Window Unit Summer, American Living Room, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Window Unit Summer, American Living Room, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Window Unit Summer, American Living Room, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1954–1959

AA-2026-225C27

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A woman in a pink sheath dress sits in a living room with two children, the kind of posed-but-casual grouping that happened whenever a camera came out in the 1950s. Mounted on the wall behind them is a window air-conditioning unit, its power cord drooping down the wall in the manner of something installed by someone who had not yet decided where anything permanent should go. Having a room air conditioner at all placed this family in the early-adopter tier: in the mid-1950s fewer than one in five American homes had mechanical cooling, and those that did treated the machine as a point of pride worth including in family photographs, the same way a new car would be. The girl sits on the lower portion of the unit itself, which is either a throne or a radiator depending on the season, and seems entirely comfortable in this role. The small doll on the side table, dressed in the same era's idea of finery, sits with the same upright posture as the woman in the chair, as if the household had a standard for deportment that extended to figurines.

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