Chapter 9
TUPPERWARE SUBURB
Figure 9.1 Postcard with Tupperware advertisement, 1950s.
2
In a tupperware advertisement from the
1950s, we see a young woman standing
with one foot on an Eames bucket chair next
to a gridded shelf arrayed with containers
in different colors, sizes, and shapes, some
containing food (Figure 9.1). She appears
awestruck. Or perhaps she is singing a paean to Tupperware? The black background of
the gridded space defies depth, while the
harlequin pattern of the floor and the shelves
extend beyond the picture frame. Is it a domestic space? Or is it a shop? Is she standing
in her kitchen or is she in a kitchen store? The
juxtaposition of the Eames chair, the Tupperware, and the “emancipated” woman conveys
the space as modern. Her gesture and casual
clothing—white blouse, black capri pants, red
nylon sash, and flat shoes—contrast with the
ordered space of the shelf while echoing the
color scheme of the setting. The advertisement recasts Rosie the Riveter in a domestic
idiom of modern consumption, as a woman without care and without the need to do
physical labor (Figure 9.2). The vision of a
new industrial order dominates the space.
The Tupperware advertisement marks a moment when plastic entered the daily lives of
middle-class families in the U.S. amid the
changing culture of foodways, consumption,
and domestic labor. Tupperware offered
long-term storage and the capacity to think
of shelves not merely filled with canned food,
but replete with home-made food that could
be sealed and protected in a manner akin
to industrial production. Tupperware presumed a culture of unlimited consumption
and return to food normalcy after World War
Figure 9.2 Rosie the Riveter, World War II
poster, 1942.
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II. Women who were needed to work in the
factories during the war were expected to
return to their domestic chores, leaving the
industrial work to the men who had come
back from war duties. The lives of middleand working-class women would be retooled
for domestic production. Tupperware advertisements promoted the ideas of utility and
beauty in one commodity meant especially
for women.
Earl S. Tupper (1907-1983), the founder of
Tupperware, had figured out how to produce
a flexible, injection-molded polyethylene
container as early as 1942. More experimentation while working for DuPont during World
War II led to his patent of an airtight seal in
1949. The sales of Tupperware in the early
years were not remarkable. That changed
by the mid-1950s. The marketing strategy of
Brownie Wise (1913-1992) who in 1951 became the company’s general sales manager,
was a game-changer.1 In 1956, the Museum
of Modern Art included Tupperware in an
exhibition of modern design, bestowing on
Tupperware the status of art.
The various innovations with plastic in the
war industry during World War II needed a
domestic market in the postwar period. Plastic containers and packaging facilitated the
transportation of goods that supported mass
consumption. Hailed for its waterproof and
nonconductive properties, plastics found
manifold use in industrial design, automobile
and building construction, and because of
its twin characteristics of indestructibility and
moldability became synonymous with com-
4
fort, convenience, and modernity. It created a
new image of domesticity.
Indestructibility
The mid-century enchantment with plastic
resided in a fascination with modern design
that aimed to push the limits of nature to offer a better standard of living and a new lifestyle. It came to be endowed with quasi-mystical qualities for its material realization of
social and economic potential. Unlike other
materials used in construction such as earth,
metal, or timber that retain their natural properties, nudging designers to work with the
nature of materials, plastic’s form coemerges
with the substance itself. Polymer chemistry
can devise any form that is desirable.2 The
almost infinite adaptability of plastic resides
in its molecular structure (Figure 9.3). The
chemical bonds in plastic are very strong—
hence the indestructibility. Its inorganicity
defies natural decay.
Consider a chair designed in 1948 by Ray
Kaiser Eames (1913-1988) and Charles
Eames (1907-1978) in the Collection of the
Museum of Modern Art (Figure 9.4). This
chair is not purely plastic; it is a composite of
wood, rubber, plastic, and metal. Its surface
modulation challenges the usual rectangularity of chairs and couches. That was the magic
of plastic. The Eames’s had refined their design techniques while working for the U.S.
Navy during the war, leaning toward forms
that were biomorphological—forms that simulated the shape of living creatures. The chair
Figure 9.3 Polyethylene molecule strand.
Figure 9.4 La Chaise, 1948, Ray Eames
and Charles Eames. Collection of the
Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
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was both natural in its shape, and profoundly
unnatural in its conception and manufacture.
Viewers were expected to admire the sheer
imagination of this chair as a unique piece of
art. The designers were invested in creating
a modern imaginary of comfort that hinted
at the natural soft contours of the body. You
were expected to be both surprised and
embraced by this piece of modern furniture.
Modern design was comfortable.
Roland Barthes, literary critic and semiotician, after visiting an exhibition in Paris in the
mid-1950s, described plastic as miraculous
in its capacity for “infinite transformation.” As
if by alchemy something magical had been
produced out of the everyday and ordinary.
He was both awed and disturbed by the new
substance:
A miracle is always a sudden transformation of nature… Plastic remains
impregnated throughout with this wonder: It is less a thing than the trace of a
movement…the quick-change artistry
of plastic is absolute: it can become
buckets as well as jewels. Hence a perpetual amazement. It is the reverie of
man at the sight of the proliferating
forms of matter.3
A byproduct of the petrochemical industry,
the endless adaptability of plastic, its cheapness, and indestructibility, Barthes wrote,
invoke reverence and pleasure. Plastic “gives
man the measure of his power … the euphoria of prestigious free-wheeling through .Na-
6
ture.”4
Its use for the most mundane purpose, its
everyday domestic use, the ability of the ordinary person to possess it, was the key to its
glamor. It became the substance suggestive
of the ability to reshape everyday life, usher
in change, and open up new opportunities
for consumption. Its ubiquity was its virtue.
It engendered the belief in the capacity of
consumer goods to usher in a new age of
prosperity and to forge communities.
If the Anthropocene is usually traced back to
at least the nineteenth century with the use of
coal as the driving force behind the Industrial
Revolution, the age of plastic—Plasticene—is
just over a century old.
Early versions of plastics were plant polymers
and invented as substitute for materials such
as ivory that by the mid-nineteenth century
had become scarce because of the largescale hunting of elephants. In the twentieth
century plastics have mainly been derived
from refining oil and natural gas, but ultimately driven by the same logic of colonial
extraction that made ivory scarce. In 1907 the
first synthetic polymer Bakelite was created
followed by a patent in 1909. Bakelite was
nonconductive and useful for manufacturing
telephones, radios, and electrical devices. Experimentation with plastic during World War
II led to its use in “airplane tires, tow ropes,
flak vests, and blood plasma filters.”5
Not until the 1950s in the U.S. was there any
extensive use of plastic in daily life. In coun-
7
tries with close economic ties with the U.S.,
plastic spread rapidly. In most other parts of
the world, its prevalence in the house was
rare before the 1980s. While plastic had entered specialized uses for its properties as
sealant and insulation, as the shaper of everyday life it is a relatively recent phenomenon,
but world-changing.
How did people manage without plastic
before? Easily, it seems. For local consumption, the use of paper and fabric for shopping
bags, paper and leaves for wrapping fish
and meat, was the norm in many parts of the
world. The use of easily degradable organic
materials, however, limits a product’s shelflife and requires frequent replenishment of
the pantry. For fresh produce you have to go
to the store every day or so. For foodstuff to
last longer, the use of wooden casks, glass
bottles and jars were typical into the early
twentieth century.
An important shift in how we store food
took place in the nineteenth century, with
long-distance trade and the need for impervious containers to seal food products. The
fashion for tea containers or tea caddies in
Europe resulted in attempts to break the
“porcelain code,” that is, compete with China-manufactured porcelain. Porcelain was
elite luxury, and thus its impact was limited.
The invention of the tin can in the 1810s,
initially meant to supply food to the French
army and navy, was soon used to sell food
for domestic consumption in Europe and the
U.S. By the late nineteenth century, housekeeping guides were suggesting canned and
8
bottled foods were necessary in a household
(Figure 9.5). Many of these were food imported from a distance, often from another part
of the world. Thus, the tin can not only broke
the distance and time barrier that defined
food storage, it also unhinged it from seasonal rhythms of consumption. Year-long consumption of seasonal produce became considered a mark of wellbeing. The profit to be
made in industrial-scale production of food
gave rise to improved techniques of producing cans. Only in the early twentieth century,
however, was canned food easily available
to the middle-class, and increasingly to the
working class, at affordable prices.
Canned food strengthened the industrial
“food axis,” to use Elizabeth Cromely’s term.6
The trajectory of foodstuff from the plantation
and factory to the grocery store and kitchen,
dining, and storage space within domestic
confines defined a new method of preparing
and delivering food. Between 1890 and 1920
a steady set of experiments in measuring
food calories—that is calorie as a measure of
food—began to change the state authorities’
and popular understanding of what kind of
food was appropriate for consumption and
how it would impact labor efficiency. An attendant investment in the new field of home
economics made the domestic kitchen a
site of design experiments. Efficiency meant
planning the kitchen as one would a factory, to save labor time. Its architectural form
would be a streamlined kitchen (Figure 9.6).
Explained as conducive to raising healthy
families and saving the time spent in a servant-less kitchen, the reformed kitchen would
Figure 9.5 Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1891.
Figure 9.6 Old and inefficient kitchen
(top) and improved, efficient modern
kitchen (below). The new kitchen design
meant buying an entirely new set of appliances.
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become the target for an expanding market
in domestic gadgets. That explains the extensive advertising undertaken by the companies that produced these consumer goods.
They needed to transform the way consumers, particularly women, thought of the house
as a space of production and consumption.
Figure 9.7 Tupperware advertisement,
1950s, offering efficient storage.
Tupperware, simulated the properties of
canned food in terms of convenience, but
to be produced at home. It assumed a refrigerator in the kitchen and ample storage
capacity. Tupperware publicity even claimed
that because the sealed containers made it
possible to store containers upside down
and sideways, if needed, Tupperware was an
efficient utilization of storage space (Figure
9.7). Tupperware’s sales exploited the opportunities opened up by postwar suburban
development in the U.S. and the expanding
global market for U.S. products, particularly
those related to the petroleum industry.
When Brownie Wise took over Tupperware
sales, she modeled the marketing strategy
on the method of selling domestic cleaning equipment in Stanley Home Company
where she worked. The idea was to build on
women’s social networks and target women
homemakers as the primary consumers. Selling directly to consumers by hosting parties
and encouraging the buyers to become sellers—thus creating a sales chain—it was based
on a canny reading of U.S. suburbia. Picture
windows of ranch-style houses with lawn-covered front yards and parked cars feature
prominently in the publicity images. As
home-based sellers of Tupperware, the com-
10
pany enticed women with the possibility of
independent earnings so they might indulge
in an expanded pattern of consumption such
as buying a car (Figure 9.8).
If “plastic freed us from the confines of the
natural world, from the material constraints
and limited supplies that had long bounded
human activity,” as journalist and science
writer Susan Freinkel notes, the new “elasticity unfixed social boundaries.” As it unfixed
some boundaries, it helped create new ones.
Boundaries
The popularity of Tupperware was made
possible by the emergence of a new form
of suburban residential design. The postwar suburban home was defined by the single-family residence sitting in the middle of
a lot as a modular unit in a larger planned
suburban development. The planning principles were elaborated in the design of Radburn, New Jersey, in 1929 by Clarence Stein
and Henry Wright. Dubbed “the town for the
motor age,” the plan featured functional zoning—land use separated by function, direct
automobile access to the house, cul-de-sacs
defining a block of houses, and differentiation between vehicular and pedestrian paths.
The individual residence’s lower floor incorporated a garage, and a kitchen directly connected to a dining space that opened onto
a living room overlooking a patio and the
backyard. Bedrooms were located upstairs
Figure 9.8 Tupperware advertisement,
1950s, promoting expanded consumption.
Figure 9.9 Plan of neighborhood block,
Radburn, New Jersey, 1929.
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(Figures 9.9 and 9.10).
Figure 9.10 Plan of Radburn New Jersey,
1929.
Figure 9.11 Levittown, PA, Slab construction in progress, ca 1952.
The proprietorial basis of land ownership was
made clear. The lot boundaries expressed
the physical limits of ownership. The cul-desac centric block described the immediate
neighborhood community, while pathways
leading to green park space was shared by
the entire community. These principles, reworked through mass production characterized the post-World War II U.S. suburb. The
houses were conceived as repetitive modules
identically assembled from standardized
building elements to ensure efficient—that is
time-saving—production and cost effectiveness (Figure 9.11).
In 1950, for the first time in U.S. history, the
percentage of homeowners exceeded that
of renters (Figure 9.12). This new ratio was
pulled and pushed by financial policies, real-estate regulations, and practices of social
engineering. The idea of suburb and suburban home was sold as a desirable possession, as a must-have commodity. It necessitated automobile ownership and was therefore
related to the profits of the automobile
industry. Consider the Kaiser Homes built
across the western U.S. as an example of the
persuasive nature of the suburban ideal.
As the brainchild of Henry Kaiser (18821967), the company started with the construction industry, then moved to shipbuilding during World War II, followed by
automobiles, real estate, and then health
care. Kaiser homes promised instant commu-
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nity:
Kaiser Community Homes will build
homes, grouped together in complete
communities — including health, recreation, school, and commercial centers —
for the families of America everywhere
in America. Into the field of homebuilding, it will introduce industrial methods,
comparable to those developed in
other lines of production.7
The company claimed that it would make
financial sense for the buyers. Here savings
incurred from industrial methods of house
production would “be reinvested in the
homes to enhance its value and service to its
owners.” The tone of the advertisement was
less about making profit than about providing a service. It sought to entice buyers by
giving them the opportunity to be part of
Kaiser industry’s achievement.
Building “22 miles of homes” comprising an
extensive infrastructure of 18 miles of sewers, 25 miles of sidewalk and 22 miles of
curbs was ambitious (Figure 9.13). Kaiser’s
advertising peddled mass production and
prefabrication much like Levittown did in the
eastern U.S. Here the potential for instant
transformation resided in efficient factory-like
construction: a bathroom in a house could be
put together on site in an hour, and was cast
“almost in one piece out of plastic” (Figure
9.14).
The ability to seal off an object from its surroundings was perhaps attractive because it
Figure 9.12 Graph showing increase
in homeownership between 1890 and
1950.
Figure 913 Kaiser Home advertisement
of Panorama City, ca 1945.
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played on anxieties about contamination and
harm.8 Plastic’s imperviousness creates conditions of cleanliness, and the idea of “clean”
can extend beyond the problem of keeping
food from spoiling.
Figure 9.14 Bathroom in a Kaiser model
home, ca.1947. Photographer Maynard
L. Parker. Courtesy of Huntington Library,
San Marino, CA.
Figure 9.15 HOLC Map of Milwaukee, WI,
1938.
The suburban gathering featured in Tupperware advertisements were white-only suburbs and assumed the racially homogenous
residential neighborhood as the norm. The
norm was developed through a series of
regulations in the 1920s and 1930s through
agreements between financial institutions,
real-estate interests, and the federal government. The Home Owner’s Loan Corporation
(HOLC) was established in1933 by the U.S.
Congress to refinance mortgages in default
to prevent foreclosures. In 1935 the HOLC
was asked to evaluate 239 cities in the U.S.
and create “residential security maps” to
determine the level of security for real estate
investment in these cities. The HOLC developed four distinct categories when mapping neighborhoods. These categories were
meant to serve as a basis for a financial institution to determine the perceived desirability
and risks of investing in a neighborhood. The
categories were color-coded green, blue, yellow and red, in increasing order or risk and
corresponding decreasing order of desirability.
A 1938 HOLC map of Milwaukee, WI, demonstrates the manner in which different neighborhoods were evaluated in terms of financial risk (Figure 9.15). The “best” areas were
given a grade of A and coded green, and
were deemed to be exemplary neighbor-
14
hoods for lenders. They were ideal in that
the neighborhoods were structurally sound,
visually appealing, and composed of exclusively white residents. Areas coded blue, or
grade B, were deemed “still desirable.” These
spaces were often older but still worthy of investment. The assessor noted that there was
a mix of fine homes and lower-class residences, but the houses were poorly maintained.
As with green-rated neighborhoods, there
were no African Americans living in this area,
and only a few foreign-born families. “Definitely declining” areas received grades of C,
coded yellow. Homebuyers in these localities
were perceived as unstable purchasers, and
investors often proceeded with caution. In
Milwaukee such an area was described as
“occupied by wage earners, Germans of the
first, second, and third generation predominating overwhelmingly.” The worst grade
was D, coded red, and tagged with the label
“hazardous” for investment. According to the
people doing the assessments, these neighborhoods were old and in poor condition
and had a preponderance of African American residents (Figure 9.16).
This legacy of legalized discrimination
shaped the planning of postwar U.S. suburbs. Restrictive covenants prevented people
of color from buying and renting houses in
the privileged suburban developments built
since the 1940s. Discrimination in housing
was prohibited in the 1960s, but de facto (or
informal) discrimination continued, drawing
boundaries among racially defined communities. As sociologist and social historian,
George Lipsitz writes, “the suburbs helped
Figure 9.16 Detail of HOLC Map of Milwaukee. Red areas are deemed “hazardous.”
15
turn European Americans into ‘whites’ who
could live near each other and intermarry
with relatively little difficulty. But this white
‘unity’ rested on residential segregation and
on shared access to housing and life chances
largely unavailable to communities of color.”9
Neither the idea of suburb, nor racialized discrimination, was exclusive to the U.S. Racism
has a pre-twentieth century history associated with colonialism and slavery. The contours
of racialized discrimination in housing, however, changed in the twentieth century. The
U.S. suburb is an instantiation of this trend. In
South Africa, the model took on a different
form.
Figure 9.17 “Ideal Apartheid Plan,” South
Africa, 1950.
Figure 9.18 Group Areas in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The Group Areas Act of 1951 and subsequent legislation made cities in South Africa
territorial possessions of its minority white
population, where they lived in suburban
communities away from peoples of color. The
system of separation, called “apartheid” decreed that cities would have areas specifically
designated for racial groups—white, African,
Indian/Asian, colored—separated by buffer
zones of open space, and road and rail infrastructure. Entire African communities were
uprooted from their erstwhile places of residence and forced to move to rural “homelands” or new “townships” bereft of basic
infrastructure such as sewage system and
water supply (Figures 9.17 and 9.18).
Apartheid was realized through city planning.
Modern infrastructure was confined to white
suburbs and marked the boundaries that
separated whites from other racial groups.
16
These white suburbs were dependent on
Black labor for running the house, however.
Drift
Suburban development depended on the
mobility of people and goods. It required a
massive infrastructure of roads and was consonant with automobile ownership. The horizontal sprawl that characterized the peripheries of U.S. cities in the second half of the
twentieth century was enabled by the active
participation of state agencies. The Federal
Highway Act of 1944 provided a boost by
authorizing the spending of $1.5 billion in
matching funds to build and improve roads.
In 1956 the Federal Aid Highway Act allocated $25 billion over a twelve-year period
to pay for a “National System of Interstate
and Defense Highways, a planned network
of 41,000 miles of multilane, limited access,
toll-free roads.”10 The substrate of such spatial planning was the petrochemical industry
that produced not simply automobiles and
plastics, but a variety of solvents, building
materials, fertilizers, drugs, and explosives.
Its effects went far beyond the U.S. The proliferation of housing units and extension of
infrastructure meant expanding markets. The
suburban model of planning was exported to
other countries as were the products and the
waste accumulating from them. Tupperware,
introduced in South Africa in 1964, became a
mark of upward class mobility.11
Plastics are so numerous in our everyday lives
that if we start making a list of what we use on
17
a daily basis, as Freinkel did—from the toilet
seat and sweatshirt, to cling wrap, that pack
of frozen raspberries, yogurt container, and
garbage can—the list will fill pages. Once we
start noticing the extent of PVC in our built
environment, the list would be even longer.
PVC pipes, cables, and siding, are among the
durable goods made by adding plasticizers
and other additives to polyvinyl chloride.
These additives can leach into the surroundings causing harm. Durable and disposable
plastics have a tremendous cumulative environmental impact. In the ocean a plastic bottle will take 350 years to degrade. In a landfill
it will take many more times that number.
Plastic distances humans from the larger
environment. The roots of this approach to
social life predates the invention of plastic,
and is deeply rooted in eighteenth-century
Western preoccupation with seeing land, water, and nature at large as moldable, extractable, and expendable. The impermeability of
plastic, for example, and its inability to biodegrade—its refusal to dematerialize,” results in
not just dangerous patterns of accumulating
wastes on land and water, but the phenomenon of offloading such waste recycling to regions of the world—out of sight, out of mind—
where labor is cheap and pollution and labor
laws lax.12 The industrial grid thus connects
more than the grid of kitchen shelves to the
grid of the factory. The food axis extends and
flows into an extended matrix throughout the
planetary environment.
Plastic drifts. It travels with people, animals,
wind and water. The plastic straw once dis-
18
posed ends up in a garbage heap that is
invisible to most in the Global North, and
commonly visible in the Global South. The
garbage heap is a primary and deadly feature in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
Made up of four clockwise rotating ocean
currents—the North Pacific, California, North
Equatorial, and Kuroshio—covering an estimated area of 7-9 million square miles—the
North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is notable for
its collection of ocean trash (Figure 9.19).13
Renamed the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,”
here “in the center of the Gyre—some 1,100
miles from the nearest land mass—exorbitant quantities of fragmented plastics float in
the upper 3 to 6 feet of the water column.”14
Midway Atoll, Kauihelani in Hawaiian, literally
meaning “backbone of heaven,” located at
the northwestern end of the Hawaiian archipelago, has become the “final resting place”
for a huge amount of plastic debris. Conservation biologist, Nicholas Mallos notes that
it is not just the Gyre that had accumulated
plastic debris through ocean drift from North
American and Asian shores, but that 5 tons
of plastic are brought to Midway in the stomachs of birds that had foraged in the ocean
for food (Figure 9.20).15
In a single albatross chick’s stomach Mallos
found “nine plastic bottle caps, two strands of
dental floss, one 5-inch orange fishing float,
103 miscellaneous plastic pieces, six pumice stones and 60 squid beaks.” The last two
items on this list were the only two that were
naturally occurring. “Albatross, along with the
other inhabitants of Midway,” Mallos writes,
“are the recipients of the collective impacts
Figure 9.19 Map of ocean gyres.
Figure 9.20 Plastic debris in the stomach
Laysan albatross, Midway Atoll. Photograph courtesy National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Source: Gyre:
The Plastic Ocean, 2014.
19
of the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality that
permeates our global society.”16 They are ensnared in the extended, drifting human food
axis.
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Endnotes
1
Alison J. Clarke, The Promise of Plastic in
1950s America (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian
Books, 1999).
2
Heather Davis, Plastic Matter (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2022), 29.
3
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette
Lavers (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1972), 97.
4
Barthes, Mythologies, 97-98.
5
Davis, Plastic Matter, 27.
6
Elizabeth C. Cromley, Food Axis: Cooking,
Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).
7
Oakland Tribune, May 9, 1945.
8
Davis, Plastic Matter, 12.
9
George Lipsitz, “Possessive Investment in
Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the
‘White’ problem in American Studies,” American
Quarterly 47, no. 3 (Sep 1995), 374.
10
Margaret Walsh, “Gender and Automobility:
Consumerism and the Great Economic Boom,” Automobile in American Life and Society (2004) http://
www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Gender/Walsh/G_
Overview3.htm#walsh
11
Molly Anderson and Shari Daya, “Memory
Justice in Ordinary Urban Spaces: The Politics of
Remembering and Forgetting in a Post-Apartheid
Neighborhood,” Antipode 54, Issue 6 (Nov 2022),
1684.
12
Heather Davis, “Life and Death in the Anthropocene,” in Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White
(eds), Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches
to Contemporary Architecture (New York: Routledge,
2019), 84.
13
Julie Decker, “Preface,” Gyre: The Plastic
Ocean (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2014), 12.
14
Nicholas Mallos, “Turning the Tide on Marine
Debris,” in Decker, ed., Gyre 75.
15
Mallos, “Turning the Tide,” 78.
16
Mallos, “Turning the Tide,” 81.