Donna Schumacher ~ California

Architecture, the Ideal, & Marilyn Monroe: Towards a Feminine Aesthetic in Architecture
By Donna Leigh Schumacher.

A template for understanding the body's design as it moves through time and space. An engaging and critical study of the female body and how it relates to modernist and post-modernist methods of interpretation. Schumacher deconstructs modernisms attempt to create the ideal goddess through pure abstract forms without specific cultural and historical precedents (tradition) and uses Marilyn Monroe as a catalyst for fashioning a living abstraction of the idealized form of female sexuality. An architect herself, Schumacher subverts the dominant white male, middle-class view that objectifies women by advancing a female aesthetic, an aesthetic which investigates the various structures that produce "contradictions and nonlinear movements." Includes critical as well as personal revelations and a bibliography. Plus a prospectus complete with drawings for a 1993 art exhibition and one of the author's own architectural designs. A must for anyone interested in post-modernist theory.
$60