Masterly Confusion: Ported Protection in the American Interwar

Drawing from comparable experiences of trauma, play, and tectonic improvisation as camoufleurs during the First World War, architects Ralph Walker and Aymar Embury II would later work through logics of protective concealment in domestic design projects ranging from carpet prototypes for the Metropolitan Museum in New York to bridge infrastructures for Robert Moses—pursuing forms that provided a sense of security in their woven equivocation and offered portability through their scalability and potential for standardized ubiquity. As with the operations of artillery and personnel camouflage where makeshift flat-tops of fabric and foliage provided spaces of relief within a brutal theater of reciprocal violence, the “masterly confusion” of much interwar architectural work long deemed “modernistic,” middlebrow, or not fully modern was often animated by strained therapeutic desires to mask or avoid the aesthetic and physiological shocks of modernity while also furthering the entrenchment of modern forms of mobilization at more systemic levels. This paper traces how formal ambivalence born out of necessity on the battlefield would come to migrate across surfaces and mutate into surfaces back home, advancing the fluid forms of capital and corporatism via subtle tectonic and material means.