Designed To Chill.(International Edition; THE ARTS)

Byline: Ginanne Brownell

The cold war wasn't just about space and weapons but about who could design the best plastic chair.

In hindsight, it was one of the more fitting locales for a cold-war standoff. While touring a mock-up of a gleaming General Electric kitchen, American Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev debated the merits of communism versus capitalism. The year was 1959, and the two leaders were in a Moscow hall attending the American National Exhibition, part of a U.S.-U.S.S.R. cultural exchange. While standing in one of the four kitchens brought over for the show (at a cost of $3.6 million), Nixon began boasting about things like TV dinners, Cadillac convertibles and lawn mowers. Khrushchev countered that at least Soviets concentrated on things that really mattered. "Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strength of rockets?" Nixon asked the Soviet leader.

The "Kitchen Debate," as it became known, was significant because it not only opened dialogue between the two superpowers but also demonstrated that the cold war was a competition over more than space and arms. In "Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970," London's V & A museum argues that the hegemonic struggles between the Soviets and the Americans were as much about landscape, design and architecture as about weapons. The show (through Jan. 2009, then traveling to Italy and Lithuania), explores how the Soviet Union and the West competed for technological, social and aesthetic dominance. "The absolute magnetic power about architecture and design is that it is about human experience, [so] the idea that the home might be a battleground had this very powerful way of capturing the imagination," says cocurator David Crowley.