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Reviewed by:
  • Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000
  • Amanda Rees
Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000. By John Archer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2005.

At the beginning of the new millennium 66% of the U.S. population owned homes and over 50% of population lived in suburbia. As the housing crisis unfolds at the end of the millennium's first decade with massive mortgage defaulting in urban and suburban spaces, along with the increasing costs of automobile transportation, we have good reason to meditate on the concept of suburbia and its relationship to the American Dream. John Archer helps us do that. Spanning four centuries, Archer argues that suburban architecture and the idea of the American dream home are deeply rooted within seventeenth-century English philosophy and material culture. From John Locke to New Urbanism, Archer embraces, built, discursive, and lived spaces as he places the American dream home in a broader context.

Breaking the book into three major historical periods: eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the suburban house became the location in and from which a growing bourgeoisie explored the concept of identity. Domestic architecture becomes a powerful instrument to construct the self in multiple contexts, and the role of aesthetics forms a central element of identity in terms of class as well as the production of a national taste. Indeed, Archer's aesthetic analysis should not be limited to his response to New Urban practitioners. We can also apply his work to analyze the reiterative articulation of suburban architectural, landscape architectural, and interior design tastes in television networks such as HGTV or the taste-maven corporation Martha Stewart Living Omimedia.

When surveying three centuries, the type of data accessible and useful to such a project changes dramatically. In Archer's case, this results in a distinct bifurcation of the book. The first section focuses on interpreting architecture and landscape architecture using floor plans, maps, and photographs of elevations, while the later section utilizes romance novels, advertising, and film. Though his central theme does a reasonable job of [End Page 149] connecting the sections, the bifurcated feel might have been reduced if Archer had placed his theoretical framework (embracing Bahktin and Bourdieu) at the beginning.

Having set himself the monumental task of articulating ideal suburban architecture Archer does miss some important elements. For example, a variety of British and American industrialists including Lever, Cadbury, Rowntree, and Pullman created aesthetically complex suburban communities for working class residents. These communities provided a nursery for suburban home architects and landscape architects of the City Beautiful and Garden City movements. However, Archer's focus on the bourgeoisie limits his scope. Not only is there little mention of working class suburbs, there is scant mention of suburbs inhabited by ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, for example Latino, African-American, and Jewish communities. Questions this book raises include: how was identity constituted in minority suburbs, was it the same, did it differ, and why? I was surprised not to see mention of Kenneth Jackson's masterful Crabgrass Frontier (1987) especially his reflections on nineteenth-century suburbs. Nor did Archer mention the single most powerful tool to expand U.S. twentieth-century suburban home growth and identify formation: the fixed rate 30 year mortgage. That said, Archer's masterful and expansive work will interest a board spectrum of scholars from architectural, cultural, planning, suburban, and urban studies, and is an important contribution to the study of suburbia in the United States.

Amanda Rees
Columbus State University
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