24 February 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Cultural Imaginaries of Allergy and the Home in the Mid-20th-Century United States
ERICA VINSON
McGill School of Architecture
Respondent: Piergianna Mazzocca, Cornell University
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Brochure from the Sinclair Hotel, located in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains. There's A summer of fun ahead at The Sinclair, Bethlehem, New Hampshire, 194-, NC 917.422 S6161br, New Hampshire State Library.
Throughout the 1940s, U.S. mothers wrote to the National Children’s Bureau asking how to relieve their children’s allergy symptoms. While they were sometimes asking for medical advice or clarification, they were often asking where they could move their families to avoid the allergens that caused their children’s asthma. While experts at the Bureau would tentatively confirm the potential of relocating, they often cautioned that there was no way to know if a new environment would be beneficial. Despite its limitations, the dream of escaping environmental allergens, particularly ragweed, had a long history and was powerful enough to motivate the establishment of resort towns across the continent. In a 1925 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, Dr. Woods Hutchinson wrote about the safety of both the mountains and “barren islands out at sea,” encouraging readers to escape to locations outside the reach of ragweed pollens. In 1947, Russell Maloney noted that “ragweed, the doctors said, grows only around cleared land. For instance, beside highways and railroad tracks...” In their attempts to escape Ragweed, those who suffered from allergies wer encouraged to flee to inhospitable, uninhabited places.
I am interested in the enclaves and resort towns that grew around ragweed retreats. Bethlehem, New Hampshire, nestled in the White Mountains, exists between the constructed comfort and familiarity of hotels and the awe-inspiring, alien landscapes of the mountains. How did ideas of hospitality and habitability square with the need for barren landscapes? How did the constructed familiarity of the hotels affect how visiting allergenics imagined the mountains? By analyzing the promotional material produced by prominent Bethlehem hotels, I explore how promises of comfort and relief worked to domesticate the White Mountains and reframe longstanding notions of the mountains’ mythical status to fit more neatly into 20th-century ideas of treatment and consumerism.
***
GEORGINA PANTAZOPOULOU
University of Antwerp
Respondent: Rebecca Carrai, KU Leuven
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From Inside to Outside, and Back Again: A Polykatoikia Interior, Illustration, Georgina Pantazopoulou, 2025.
Could the rigid lines of modernist architecture become porous through touch, memory, and everyday improvisation? This project asks whether Athens’ polykatoikia—a post-war housing typology built on repetition and standardization—can be re-read through the bodily and sensorial practices of its inhabitants. Rooted in feminist and intersectional theory, the research explores how people dwell, adapt, and inhabit these spaces in ways that unsettle their original, masculinist design logic.
Using post-war Athens’ polykatoikia as its lens, the research mobilizes intersectional feminist theory to interrogate how interiors mediate culture, behavior, and equity. Through desk research and preliminary field observations in two polykatoikia subtypes—social-housing and antiparochi—the study reframes the home as a site of situated knowledge and collective creativity. Women extending kitchens onto balconies, children claiming stairwells as playrooms, families transforming thresholds into shared zones of encounter—these unmapped gestures are understood not merely as utilitarian responses, but as embodied acts of negotiation, resistance, and care. The project asks: can these lived interventions—intimate, improvised, and often invisible—be understood as feminist spatial practices, even when they are not named as such?
Modernism’s rationalist ethos, with its emphasis on modularity, universality, and functionality, left little room for difference, softness, or emotion. Yet within the repetitive structures of the polykatoikia, bodies leak through the blueprint—they reconfigure space not through demolition, but through accumulation, routine, and tactile memory. The home becomes a site of friction between architecture’s intention and life’s insistence: a space shaped as much by cultural norms and social constraints as by personal gestures and collective memory.
The research aims to move through its spaces with curiosity and attention. It listens for the feminist potential in daily acts: in the way rooms are rearranged to care, to cope, to claim autonomy. It invites us to consider architecture not only as structure, but as a living archive of bodies in relation, and to ask: what happens when home is not designed for us, but we inhabit it anyway—differently, tenderly, insistently?
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Cultural Imaginaries of Allergy and the Home in the Mid-20th-Century United States
ERICA VINSON
McGill School of Architecture
Respondent: Piergianna Mazzocca, Cornell University
Brochure from the Sinclair Hotel, located in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains. There's A summer of fun ahead at The Sinclair, Bethlehem, New Hampshire, 194-, NC 917.422 S6161br, New Hampshire State Library.
Throughout the 1940s, U.S. mothers wrote to the National Children’s Bureau asking how to relieve their children’s allergy symptoms. While they were sometimes asking for medical advice or clarification, they were often asking where they could move their families to avoid the allergens that caused their children’s asthma. While experts at the Bureau would tentatively confirm the potential of relocating, they often cautioned that there was no way to know if a new environment would be beneficial. Despite its limitations, the dream of escaping environmental allergens, particularly ragweed, had a long history and was powerful enough to motivate the establishment of resort towns across the continent. In a 1925 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, Dr. Woods Hutchinson wrote about the safety of both the mountains and “barren islands out at sea,” encouraging readers to escape to locations outside the reach of ragweed pollens. In 1947, Russell Maloney noted that “ragweed, the doctors said, grows only around cleared land. For instance, beside highways and railroad tracks...” In their attempts to escape Ragweed, those who suffered from allergies wer encouraged to flee to inhospitable, uninhabited places.
I am interested in the enclaves and resort towns that grew around ragweed retreats. Bethlehem, New Hampshire, nestled in the White Mountains, exists between the constructed comfort and familiarity of hotels and the awe-inspiring, alien landscapes of the mountains. How did ideas of hospitality and habitability square with the need for barren landscapes? How did the constructed familiarity of the hotels affect how visiting allergenics imagined the mountains? By analyzing the promotional material produced by prominent Bethlehem hotels, I explore how promises of comfort and relief worked to domesticate the White Mountains and reframe longstanding notions of the mountains’ mythical status to fit more neatly into 20th-century ideas of treatment and consumerism.
***
Could Feminism Reside Here? Revisiting Domestic Space in Athens’ Polykatoikia
GEORGINA PANTAZOPOULOU
University of Antwerp
Respondent: Rebecca Carrai, KU Leuven
From Inside to Outside, and Back Again: A Polykatoikia Interior, Illustration, Georgina Pantazopoulou, 2025.
Could the rigid lines of modernist architecture become porous through touch, memory, and everyday improvisation? This project asks whether Athens’ polykatoikia—a post-war housing typology built on repetition and standardization—can be re-read through the bodily and sensorial practices of its inhabitants. Rooted in feminist and intersectional theory, the research explores how people dwell, adapt, and inhabit these spaces in ways that unsettle their original, masculinist design logic.
Using post-war Athens’ polykatoikia as its lens, the research mobilizes intersectional feminist theory to interrogate how interiors mediate culture, behavior, and equity. Through desk research and preliminary field observations in two polykatoikia subtypes—social-housing and antiparochi—the study reframes the home as a site of situated knowledge and collective creativity. Women extending kitchens onto balconies, children claiming stairwells as playrooms, families transforming thresholds into shared zones of encounter—these unmapped gestures are understood not merely as utilitarian responses, but as embodied acts of negotiation, resistance, and care. The project asks: can these lived interventions—intimate, improvised, and often invisible—be understood as feminist spatial practices, even when they are not named as such?
Modernism’s rationalist ethos, with its emphasis on modularity, universality, and functionality, left little room for difference, softness, or emotion. Yet within the repetitive structures of the polykatoikia, bodies leak through the blueprint—they reconfigure space not through demolition, but through accumulation, routine, and tactile memory. The home becomes a site of friction between architecture’s intention and life’s insistence: a space shaped as much by cultural norms and social constraints as by personal gestures and collective memory.
The research aims to move through its spaces with curiosity and attention. It listens for the feminist potential in daily acts: in the way rooms are rearranged to care, to cope, to claim autonomy. It invites us to consider architecture not only as structure, but as a living archive of bodies in relation, and to ask: what happens when home is not designed for us, but we inhabit it anyway—differently, tenderly, insistently?