This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.
The fascinating history of the twentieth century's most successful experiment in mass housing While the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and their contemporaries frequently influences our ideas about house design at the midcentury, most Americans during this period lived in homes built by little-known builders who also served as developers of the communities. Often dismissed as "little boxes, made of ticky-tacky," the tract houses of America's postwar suburbs represent the twentieth century’s most successful experiment in mass housing. Houses for a New World is the first comprehensive history of this uniquely American form of domestic architecture and urbanism. Between 1945 and 1965, more than thirteen million houses—most of them in new ranch and split-level styles—were constructed on large expanses of land outside city centers, providing homes for the country’s rapidly expanding population. Focusing on twelve developments in the suburbs of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Barbara Miller Lane tells the story of the collaborations between builders and buyers, showing how both wanted houses and communities that espoused a modern way of life—informal, democratic, multiethnic, and devoted to improving the lives of their children. The resulting houses differed dramatically from both the European International Style and older forms of American domestic architecture. Based on a decade of original research, and accompanied by hundreds of historical images, plans, and maps, this book presents an entirely new interpretation of the American suburb. The result is a fascinating history of houses and developments that continue to shape how tens of millions of Americans live. Featured housing developments in Houses for a New World: Boston area: Governor Francis Farms (Warwick, RI) Wethersfield (Natick, MA) Brookfield (Brockton, MA) Chicago area: Greenview Estates (Arlington Heights, IL) Elk Grove Village Rolling Meadows Weathersfield at Schaumburg Los Angeles and Orange County area: Cinderella Homes (Anaheim, CA) Panorama City (Los Angeles) Rossmoor (Los Alamitos, CA) Philadelphia area: Lawrence Park (Broomall, PA) Rose Tree Woods (Broomall, PA)
This comprehensive study of land use on the suburban fringe analyzes the complex relationships that underlie land conversion in the United States. It contains a detailed examination of the northwestern urban complex; some nationwide projections for the future; and a list of measures that, singularly or together, may change the nature and results of the suburban land conversion process. Originally published in 1971
In the early twentieth century, the appearance of new houses across the United States shifted dramatically. Rejecting the elaborate decoration and complexity of Victorian homes, these new houses featured open, parlorless interiors and a minimalist aesthetic, radiating an aura of warmth, coziness, and naturalness. Nowhere were such residences more evident than in West Coast cities, especially Seattle, where explosive growth generated entire neighborhoods of this new house type--the bungalow. It was the nation's first modern home, and it established the essential characteristics of popular housing for the rest of the twentieth century. In The Seattle Bungalow, Janet Ore modifies the common notion that architectural change flows only from the design elite--the architects, domestic reformers, and planners who advocate for changes in domestic architecture--and argues that ordinary people played a crucial role in creating the bungalow. Through their growing power as consumers, modest-income families influenced the physical form of early twentieth-century houses and suburban landscapes. Still operating within a nineteenth-century labor and contracting system, small home builders responded to rising consumer demand for new conveniences such as electricity and central heating by simplifying their structures. Ambitious salespeople-real estate agents, plan book purveyors, and builders--created a new market for affordable small houses through astute advertising and financing. And once families acquired their homes, they used them flexibly, adapting their lives to their domestic spaces and refashioning their homes when necessary. From such efforts sprang the Seattle bungalow, an artifact of ordinary people's part in creating modern culture. Janet Oreis assistant professor of history at Colorado State University and has been a contributing writer toPacific Northwest QuarterlyandPerspectives in Vernacular Architecture. "Janet Ore's subject - the origins, marketing, development, and legacy of working-class housing in Seattle - offers an opportunity not only to explore architectural history but to characterize the economic, aesthetic, moral, and social dimensions of such housing." - Dennis Andersen, co-author ofDistant Corner: Seattle Architects and the Legacy of H. H. Richardson "A valuable record of the housing boom that transformed the American suburban landscape in the first decades of the twentieth century." - Kingston Heath, Director, Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, University of Oregon
