Architecture, Technology and the Uncanny: Infiltrating Space in "The Veldt" and in "The Digital House Project"

The family unit also underwent, if not a drastic transformation, certainly an intense reaffirmation of fixed gender roles of its leading members: "It was the America in which dad was the breadwinner and mom the homemaker, and home and car-ownership appeared to be natural facts of life" (Carosso 8). [...]this idealized two-parent family had a particular flavor because of the suburban lifestyle that reigned at the time: "The expansion of industrial production of small consumer durables required, in the USA as in the UK, an investment in the home, and the drive towards homogeneity resulted in these homes being increasingly located in new suburban developments accesed by new automobiles, fuelled in America by home-produced and cheap gasoline" (Thumim 7). According to Janet Thumim, the Fifties were defined by this suburban existence, by the emergence of the television industry, and by the convergence of these two phenomena-watching television as an essential part of family life and routine. Sinister elements emerge as the story progresses, such as a sense that the reality of the nursery is "all-too-real." [...]the traditional family structure is undermined, since the children consistently challenge and threaten parental authority. According to this author, this concept can be traced to a written source dating from 370 B.C., specifically to Plato's Book VII of the Republic, in which the philosopher discusses the "Allegory of the Cave," centering on "ideas of perception, reality and illusion" (Sauter 1).