get constructed in American culture after World War II? This dissertation focuses on the ways that architectural spaces—particularly domestic and laboratory space—are configured as “safe†spaces. Through case studies of high-rises, suburban houses, underground bunkers, and industrial cleanrooms, it seeks to uncover how the built environment produces and is produced by the concept of “safety.†This case study model incorporates critical and sociological theory, historical documents, popular literature, and film to investigate “safety†as the basis for projects that sustain racialized and gendered forms of power, as well as participating in a peculiarly American “bunker mentality,†or the politics of fortification, spatial control and defense, and apocalyptic narratives. The figure of the zombie as a destabilizing and deterritorializing force is central to this study since so many of these architectural cases are opposed—in literary but also in governmental policies—to zombies. Ultimately, this study imbricates architecture and story-telling, the material and the imaginative, to critically evaluate how the story of “safety†is told and then mobilized to political ends. | 335 pages
Recommended Citation
Clinton, Gregory, "The Architecture of Safety: Bunker Mentalities and the Construction of Safe Space in America" (2017). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3035.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3035