Tulips in Winter: A Sales Job for the Tract House

Premature aesthetic or ideological judgments . . . almost always get in the way of clear vision.

—Peirce Lewis

As a graduate student in geography at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, in the 1970s I learned something from most of the speakers who visited the department, but never more than from Peirce Lewis. His talk was stimulating, but what I remember most was the field trip the day after. A group of us took him on an unstructured tour of the surrounding country. Toward the end of the long afternoon, and as we were beginning to drowse in the back seats, he suddenly called "Stop!" The van skidded to a halt. I peered over his shoulder into the darkling dusk. Nothing special. A row of bungalows. An elderly couple fiddling with the border in front of their house. Had we run over a dog? But no. Peirce Lewis was out of the van and striding over to the couple, affably proffering his hand. They were planting flowers. And since this was Ontario in late winter they were plastic flowers. I started to squirm. How could he be so patronizing? Wouldn't it be better to smirk quietly, and move on? He returned after a few minutes, jumped in, and off we went. I listened to his report of the conversation. Not what he said but how he said it. He was animated, fascinated. No condescension; not even the hint of a smirk. He had seen something intriguing, suspended his judgment, and tried to make sense of it.

Peirce Lewis was surely conscious of putting on a performance. If so, it worked. I learned a lesson, one that took some time to percolate through the accretions of cultural snobbery I had brought from England: as observers of the built environment, our first question should be "what's there?" followed by "Why?" and "What does it mean?" It's not necessarily a lesson we learn for good. I myself soon lost sight of it while wandering in some thicketed abstractions of social theory. If this happens to you, close your eyes and think of red plastic tulips. It works for me. And of course we cannot ignore our preferences, predispositions, or prejudices, since they unavoidably shape our responses. But we should do our best to suspend them, at least for a while.

This is a sentiment that most readers of this journal would probably share, which is why I continue to be puzzled at how those who are interested in vernacular architecture, cultural landscapes, and material culture treat the modern suburb. Or, to be more precise, at how they neglect it. For several decades, prominent writers have been telling us to consider the average house in the mass suburb. In 1969 Amos Rapoport commented that today this is the most culturally significant dwelling.¹ Since then, Dell Upton has regretted the fact that the tract suburb has been so neglected by students of vernacular architecture.² Talking—you might guess it would be something like this that would set him off—about garages, J. B. Jackson went further, suggesting that we should take our cue from "the mass homebuilder," who has "in a sense come up with a good working definition of vernacular architecture." It is, he suggests, no more than the "visible result of a confrontation between the aspirations of the occupying family and the realities of the environment—natural, social, economic."³ I won't debate that definition right now (although it could use some clarification, realities being socially constructed and so forth), but Jackson's main point is that the mass builder is arguably the bearer of a—no, make that the—modern vernacular tradition. It follows that we should attend to what he builds, triple garages and all.

The Neglect of the Tract House

With advocates like Rapoport and Upton, you might think that someone would have paid attention. Not so. Hardly anyone has given serious consideration to the design and appearance of the postwar suburban house, and fewer still to what Howard Davis has called the culture of building that produced it.⁴ These...