Architecture

By Jessica Ellen Sewell 

Image from Pillow Talk (1959). Split screen heightens the contrast between the feminine apartment of Jan Morrow (Doris Day) and Brad Allen (Rock Hudson)’s bachelor pad. (© Universal Studios)

The mid-1950s saw the invention of a new, highly mythologized housing type, the bachelor pad, articulated most fully in the pages of Playboy and in films. The bachelor pad is an apartment for a single professional man, organized for entertaining and pleasure, and displaying tasteful consumption. The bachelor pad was culturally salient at this particular historical moment because it linked a culture increasingly focused on consumption and what sociologists and cultural commentators in the late 1950s argued was a “crisis in masculinity.” The bachelor pad provided a compelling fantasy of individual consumption and economic and sexual power to counter that crisis, but at the same time, helped to produce the masculinity crisis by problematizing straight male domesticity.

As described in Playboy, the pad “is, or should be, the outward reflection of his [the bachelor’s] inner self—a comfortable, livable, and yet exciting expression of the person he is and the life he leads.”¹ It is precisely this inner self that was seen to be in crisis in the late 1950s: men’s sense of themselves as individuals had been stripped away, a state that was blamed partly on the conformity of corporate America and partly on women.

By Oleg Grabar 

Oleg Grabar (back row, second from right) with the 1969 staff of his archaeological team in Syria excavating a site known as Qasr al-Hayr

It has been nearly sixty years that I have been engaged in an active scholarly life. My first article came out fifty-eight years ago, and there are still now two or three studies in the process of being printed or ready to appear on the Internet. In between lie some twenty books, several of which were translated into at least seven languages, and over one hundred and twenty more or less significant articles.

This considerable production can easily be divided into three groups, whose chronology raises interesting conclusions about the path of research traveled by a historian of the arts of the Islamic world who came into academic existence in the middle of the twentieth century. Whether this path is unique or typical is for others to decide.

The first group consists of traditional research based on the publication of documents, the excavation of new documents, and the significance of these documents within relatively strict chronological and spatial limits. Scholarship of this type is for the most part restricted in its interest and usefulness to other scholars of the same vintage, and it dominates the first half of my creative years. The number of works of this type that would have been initiated by me has clearly diminished with time, even though their scientific quality (or weakness) tends to remain steady over the years.