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Reid Design Diplomacy paper final May 2017.pdf (127.5 kB)

Cold War cultural transactions: designing the USSR for the West at Brussels Expo ‘58

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-05-26, 10:54 authored by Susan Reid
Focusing on the Cold War Expo in Brussels 1958, this article takes the metaphor of “design diplomacy” as a lens through which to explore the dilemmas of Soviet exhibition planners charged with designing a modern image of the USSR at the World Fair. Seeking ways to represent the advantages of socialism to foreign, especially Western publics, the exhibition organizers began to question established Soviet tradecraft in the production of mass exhibitions, concluding instead that if the USSR was to make itself understood by the capitalist “other,” it must adopt selectively the idiom of its audience and interlocutor. The Soviet ‘self was constituted in relation to two main “others”: the USA, whose pavilion was adjacent to the Soviet one; and the anticipated public, about whom the Soviet designers knew little. As in diplomatic transactions, the art of persuasion demanded negotiation and compromise, resulting in a degree of transculturation and cross-fertilization.

Funding

This research was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [grant number RF/5/RFG/2004/0095]; the AHRC [grant number R/121918].

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Politics and International Studies

Published in

Design and Culture

Citation

REID, S.E., 2017. Cold War cultural transactions: designing the USSR for the West at Brussels Expo ‘58. Design and Culture, 9 (2), pp. 123-145.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2017

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Design and Culture on 13 July 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17547075.2017.1333388.

ISSN

1754-7075

eISSN

1754-7083

Language

  • en