Houze, Rebecca
Houze, Rebecca
Bio Sketch
Rebecca Houze is an American design historian, Professor of Art History at Northern Illinois University, where she teaches the history of design and the decorative arts. A specialist in Viennese design, women in the applied arts, and design-history historiography, she is the author of New Mythologies in Design and Culture: Reading Signs and Rewriting Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2016) and co-editor, with Grace Lees-Maffei, of The Design History Reader (Berg, 2010). Her essay "From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte: Marketing Domesticity with Fashionable Interior Design" (Design Issues 18.1, Winter 2002) — reprinted in Intimus — established the gender-and-marketing account of Viennese modernism: the new style's success built on its direction "towards the feminine," women's handcrafts as the Secessionist ornament's source, and fashion as the mechanism that carried art to market.
Key Works
- *From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte: Marketing Domesticity with Fashionable Interior Design* (2002/2006) — the gendered marketing history of Viennese modern design: Gemütlichkeit and the Biedermeier interior, the Secession's botanical trademark, Semper's cladding lineage from Hoffmann to Loos, the Werkstätte's showroom-homes, and fashion as "the constant driving force" of the modern style.
- New Mythologies in Design and Culture: Reading Signs and Rewriting Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2016) — design history's mythologies and their rewriting.
- The Design History Reader, co-ed. with Grace Lees-Maffei (Berg, 2010) — the design-history anthology.
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- wiener-werkstatte — the workshop whose fashionability was "the secret of its success"
- secessionist-style — the botanical, youth-coded modern style as trademark
- interior-as-garment — the interior "regarded as a form of dressing," from Semper's Bekleidungsprinzip to Loos
- gesamtkunstwerk — the domestic living space as "a theater of modern life"
- gemutlichkeit — the "kind of cozy comfort" defining the true Viennese interior
- biedermeier — the historical style the modern architects embraced for its simpler domestic life
- fashion — the resisting/exploiting tension at the emergence of the modern style
- design-reform — the Viennese applied-arts reform wing (Oesterreichisches Museum, Kunstgewerbeschule)
Relevance to the Core Research
Houze supplies the wiki's Viennese-design-reform cluster — the history of exactly the art/craft/design tussle in which interior design sits "at the centre" (editors, p. 156). Her chapter connects the wiki's Semper-lineage materials doctrine (law-of-cladding) to its gender-and-the-interior cluster: in Vienna, the interior-as-garment was not a metaphor but a marketing mechanism, and the feminine handcraft economy it relied on was both exploited (Folsenics's ambivalence) and constitutive (the women designers who "creatively inspired the work of male teachers"). For the Researcher's interior-design-theory and everyday-interest areas, Houze's complementary-process thesis — art and commerce fueling one another through fashion — is the historical groundwork for any account of how designed interiors reach their publics.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
