Beatriz Colomina’s Domesticity at War advances a striking proposition: post-war American domestic architecture was not a peaceful refuge from conflict, but a space profoundly reorganised by the technologies, fears, and visual regimes of war. Even from its contents, the book’s architecture of argument is evident: “Built in the USA” frames the home as a national project, while chapters such as “1949”, “DDU at MoMA”, “The Eames House”, “The Lawn at War”, “X-Ray Architecture”, “Unbreathed Air”, “Enclosed by Images”, and “The Underground House” suggest a history in which modern domesticity becomes inseparable from exhibition culture, military research, environmental control, mass media, and nuclear threat. Colomina’s central claim is that the twentieth-century house was transformed into an apparatus of security and exposure: transparent, photographed, monitored, medically scanned, air-conditioned, and imagined as both shelter and target. A specific case is the Eames House, which can be read not merely as an icon of lifestyle modernism, but as part of a broader post-war ecology of prefabrication, publicity, technological optimism, and national identity. Likewise, the “Underground House” evokes the Cold War fantasy of survival beneath the surface, where domestic comfort and civil defence converge. The conclusion is that domestic architecture is never merely private; it is a cultural battleground where geopolitical anxiety, technological systems, and ideals of everyday life are materially installed.
