The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture 1890–1930 by Alan Gowans (review)

SHORTERBOOKREVIEWS Alan Gowans. The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture 1890-1930. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. xv + 246 pp. Illus. Alan Gowans' latest book, The Comfortable House, looks like the product of a university lecture series. This is not a criticism. On the contrary, appreciation of Gowans' ten immensely informative and highly idiosyncratic illustrated essays would be enhanced through verbal and visual presentation. Television producers are missing out if they let this work go by. Such lively erudition begs for a medium which can give both its author and his thesis full power. The Comfortable House is a grand study of ordinary houses erected by suburban Americans during a period of the most intensive residential construction in the history of the United States. Between 1890 and 1930, thousands of middle-class people, with very little money and easy-financing packages, were able to capture something that had largely been the preserve of the wealthy-a single family house of their own. Alan Gowans demonstrates a sometimes despised tenet of architectural design that variations on a standard plan may be more effective and affordable than radical innovation. Also, a fair measure of choice, both as to style and location, could be exercised by a prospective suburban house-buyer at the tum of last century. Suburbia, despite its coined terminology and subsequent social malaise, was not necessarily to be equated with uniformity, drabness and the levelling of industrialised accommodation. With a crisp mastery of detail that has become his trademark, Gowans delves into the mail-order catalogues of mass house marketing. Their titles promised much: Palliser' s Model Homes for the People (1876), Reed's House Plans for Everybody (1878), National Architects Union's Sensible Low-Cost Houses (1895), The Radford American Homes (1903), Sears' Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans (1908), The National Fire Proofing Company's The Natco Housefor Six Thousand Dollars (1912), Los Angeles Investment Company's Modern Homes of California (1913), Aladdin Houses "Built in a Day" (1914), National Builder's Complete Plansfor Eighteen Houses of from four to six Rooms (1923), Montgomery Ward's Wardway Homes ( 1927). All were comfortable houses, which Gowans defines as instruments for promoting social stability, supporting ''the good life for individuals in families,'' assisting a ''rise in society," and ''meeting and satisfying the immemorial human longing for privacy and space to grow and develop.'' Suppliers delivered what was promised. Gowans tells a nice story of a West Virginia purchaser of a 1928Sears ''prefab'' whose wife still lived in it at time of publication-"few repairs have ever been required. That is typical of prefabricated houses; their materials were first-class, just as advertised; the labor-saving 262 Shorter Book Reviews constructional techniques were sound, just as advertised. This Comfortable House has withstood a lot of living.'' They were available in all the historic styles of North American architecture and in four of the now easily recognisable formsbungalow , 2-storey foursquare, "workingman's" foursquare, and homestead temple-house. The latter was a "downmarket" representation of Jefferson's utopian prospect of recreating Rome in America. Gowans examines the architects and companies which gave America its comfortable houses, the feuds between architects, near-architects and non-architects, the ferocity of commercial competition , and the welter of styles employed (four essays alone on classical, medieval and colonial revival). With its wide, double-columned pages, studded with photographs of houses, prefabricated designs, measured floor plans, promotional catalogue samples, and wood and plaster ornamentation, The Conzfortable House is something of a tour deforce. This important pioneer study is authoritative and suitably provocative in its assertions, absorbing, elegant for the most part (only the cover tints grate), and a real pleasure to possess. Gordon Dodds Manitoba Archives Henry D. Thoreau, ed. K.P. Van Anglen. Translations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. 281 pp. Translations, the eighth volume to appear in the Princeton edition of Thoreau's collected writings, gathers for the first time all of Thoreau's literary translations, and includes a:swell two undergraduate compositions by Thoreau, one in Latin and the other in Greek. The editor, K.P. Van Anglen, defines "literary translations " as "substantial, independent works conceived for an audience even if not published" (159...