Overview

During the quarter century between 1945 and 1970, Americans crafted a new manner of living that shaped and reshaped how residential builders designed and marketed millions of detached single-family suburban houses. The modest two- and three-bedroom houses built immediately following the war gave way to larger and more sophisticated houses shaped by casual living, which stressed a family's easy sociability and material comfort and were a major element in the cohesion of a greatly expanded middle class. These dwellings became the basic building blocks of explosive suburban growth during the postwar period, luring families to the metropolitan periphery from both crowded urban centers and the rural hinterlands. Detached America is the first book with a national scope to explore the design and marketing of postwar houses. James A. Jacobs shows how these houses physically document national trends in domestic space and record a remarkably uniform spatial evolution that can be traced throughout the country. Favorable government policies, along with such widely available print media as trade journals, home design magazines, and newspapers, permitted builders to establish a strong national presence and to make a more standardized product available to prospective buyers everywhere. This vast and long-lived collaboration between government and business?fueled by millions of homeowners?established the financial mechanisms, consumer framework, domestic ideologies, and architectural precedents that permanently altered the geographic and demographic landscape of the nation.

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9780813937618

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This book is a sorely needed contribution to the history of post World War II domestic architecture, which for too long has focused on a few key architects and merchant builders at the expense of a thorough understanding of the most ubiquitous building form of the period: the middle-class American house. Focusing on the house as the principal building block of the postwar American landscape, Jacobs's narrative shows us how it resulted from a complex, yet carefully orchestrated, series of collaborations between the building industry, the federal government, postwar tastemakers, and middle-class consumers. National in scope and ambitious in using a rich body of evidence drawn from builders' records, shelter magazines, and actual houses, this book fills a much-needed gap in suburban studies and American architecture by examining the structural, stylistic, and formal innovations of middle-class houses from the rich and varied perspectives of their designers, builders, and occupants.--Anna Vemer Andrzejewski, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of Building Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America

Detached America examines closely the issues of housing that most adults are familiar with--the ranch house, the split level, informal living--but for the first time, these architectural forms are investigated in detail and placed within a rich social and cultural history. --Andrew Dolkart, Columbia University

Author Information

James A. Jacobs is a historian for the Historic American Buildings Survey and the National Historic Landmarks Program of the National Park Service.

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