Happiness by Design?

This event is conducted in partnership with the Lien Fung's Colloquium

Synopsis
Can good design make people happier? Early 20th century architects and writers believed it to be possible. Modernist designers sought not merely to create environments that were useful and beautiful, but to forge a radical new way of life with the potential to expand collective well-being. Their ambition led to a wholesale re-conception of the spaces of the home and a commitment to better living through an emphasis on efficiency, cleanliness, and decluttering. Modernists sought a life, as Virginia Woolf put it, “without smell, waste, or confusion”. Is this where happiness lies? Withal, these values remain embedded in contemporary design today and continue to shape our understanding of the emotional impact of built and designed environments.

Speaker Biography
Victoria Rosner is Dean of the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study and Professor of Humanities and English. Her most recent book is Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life (Oxford UP, 2020). Rosner’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and others. She is a past winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize (for Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life [Columbia University Press, 2005]), and is the recipient of the 2022 Docomomo Advocacy Award of Excellence for her research on women architects.

Moderator Biography

Emily Soon is Lecturer of English Literature in the College of Integrative Studies and the School of Social Sciences at SMU. Her research focuses on cross-cultural literary engagement between Asia and Europe in the premodern and modern eras, with a particular emphasis on Southeast Asia. Her research has been published in the journal Modern Philology, the yearbook Shakespeare Survey, and England’s Asian Renaissance (Ng, S.F. and Nocentelli, C. (Eds.) University of Delaware Press, 2021).