ABSTRACT
Interior architecture, before being recognized as a discrete scholarship, was responsible for the grunt work of winning the hearts and minds of the people in a battle of global politics that affected much of the life people live today. The idea of the home interior, both as an abstract achievement of middle class and the tangible ownership of goods and appliances, was instrumental in the waging of the Cold War. The ranch-style home was replete with the American infrastructure that marked the middle class: a dishwasher, a combination freezer and refrigerator, a garbage disposal, and a countertop cooking range. The prefab home with its passage was dubbed "Splitnik" in reference to the Soviet satellite Sputnik that had pushed the Soviet Union to the forefront of the space race. To a modern scholar, the way in which food and domestic labor was connected to the home's interiors and then to world peace seems surreal.
