The Seattle Bungalow: People & Houses, 1900–1940 (review)

Janet Ore argues that bungalows were the bases from which the majority of Seattle families came to terms with the new social and economic order of the early twentieth century. Bungalows were also central to negotiating changing gender roles. Ore believes that twentieth-century popular domestic architecture first emerged in western cities. Seattle, with the best-preserved urban record from this time, is thus well suited for a bungalow case study. The choice of Seattle is convincing: Ore's narrative links the city's bungalows of varying styles, sizes, and exclusivity and demonstrates how they exemplify a larger industrial landscape emerging at this time. For Ore, the bungalow's open floor plan, and the way in which its exterior form blurred the relationship between inside and outside, was ideally suited to mediating a family's relationship to the changing world.

Bungalow form marks the transition between the Victorian and the modern. Its open plan and what Ore terms its "advanced comfort technologies" were significant precursors to the modern suburban home, in particular the postwar rancher. At the same time, its form was nostalgic and often associated with a quest for a quieter, more natural life inspired by Arts and Crafts philosophy. For Ore, the bungalow simultaneously acted as a place of respite from the modern world and as a laboratory for industrial efficiency. She argues that the tricky balance of accepting and rejecting industrial values was physically present in the bungalow, where new technologies, especially sanitary technologies, were hidden within a rustic retreat.

Ore's book has an uneasy relationship with the Arts and Crafts legacy. On the one hand, she argues that Arts and Crafts ideology had little to do with the creation of Seattle's bungalow neighborhoods. Instead, nonelite men and women contributed to bungalow form as consumers demanding small homes with advanced technologies. At this level, bungalows were commodities available to a growing class of consumers. Ore says the basic bungalow is also explained by changes in the construction industry: bungalow form denoted greater industrial efficiency in home building. The simplified house footprint and the open interior transferred building costs from complicated plans to building systems. Changes in building practices also drove more entrepreneurial builders toward mass production, further simplifying building form. Thus, for Ore, the simplification of house form, in particular the open plan, conveniently coincided with Arts and Crafts ideology but was not a result of Arts and Crafts reforms.

On the other hand, Ore discusses Arts and Crafts ideology and an exclusive Arts and Crafts community at great length, and her claim that others have overestimated the role of Arts and Crafts reformers in twentieth-century building form loses its vigor over the course of her exploration of this elite community. Yet her case study is valuable for its description of the range of bungalow forms intended for different social-class markets. Her examples of "ordinary" families and homes are closely bound with Arts and Crafts ideology too, and a disconnect between documenting "ordinary homes" with extraordinary examples pervades the text.

Despite that tension, The Seattle Bungalow makes an important contribution to the study of bungalows and early-twentieth-century architecture. The definition of the bungalow type is problematic, and Ore adds to the debate by finding bungalow commonalities through looking at construction methods and household technologies as much as formal characteristics. Her study of the mapping of public and private spaces, and male and female spaces, onto the open bungalow plan is also noteworthy. Ore's case studies of the ways in which specific families defined spaces as private in the open house plan are fascinating, and her suggestion that the open floor plan revealed family tensions that could earlier be secreted away in smaller, divided Victorian spaces is a promising topic for further research.