There is hypocrisy in this scoffing at the suburbs, too. No conformity is stronger than that imposed by perceptions of urban chic, for example. Consider all of the city folk who yearn to live in gutted, sandblasted and overpriced lofts that look like warehouses and are just about as comfortable.
In any case, the houses of suburbia are not as unrelievedly similar as their detractors make out. Many of them built in the last 40 years can be classified into various styles with almost the same precision one employs in classifying Chartres, the Chrysler Building or Robie House.
Serious writers who have explored this territory (Lester Walker, Gwendolyn Wright and Virginia and Lee McAlester, among others) do not always agree exactly on terminology, but they come pretty close.
Walker points out that Contractor Modern Style may well be the true 20th- Century vernacular mode in America. Such a house is long, low, compact and easy to build in as little as eight weeks. Today`s pattern books used by developers and contractors contain endless pictures and plans of these dwellings, each slightly different from the others. They are essentially the same books that were used when America was building a record million houses a year between 1948 and 1955.
Yet Contractor Modern is a generic term. The McAlesters are among those who have devised a more elaborate classification system, and with it one can identify all but the most wildly eclectic houses built in the last few decades.
The suburban style gamut begins with Minimal Traditional, invented in the 1930s but carried over until about 1950 and built in vast numbers. Such a house is essentially a bland little box with a low-pitched roof, a gable at the front and often a large chimney. It may be of brick, wood, stone or even all three.
Even more ubiquitous is the rambling one-story Ranch, whose roots go back 150 years to the Spanish Colonial period in the American Southwest. The style was revived by Californians in the 1930s but didn`t take off elsewhere until the postwar boom years. It was made possible because suburban lots were large enough to accommodate the land-gobbling Ranch form. The style`s other principal features are hipped roofs, widely overhanging eaves and attached garages that make such houses much wider than long.
The Shed Style evolved in the 1960s from the work of a few contemporary architects who were playing with multiple, shed-like roof forms that set up strong diagonal lines and visually contrapuntal effects. It began as a look favored by rich people who hired their own architects, then quickly trickled down to middle-class mass production. Shed is still in vogue and often turns out to be a catastrophe in less than highly skilled design hands.
But if these postwar styles (along with Split Level) were destined to become among the most dirt-common, this did not mean that developers and the public were turning their backs on historicism. The American public has never given up on Neo-Colonial houses (and the fat, maple-and-chintz furniture one puts into them). Nor has allegiance to half-timbered Neo-Tudor ever waned. In the last few years Tudor has even made gains on Ranch and Split–or been grafted onto them.
The Mansard Style is still much liked, although usually done badly, and Neo-French holds its own with hipped and steeply pitched roofs. Neo-Classical Revival houses are popular, however silly they look in miniaturized form on lots of less than estate size–particularly if their Scarlett O`Hara porticoes trail off into two-car garages. A relatively new revival look moving into the Chicago area is Neo-Victorian, identifiable by its little pieces of tack-on gable scrollery.
An irony in all this revivalism is that today`s Post-Modernist architects are merely reflecting mass taste of long standing when they turn out wittily historicist houses that are polemically antithetical to the International Style. The masses never did accept the idea of living in a glass-walled house where you couldn`t walk around in your underwear.
Middle-class taste also rejects such innovations as below-grade earth-insulated houses, solar houses with strange looking roofs and almost anything else offbeat. Lawsuits, suburban building-code changes and even fistfights have resulted when some maverick tried to build his outre dream dome on a vacant lot surrounded by Splits and Ranches.
Distaste for the unusual does not preclude successful marketing of gimmicks, however. Frequently advertised today is the ”loft” house whose living room is overlooked by a kind of balcony large enough only for, say, a solo performance on the cello. Old standby gimmicks still in favor include the exposed ”island” kitchen from which a clever hostess may fling bon mots at her guests white grating onions or decanting a liter of domestic white.
Marketing today`s house also reflects America`s basically Anglophile leanings. The middle-class snob words that leap out from real estate advertising are invariably the likes of Dover, Oxford, Cambridge, Westminster and Chelsea. Another hallmark of such ads is their insistence on calling houses ”homes.”
What lies ahead for the Great American House in the next decade or two? A few fairly safe speculations may be ventured:
— Time-tested styles created in the post-World War II era will remain as popular as ever, for they symbolize fulfillment of a national dream. When urban renewal authorities decided to build single-family dwellings in the ravaged South Bronx a couple of years ago, Ranch and Split models were chosen even though their big windows had to be covered by burglar bars.
— As Postmodern influences become stronger, hybrid tract-house looks will emerge. We may see things like Palladian windows on Cape Cod cottages and buttresses on Beaux-Arts bungalows–but all somehow diluted to take the sting out of them.
— Houses for people of limited means will continue to be scaled down in size to minimize price increases. This will disturb the manufacturers of king- size beds, but developers will simply begin naming their models ”La Miniatura” and their streets ”Kensington Narrows.”
— Architects who design mass housing will remain as anonymous as the people who design prosthetic devices or three-piece polyester suits. Architects who design the nation`s minuscule percentage of one-of-a-kind houses for the rich will win all of the awards and be published in the glossy magazines.
Beyond that, the crystal ball becomes foggy, although someone will always insist on making predictions about holographic TV rooms and bathrooms that wash themselves. But of one final thing you may be sure: Whatever mass-produced houses Americans decide to buy will not be laden with sly visual metaphors, esthetic in-jokes and images created to capture the fancy of tweedy academics or nose-in-the-air critics. And never, ever, will they be places where you can`t walk around in your underwear.
