TUCSON MODERNISM WEEK
When
Saturday, November 7, 2:15 PM - Venue TBD
TUCSON MODERNISM WEEK
In-person event - $10
Details and tickets here
As part of Tucson Modernism Week, Dr. Jennifer Jenkins will explore in her lecture that time not so far away when the threat of nuclear oblivion became part of American culture and shaped how we lived and built our cities.
In March 1953, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission began a series of above-ground nuclear tests at Yucca Flats, Nevada, 67 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The blasts were meant to test the resilience of “the American Home” under nuclear attack. Henry Luce’s LIFE magazine reported in a photo-story that six-room “sacrificial houses” were placed at 3500 and 7500 feet from Ground Zero. The Colonial-style two-story, painted clapboard houses—in stark contrast to the Nevada desert architectural vernacular—were staged with items straight out of a midcentury department store window: up-to-date furniture, drapes, rugs, and stylishly dressed male, female, and child mannequins. These structures and furnishings were meant to measure fallout's effects on typical American families. LIFE’s dramatic images of the impact and aftermath on American soil made it clear that the nuclear age had come home.
Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Southwest Center, studies the vernacular film history of the Southwest in the mid-20th century. Her publications include Celluloid Pueblo: Western Ways Film Service and the Invention of the Postwar Southwest (UA Press, 2016) and the work in progress, Screening Americans: Cinema and Citizenship in the Wartime Southwest.