Scandalous Glass House is an excursion into the Polish-Jewish functionalist architecture and the concept of a garden-city that culminated in the glass house owned by the writer, activist and socialite Irena Krzywicka. This self-proclaimed scandalist manipulated and performed two notions of transparency—architectural and social—to produce a lasting aesthetic and political change in one of prewar Poland’s richest suburbs.
Bozena Shallcross is Professor of Polish Languages an Literature, Department of Slavic Languages & Literature at the University of Chicago. Her research engages a variety of concepts related to the fundamental division between the seeing subject and the objectual sphere in literature, visual arts, and an experiential, physical world. From the late stage of Polish symbolist poetry and its ekphrastic reassessments of Western European visual arts, her research evolved into an exploration of the late modernist destabilization of the poetic subject and art-object divide from the perspective of (post)sublime encounters with artistic production of things and metaphysical nothingness. Shallcross also established another line of inquiry in which the subject-object split is defined in the wide range of Romantic artists’ homes, ateliers and other spaces, including these cohabited in transit, in which the sense of identity is conflated with habitation, dialectics of inside-outside, collections or paraphernalia of décor are ordered by the representational mode of reflexivity between a creative inhabitant and his/her domestic space as established by Honoré de Balzac. As of late, Shallcross also engaged the object-subject split in a radically different historical setting of the Holocaust in order to establish the precarious ontology of trivial, everyday things in extreme conditions of the genocide.
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Further reading: https://www.semcoop.com/blog/post/scandalous-glass-house-bozena-shallcross