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Reviewed by:
  • The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity
  • David P. Handlin, Architect
The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity. By Sandy Isenstadt. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006.

Sandy Isenstadt refers to his book, The Modern American House, Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity as a "polemic."

His argument is that in the early nineteenth century the size of a house was less significant than its autonomy. However, during the course of the nineteenth century and through to the 1950s, as more houses were illustrated in popular magazines, the middle class became dissatisfied with the small size of its houses.

Architects, landscape architects, and interior designers addressed this condition by inventing devices to make a house appear more spacious than its actual dimensions. Especially by manipulating the size and nature of windows, they gave the inhabitants of [End Page 95] small houses the illusion of spaciousness by creating views to a verdant, uninterrupted exterior that the size of the house and the lot on which it sat belied.

Isenstadt's book thus does not deal with formal issues, the appearance or style of houses. Nor does it focus on a house's internal organization or the evolution of the open plan, a hallmark of an emerging modern architecture that Vincent Scully and others have outlined. The book instead is about perceptual strategies that design professionals devised to give "the middle class a vocabulary with which to evaluate spatial experience in their modest homes." This is the polemic of Isenstadt's book. These strategies of spaciousness did not simply establish a receptive climate for the introduction of European modernism into American domestic architecture from the late 1920's through the mid 1950s, they themselves instead constitute "a new and distinctively modern category for domestic architecture." In effect, spaciousness and the ability to manipulate it is what is truly modern.

The most convincing part of the book is the last third in which Isenstadt focuses on specific issues such as the nature and size of windows and the invention and popularization of the picture window. His use of Libbey-Owens-Ford advertising literature in the 1940s and 1950s is especially informative. The author's understanding of the work of Richard Neutra and thus of the transformation of European modern architecture as it was adopted in the United States is sensitive and illuminating.

The book is engagingly written and full of fascinating information. However, it does not hold together. Much of the book, especially the first two thirds, which advances through the nineteenth century to the 1920s, consists of the stringing together of quotations from various sources, European as well as American, well known and obscure. Given that successive citations often span twenty or thirty years, the reader is too frequently left wondering whether this case for spaciousness is simply a forced creation of the author or something that actually existed.

The tenuousness of the argument is exacerbated by a related problem. The period covered is marked by major events—the Civil War, the First World War, the economic depressions that occurred every twenty years, etc. These mile stones are occasionally alluded to, but the evolution of spaciousness apparently neither responded to nor was shaped by them. Certainly house styles, and for that matter all other forms of creative production, constantly changed during this period. Thus, it seems hardly credible that a quest for spaciousness proceeded as an unpunctuated evolution.

The text could also benefit from a better understanding of social and economic history. Throughout references are made to the "middle class" and the "small" or "modest" size of its houses. Especially since many of the illustrations and citations are of houses that in no way could be considered middle class or small, it would seem important to include a sustained statistical analysis to define and differentiate who was included in the middle class, how big its houses were, and how both changed over time. To claim, as the author does, that the middle class simply was neither rich nor poor is not good enough. We want to know more about these people and thus about the hopes and fears that they invested in their houses.

Houses are intricate...

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