Published September 2008
Architecture and
Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000, by John Archer. Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 2008, 496 pages, $27.50
Sprawling Places, by David Kolb. Athens, University of Georgia
Press, 2008, 267 pages, $22.95.
Edible Estates:
Attack on the Front Lawn, by
Fritz Haeg. New York, Metropolis Books, 2008, 128 pages, $24.95
Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, edited by Andrew Blauvelt, Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 2008, 336 pages, $34.95
A brilliant scene in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian finds a crowd chanting, in complete unison, “We are all individuals! We are all individuals!” One man, standing slightly aside, says, as if perplexed, “I’m not.”
Scholars, writers, artists, architects, urbanists, and now, a subset of thinkers we could just as well call suburbanists, seem to be in the same situation. Entranced by the idea that citizens – suburban, rural, and urban alike -- are all convinced that the suburbs are all the same, they shout, together, “The suburbs are all individuals!”
Four recent books – two by academics, two not – address that individuality of sameness of the suburb: how it came to be, what it can be, what it could be, and how we can (and should) look at it. Three of them address the suburbs as fact, and seem to say: “History happened, we’re here, now let’s play with it.” But what is that history?
Read John Archer's book Architecture
and Suburbia to find out.
Really. Read it. Ignore the standard-sounding title, its bland cover, its academic
origins, the fact that it has footnotes. It is quietly fascinating, engagingly
thorough, and completely riveting.
Archer's narrative takes
social history and renders it architectural, explaining how a
seventeenth-century interest in notions of selfhood turns into an
eighteenth-century obsession with privies, and then transforms, centuries
later, into that developed same-same suburb. Ideas we take for granted -- the
family that eats dinner together stays together, separate bathrooms save a
marriage -- are traced back here, not only philosophically and historically,
but visually as the book is full of plans and sections and illustrations that
show exactly how Enlightenment philosophy translated into a room for the
resident male, or how General Electric's need to sell more stoves turned into
the American obsession with "the dream house."
Architecture and Suburbia is not only about architecture and suburbia. It is about how we think, how we live, and how we want to live. It is about how architecture -- even when it might not look like much -- is the outward articulation of our deepest questions, a physical sign of our search for answers, and, in the end, a symbol of it all.
The philosopher David
Kolb is entranced by the symbol. Suburbs are not monolithic," he writes in
his new book Sprawling Places.
This tract-tome (it was right there!) sure is.
Kolb's main point – that
suburbs are much more complex than we think, and should not be so easily
dismissed (although who, exactly, is dismissing them is never thoroughly
explained)–is a good one, and worthwhile, but he takes far too much (sprawling)
time to get there. Early chapters discuss place as opposed to location as
opposed to locale, complexity as opposed to complication, thickness as to
thinness, nonplace as to space. Kolb describes the social construction of place
-- to paraphrase, you can take your shirt off in the park, but not in the
courtroom, and therefore place is a condition! – but then tangents into
Disneyland and how Paris, while themed, is different.
Kolb loosely offers suggestions for how
to improve our understanding of the suburbs – and somewhere in this book he
delineates, though not very clearly, three misinterpretations of suburban life
and five ""tactics" (like "increase the nonlinearity of a
place") for how to fix that. But more to the point, Sprawling Places offers a snapshot of the way things are, or can
be read to be, or could be. "Just as we need to live themed places more
broadly than their themes define, so we need to live suburban communities in a
more porous and connected way than standard images of suburbia suggest,"
Kolb writes, in what is, really, an extremely porous sentence.
Sprawling Places is meant to be a celebration of large-scale
complexity, of the hidden interpretability of places that scholars -- like
Saskia Sassen and Stan Allen, both cited here -- tend to be fascinated with yet unable to define. Kolb’s
points, when findable, are interesting; his arguments, when unpacked, are
relevant. Unfortunately, the book itself is all just a little too needlessly
and impenetrably complicated.
A palate cleanser, the
artist Fritz Haeg's book Edible Estates is nominally a straightforward account of Haeg's
turn-the-American-front-lawn-into-a-small-farm project, and practically a
deeply polemical reminder of the individuality that flourishes in what we like
to imagine as a cookie-cutter suburban world.
The second section of
the book -- a close look at four Regional Prototype Gardens -- is most
enthralling. Here we see what goes on in front of closed doors in towns like
Salina, Kansas and Lakewood, California, and Kolb would be shocked. It turns
out that people, even those who live in developments, are adventurous, and that
front lawns are very easily turned into edible gardens: all it takes is a
little time, a few machines, plants, some dirt, a commitment to watering, and
the support of a local arts institution.
Edible Estates blends art and community activism, architecture
and social change. It is a profoundly American project in its dreaminess and
ambition and, most of all, in its individuality. It's not an attack on the
front lawn. It's an attack on our sanctification of the idea of sameness.
Further attacks, interventions, approaches, and pictures, are collected in Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, a book that accompanies an exhibition of the same name that ran at the Walker Art Center earlier this year (and makes its way to the very livable – and urban! -- Pittsburgh in October). Essays by John Archer, Malcolm Gladwell, and Virginia Postrel – on, respectively, the non-oxymoronity of suburban aesthetics, the Viennese inventor of the American mall, and why chain stores are good – share space with glossy pages of art projects and interviews with artists.
Julia Christensen, in her conversation with editor Andrew Blauvelt about her Big Box Afterlife project, describes the freedom that identifying herself as an artist gives her, both in executing the project and in her exchanges with the local communities. It’s a microcosm of the divide that appears throughout this book – between artistic interpretations of the suburbs, and architectural representations of what it could be.
The artists win; their freedom to photograph what they want, to write about what they want, and, in a way, to argue what they want, show that they are the unhampered individuals. The architects here have some great ideas – Interboro’s proposal for embracing the grassroots operations of an abandoned mall parking lot is one; LTL’s adaptive re-interpretation of the big box landscape into a suburban layout is another – but it is the art – Gregory Crewsdon’s intricately staged photographs, Stephanie Nagorka’s Home Depot aisle project, and Matthew Moore’s organic re-articulations of tract developments – that cuts much more viscerally into an entrenched sense of oppressive malaise.
Each of these projects was done individually, the contributor operating on his or her own (with, one assumes, some curatorial input). In a sense, though, reading the book from front to back can feel like listening to a crowd shouting about its individuality. Here and there, though, if we look and read the suburbs – and the books about them – carefully enough, we will hear that small voice saying “I’m not!” becoming louder and louder. Soon, we might even want to listen.
