1956

April 19, 2026

FILM

In 1956, movies were mass entertainment all around the post-war world but output was dominated by the USA¹ across all genres. I never knew that The King and I, High Society, The Ten Commandments, and Around the World in 80 Days were all from 1956 but it’s not important. It’s a mixed bag, but with movies such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Forbidden Planet we can see a fear of the other due to the Cold War. These are all US movies but Japan had Crazed Fruit, Early Spring (Ozu), and Godzilla, King of the Monsters! There doesn’t seem to have been much middle ground but maybe it simply hasn’t aged as well.

MUSIC

Once again, the US was a major cultural force. In January Elvis Presley made his television debut with Heartbreak Hotel and in June sang Hound Dog. Bill Hayley sang See You Later, Alligator, Little Richard sang Long Tall Sally. You can get a feel for it from just those three.² 1956 was the first Eurovision Song Contest. In the world of classical music there doesn’t seem to have been much of note but this could just be me. 1956 was the first time Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in B♭ major for the left hand, op. 53 was performed. Prokofiev had written if for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brother Paul who’d had his right arm amputated after some war injury but nevertheless had quite a career as a left-hand only pianist³. He said he’d only play what Prokofiev had written once he understood it, but he never got around to it.

ART

Shoe and Leg (“December Shoe”) Andy Warhol

1956 was the year that Jackson Pollock died but it was also the year that Andy Warhol made the transition from fashion illustrator to artist. The image on the left is a fashion illustration from 1953 [“Move into a country flat” hehe] and the one on the right from 1956 is consciously art. Warhol had been working as an illustrator for a few years but, in 1955, his drawings for a shoe manufacturer made many people notice him as a fashion illustrator and some of his first non-commercial drawings sold from $50–225⁴ at the Bodley Gallery in New York in December 1956. Nobody can say that Warhol ever “went commercial” because commerce and artistry were together from the beginning. You could say he was a commercial artist beginning to end, and that in 1956 he just went freelance. You might even say the same for architects. Of course, I didn’t have thoughts like this in 1956 but, for some of the things below, I feel like I’ve known them all my life.

“Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?” Richard Hamilton

Commercialism or at least consumption was very evident in Richard Hamilton’s famous collage. The sources of the various images have mostly been identified⁵ and the artwork has been called a snapshot of culture although, since it’s art, it’s a representation of somebody’s commentary on what they perceive that culture to be. Somewhere. At that time. Since Richard Hamilton was British and the images are mostly from American magazines, it seems to be a comment on the Americanization of post-WWII global culture which, by 1956, was probably already well advanced. If this collage was cut-and-paste in the original sense, then I’m very impressed by how Mr. Hamilton arranged/collaged everything so the perspectives were mostly the same, but effectively so when not, such as with the “ordinary cleaners reach only this far” lady vacuuming the stairs. We’ve only had Photoshop since 1987.

Tulip Chair Eero Saarinen

For something fabricated from aluminum and fibreglass, the chair is surprisingly heavy. Because it swivels on the wineglass-like base that is the main design idea, it’s very difficult to pull away from the dining table to sit down in, especially if it’s on carpet or a rug as there’s much friction between it and that base. However, if you tilt the chair backwards to reeduce that friction then the chair will want to roll sideways. So, if ever you’re invited to dinner and have to sit on one of these for the first time, swivel the chair outwards, sit on it and then swivel back around to face your hosts. This new way of sitting down will make you will feel slightly ridiculous. Roll ’em out! Knoll⁶. $4,240.

Eames Lounge Chair Charles and Ray Eames

A molded plywood and leather chair and ottoman for the high-end market⁷ of course necessitated a modern take on a 19th century club chair. I suppose in 1956 the 19th century wasn’t all that long ago. I think all this chair says to us now is that, in 1956, people thought they were done with the past while at the same time still felt a need to define themselves with respect to it. Herman Miller⁸. $8,705.00.

ARCHITECTURE

Where to start? Or rather, where to continue?

House of the Future Peter and Alison Smithson

This proposal forever is another example of designers pandering to the tastes of people who thought they were done with the past while proving themselves incapable of escaping it. The classic image below left continues to speak to us. We never did find out why the table had to sink all the way into the floor. Or, given the chair wedged in under it on the left, even what its optimum height would be. Perhaps that chair is there to prevent a table malfunction on the day of the photoshoot? I recently read that Alison Smithson designed the “1980” costumes but who then was “Teddy Tingling”? On the whole, I think the woman’s outfit is the more successful. Man of the future seems uncomfortable without a jazzy hat or maybe he’s missing a tie to go with that collar? To be fair though, nothing dates more readily than visions of the future.

House of the Future Marvin Goody and Richard Hamilton (of MIT)

1956 was a bumper year for houses of the future. This one is more commonly known as the Monsanto House of the Future that existed at Disneyland 1956-1967. The article below emphasizes flexibility but I can’t see much evidence of it as the four arms of the house are separated by the bathrooms and kitchens above the pedestal/service core. The two staircases, lack of internal doors and the moveable wall between the childrens’ bedrooms suggest a need to keep the viewers moving but still, there’s going to be opposing traffic at the entrances to the living room and master bedroom. In the future, it seems, everything was going to be plastic. Thirty years since The Bauhaus, architecture remains cheerleader for whatever industrial sector has the most promising prospects for growth. Prefabrication, plastic, 3D printing, AI …

Le Corbusier can’t not have been doing anything in 1956. The Palace of Justice of the ChandigarhCapitol Complex also comprising the Secretariat and Legislative Assembly is on record as having its construction completed in 1956. The other two can’t have been far away. There’s also Maison Jaoul in Paris and Villa Shodhan in Ahmedabad, India. There’s also the Sanskar Kendra City Museum, again in Chandigarh, another Modernist classic that I happebn to be seeing for the first time. You be the judge.⁹ The next three images come from the Archeyes site¹⁰ that does this individual year thing for every year, it seems.

The site also noted Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall and Arne Jacobsen’s Søholm Row Houses that I wouldn’t have thought to include. All this makes me wonder what Frank Llloyd Wright was doing in 1956. I knew he’d died in 1958 and that the Solomon R. opened the following year. It turns out that construction began in 1956. There a website¹¹ listing 20 amazing facts about the building facts but doesn’t mention that it was built flipped left-right. Oops. The photos that include the model are said to be from 1946 but I’ve always wondered about the formidable looking lady who turns out to be Baroness Hilla von Rebay (1890–1967) who would have been 56 circa 1946. She was Guggenheim’s mistress until he died.¹² ¹³

The painting in the photos, in case you were wondering, is by her other lover, German artist Rudolph Bauer. S.R. was an avid collector of Bauer’s work but Guggenheim’s newly-widowed wife had them all removed from view.¹⁴. This could explain why we know little about Bauer. It’s a shame because the paintings are refreshing for being Kandinsky yet not.

TWA Flight Terminal Eero Saarinen

The building was opened in 1962 but design is most likely to have began in 1956 – it’s tricky giving dates to buildings but, in 1956 it looked like the image on the left that I’m seeing for the first time. It’s much more birdy than the metaphor we grew up with but, in 1956 it was early days and nobody knew we’d one day prefer our signifiers more enigmatic.

The Sydney Opera house (1958–1973) looks like it had a parallel though protracted structural history. ARUP investigated no less than 12 possible structural configurations. The day they realized the load transfer points were at different positions from the foundations that were already constructed can’t have been a good day. You can see the distances between the load bearing point differ slightly in these twelve diagrams. My guess is that the difference between J and K or K and L was the killer. That vertical line in section seems very important from version C onwards.

If anything is going to increase construction cost and duration, then a humungous transfer slab across the entire footprint will do it. Check the image on the left below. The image on the right is interesting too because it shows two of four additional columns – or, more correctly, crutches – that were added to what looks like the underside of the largest shell and that were concealed by later construction. Apparently there was a conflict between how people wanted the structure to look and how the structure wanted to behave. That old chestnut. We wouldn’t know about this today if it hadn’t been spotted by some astute architecture critic who visited the site.¹⁵