Detached America

Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia

James A. Jacobs

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780813937625
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

During the quarter century between 1945 and 1970, Americans crafted a new manner of living that shaped and reshaped how residential builders designed and marketed millions of detached single-family suburban houses. The modest two- and three-bedroom houses built immediately following the war gave way to larger and more sophisticated houses shaped by casual living, which stressed a family's easy sociability and material comfort and were a major element in the cohesion of a greatly expanded middle class. These dwellings became the basic building blocks of explosive suburban growth during the postwar period, luring families to the metropolitan periphery from both crowded urban centers and the rural hinterlands.

Detached America is the first book with a national scope to explore the design and marketing of postwar houses. James A. Jacobs shows how these houses physically document national trends in domestic space and record a remarkably uniform spatial evolution that can be traced throughout the country. Favorable government policies, along with such widely available print media as trade journals, home design magazines, and newspapers, permitted builders to establish a strong national presence and to make a more standardized product available to prospective buyers everywhere. This vast and long-lived collaboration between government and business—fueled by millions of homeowners—established the financial mechanisms, consumer framework, domestic ideologies, and architectural precedents that permanently altered the geographic and demographic landscape of the nation.

Notes

I INTRODUCTION

1. Key works and collections on suburbanization include: Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias; Stilgoe, Borderland; Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles; Baxandall and Ewen, Picture Windows; Hayden, Building Suburbia; Wiese, Places of Their Own; Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares; Beauregard, When America Became Suburban; Kruse and Sugrue, New Suburban History; Wiese, Suburb Reader; and D. Harris, Little White Houses. See also specific case studies: Kelly, Expanding the American Dream; Wilson, Hamilton Park; Randall, America’s Original GI Town; and D. Harris, Second Suburb.

2. Anna Vemer Andrzejewski and Barbara Miller Lane have in-process manuscripts that investigate individual builders and various dimensions of the domestic building industry in postwar America. With “One Builder: Marshall Erdman and Postwar Building and Real Estate Development in Madison, Wisconsin,” Andrzejewski will provide a deep study of a single builder, demonstrating how his business was shaped by period economics, government policy and zoning, architectural trends, and the building and design professions. Lane’s “Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945–1965” contains ten case-study developments built throughout the United States as a means of drawing conclusions about the building industry, its practices, and the purchasers of its houses.

3. Key works on the postwar domestic economy and consumerism include: Matthaei, Economic History of Women in America; E. T. May, Homeward Bound, particularly chapter 7; Hine, Populuxe; Cross, All-Consuming Century; Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks; and Cohen, Consumers’ Republic.

4. For more on the intersections of race, class, and the suburban home, see D. Harris, Little White Houses.

5. For postwar houses as part of broader studies, see G. Wright, Building the Dream; C. E. Clark, American Family Home; Archer, Architecture and Suburbia; Isenstadt, Modern American House; and Hubka, Houses without Names.

6. Jeffrey Hornstein argues that the tendency for many Americans to consider themselves “middle class” was well in place at the outset of World War II. See Hornstein, Nation of Realtors, 201–6.

7. Key texts on women and families in the postwar period include: Matthaei, Economic History of Women in America; Cowan, More Work for Mother; E. T. May, Homeward Bound; Coontz, Way We Never Were; and Spigel, Make Room for TV.

8. “Today’s Woman Selects Colors of Roof Shingles,” Washington Post, 18 Feb. 1961, sec. B: 15.

9. “Why Buyers Buy,” 54.

10. “22 Ways to Get More Sales from a Model House,” 148.

11. For more on mid-twentieth-century suburban development and domestic design in these countries, see Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities; Irving, History and Design of the Australian House; Ferguson, Building the New Zealand Dream; R. Harris, Unplanned Suburbs; Pickett, Fibro Frontier; R. Harris, Creeping Conformity; Jenkins, At Home; Schrader, We Call It Home; and O’Callaghan and Pickett, Designer Suburbs.

12. For 1945 to 1964, see U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (Census Bureau), Housing Construction Statistics, 1889 to 1964, 18; for 1965 to 1970, see Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Characteristics of New One-Family Homes: 1974, 4.

13. There is no single sou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One: The Housing Industry Reinvented
• Two: The Imagined Consumer
• Three: Livability in the Minimum House
• Four: Casual Living
• Five: The Zoned House
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index