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INTRODUCTION
For centuries Americans have seen domestic architecture as a way of encouraging certain kinds of family and social life. Diverse contingents have asserted that our private architecture has a distinctly public side, and that domestic environments can reinforce certain character traits, promote family stability, and assure a good society. Those who sought a new social order, whether they were radical orators or enterprising capitalists, have argued that American culture was malleable, in part because the physical environment of previous generations was less of a constraint than it had been in other countries. They contended that new models for housing, even more than improved factories or institutional buildings, would provide the proper setting for a great nation. Others who sought to resist radical change or assimilation have also looked to the home as a reminder of their own cultural traditions and as a protected realm for private family life, presumably outside the larger society. As a consequence, Americans have been quite self-conscious about where they live and where their fellow citizens live as well.
Bearing these attitudes in mind, I have sought to characterize the controversies surrounding thirteen different kinds of dwellings at the time they were first adopted and then generally accepted. I am not offering a scholarly treatment of any period but rather an interpretative essay that attempts to raise certain issues about American housing, and that relates the various architectural and ideological models this country has adopted. At any point in the past when Americans had to consider housing for a particular group, they felt it was necessary to talk about much more than architecture. Discussions have involved hopes and fears about family stability, attitudes about community, and beliefs about social and economic equality. And these issues have influenced design.
By emphasizing certain themes, I do not want to suggest a consensus. More than one model for the home and family have usually co-existed, although seldom in harmony. The principal American type has been the detached rural of suburban rural or suburban single-family cottage for citizens “of the middling sort,” But there have always been several kinds of specialized habitations for people who did not fit this mold. Such minorities have included city dwellers, both the poor and the wealthy, and various groups that chose to live collectively, with shared services and sometimes land held in common. Also, people whose lives were controlled by others had appropriate setting allocated to them. Several variations of industrial towns, designed by managers and professional planners, reflect ideas about control over and amelioration of factory workers. There is also a long lineage of slave housing in the South, some of which still stands, especially in rural areas. These two architectural tractions are now raising controversies as the descendants or worker and capitalist, black and white, consider historic preservation of the earlier buildings. Which memories, they ask, do we want to preserve?
Urban row houses, company towns, even residential suburbs, were usually planned in orderly rows of almost identical habitations. These planned communities form one persistent theme in American housing history, extending from the seventeenth-century New England township to the more recent townhouse development. A longstanding tension exists between the housing model based on communities of similar dwellings and a seemingly conflicting idea of personalized, self-sufficient dwellings. Given the national tendency to endow domestic architecture with individual character traits and a social profile, these two patterns carry the weight of a social as well as an aesthetic dichotomy. Each of the four chronological parts of this book contracts community planning with models for individualized houses. The ways in which planning has come to dominate every kind of housing in this country is a central theme. So too is the issue of homeownership, which has been so closely associated with detached dwellings.
This book is about ordinary houses—not all types of dwellings but only the kinds of “model homes” Americans built in great numbers, the housing prototypes they discussed with special intensity through the course of American history. It is a history of residential architecture but only rarely of professional architects. In this account, government officials, popular journalists, land speculators, reformers, and industrialists have been more important actors. It is also about the different kinds of people who lived in these houses, ranging from the New England household of the seventeenth century to the elderly women in a Chicago public-housing tower to the young couple in a townhouse condominium. What kinds of places did these people fashion for themselves, and what was proposed for them? How did they live in their homes, and how were they told they should live?
Housing inevitably involves a compromise between residents and groups of experts. Neither the way buildings look nor the way people live in them can be reduced to a formula dictated by architects, social scientists, or advertising companies. Particular households never fit a mold exactly or follow advice in magazines to the letter. Most Americans have strong opinions about their families, their communities, and their homes, and those stances are visible. Definite ethnic and class variations are recognizable, as are regional and personal variations.
However, the process of giving meaning to the home has not always been salutary. Slavery and racism, industrial exploitation, the segregation of classes, and a limited role for women have found expression in American patterns of residential architecture. The longstanding national tendency to view the home as the expression of the self has encouraged a staunch defense of social homogeneity on the one hand, and a cult of personalized decoration on the other. Yet, there is no necessary correlation between personalized architecture and a great range of character distinctions. In many cases, consumerism became institutionalized in home decoration as advertising promised new ways to promote family togetherness, social prestige, and self-expression. A preoccupation with the private dwelling has also encouraged a false sense of the family’s self-sufficiency and a fear of others intruding. All too often, in suburbs and in cooperative apartments, community has meant the exclusion of those who are not like ourselves. These reactions, too, have a history.
Americans’ passion for the home gives the history of housing a significance that goes beyond antiquarianism. Each debate about housing needs extended across class lines, although some groups have clearly had more power to implement their visions than have others. The assertion of a fundamental right to “a decent home” has been a basic tenet of the American way of life. Yet, the definition of “a decent home” raises difficult questions: What is the proper role of the family? What is a good balance between family privacy and community life, or between individual freedom of choice and governmental controls? Is the single-family detached house in the suburbs the only acceptable expression of the decent home, and the nuclear family the best living arrangement? Does democratic equality mean a right simply to shelter, or a right to dignity, choice, and the acceptance by others?
Today, housing issues are important topics for numerous interest groups around the country. Rent control, racial integration, ethnic neighborhoods, zoning battles, the needs of elderly people, energy priorities, and the shortage of decent housing at affordable prices are the focus of diverse community-based organizations and the special-interest lobbies on the right and the left. Books and conferences consider the future of the family and the scope of the current housing crises. What does it mean, for example, when a pattern that, until recently, had been considered the “typical household”—the mother and young children at home and the father at work—now encompasses just over 10 percent of the American population? Many builders are troubled by the social and demographic changes, but in order to capture the potential markets, their designs must change according to changing living situations.
The current concern about a housing crises, like the recognition of the diversity in American society, is overdue. However, both situations have created a sense of total discontinuity. It is as if, until now, life was stable, bountiful, homogeneous, and relatively unproblematic. The combined impact of a severe energy shortage, soaring prices, and social conflicts has left many Americans disheartened. They speak of the “end of the American Dream.” They tend to connect that dream to certain kinds of houses —notably detached homes in the suburbs—and to the belief that those houses used to be available to anyone who worked hard enough. But this contemporary crisis is neither unprecedented nor as devastating as it seems. Many times in the past, Americans have had to find new housing alternatives in response to social, economic, and technological problems. This is not meant to downplay the current problems but to put them in a historical perspective, and to show that policies and attitudes of the past—ways of viewing conservation, the role of women, racial differences, or urban life—helped create the current housing crisis.
Ways of confronting problems also tend to be repeated. The sense of sudden crises, unrelated to past policies and requiring rigorously enforced solutions, occurs again and again. In this sense, housing is like other fields. People become involved in political or community action in response to social issues and the diversity of people who are affected. Then the activism is often short-lived.
Architectural structure cannot fully remedy inequalities or redress wrongs or solve problems. Yet houses and residential communities do point up a great deal about social values, in the past and in the present. The subject of housing stimulates debate and social action. The history of American houses shows how Americans have tried to embody social issues in domestic architecture, and how they have tried, at the same time, to use this imagery to escape a social reality that is always more complex and diverse than the symbols constructed to capture it.
