Recent writing on the evolution of American house types

For those who've wondered how American houses and neighborhoods came to be designed and built the way they are, I have a must-read for you.  Christine Hunter's Ranches, Rowhouses and Railroad Flats: American Homes: How They Shape Our Landscapes and Neighborhoods (W. W. Norton, 1999) is a wonderful tour through 400 years of house design, construction, and urban development.  With energy issues mounting and housing policy in the news, the book is even more pertinent today than it was at publication a decade ago.



Most notably, in my view, are Hunter's keen insights into a basic historic trend in American house and neighborhood design, namely, the elimination of common space in the place where we live:

"In general, we expect an ever-growing amount from our homes but far less from the "connective tissue" between them.  The technology and consumer goods that have become available sooner here than elsewhere in the world enable us to enjoy at home a succession of amenities previously available only in more public places. [. . .]" Today, in America, the term good neighborhood frequently describes an area that consists almost exclusively of streets and private homes (though well-funded schools are still a requirement).  Restaurants, stores, even parks are often thought better located some distance away." (27)

Most people, Hunter contends, lack the knowledge to analyze and differentiate their local built environment.   American education, when it focuses on buildings, emphasizes those of faraway or preindustrial cultures or buildings of landmark status, "never the ordinary houses, apartment buildings, offices and stores that form the bulk of what we drive or walk past regularly." (18)   Furthermore, blessed with seemingly unlimited resources and space, Americans have built and rebuilt at a far faster pace than Old World societies.  The result is a pervasive ignorance about the buildings of previous generations:

     "The conditions that have allowed Americans to continually build anew have often favored experimentation and creative thinking.  At the same time, however, they have led us to devalue that which is already there.  Nowhere has this tendency been more pronounced than in the area of homebuilding.  An amazing formal variety of homes has been built in this country, but many of them no longer exist or remain relatively unknown.  Because we learn little about local neighborhood history in school, much of the information we do get comes from the real estate industry, the builders, the brokers, and the manufacturers of modern materials.  The floorplans and photos in magazines and newspapers are those of what is on the market and currently fashionable; existing older homes, unless they are very costly, are not given the same visual play."  (21)

Thus, despite the current remodeling craze, we tend to take our home's basic design for granted and to see our immediate surroundings as "natural" and "inevitable" when they are anything but.

Hunter's book seeks to restore the historical contexts in which everyday buildings, in particular, residences, were built across this country.  She recounts the gradual emergence of building codes regulating minimum standards in home design and construction so that every new home has become  subject to numerous and varied restrictions.  Such codes appeared first in industrialized cities, but regulation eventually spread to cover the entire homebuilding industry.  Similarly, as zoning laws arose, restrictions about where houses could be built and what form they could take multiplied.  The result, according to Hunter, was "a pattern of economic stratification and homogeneous neighborhoods. [. . .] [B]y mapping substantial areas of undeveloped land and strictly predetermining their use, zoning ordinances made subsequent development far less varied than it might otherwise have been, and certainly discouraged experimentation in home design and neighborhood layout." (52)  Zoning laws would often prohibit patterns of use that had been common, usually to protect property values.   But by  making it illegal to add an apartment above a garage or carriage house to accommodate an aging parent or adult child, zoning laws have actually prevented people from remaining in their homes because they couldn't adapt them to their changing needs. (53)

The book looks critically at our cultural bias toward freestanding houses and devotes most of its pages to an analytic history of attached houses and apartment buildings and the notion of neighborhood.  Having lived most of my life in freestanding houses, I found these chapters especially illuminating.  My definition of "home" is not that of other Americans, whether past or present, nor is my definition of a desirable residence the same as it was ten years ago as my circumstances have changed.  Through her discussions of architectural forms and her knowledge of the many historical forces affecting the built environment, the book has made me look at the houses and neighborhoods I've lived in differently.  Hunter's book gives me an analytic framework with which to look at the streets around me and to rethink the relationship between home and neighborhood.    

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In a fortuitous turn, the January 2011 issue of Fine Homebuilding carries an article on a closely related subject.  Entitled "The American House: Where Did We Go Wrong?" this article takes a critical look at how the availability of cheap fossil fuels in the twentieth century led to the demise of common design features that helped homes handle extremes of heat and cold without an external power source.  Why is our current housing stock being built with such disregard for ancient principles of site selection, house orientation, and shading elements?  Why have porches disappeared?  Part of the answer, argues author Kevin Ireton, lies in the history of utilities, a subject I've hardly thought about.  It's fascinating stuff.
Link:  www.FineHomeBuilding.com

Now that I'm on to urban infrastructure and home design, maybe I'll tackle the recent book on the history of air conditioning by Stan Cox, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths about Our Air-Conditioned World (The Free Press, 2010).  We'll see!