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.
