Newness is often associated with perfection in American culture.
Herbert J. Gans, sociologist
LAKEWOOD PARK, Elmwood, Park Forest, Deer Park—the names of the new suburban communities evoked images of bucolic idylls. In reality, they usually consisted of grids of small, tidy houses on grassy plots. Following World War II, Europe’s response to a similar acute shortage of housing was to build large apartment blocks. In the United States, a detached single-family house, however small, with its own backyard, was an essential ingredient of the American Dream. Developers, despite the constraints of cost, did manage to build these homes in distinctive architectural styles.
From an isolated seaside setting of sand dunes and fish flakes, this small white shuttered box has invaded the entire country.
Architectural Forum, March 1949
The first houses offered at Levittown I were Cape Cod cottages, which Alfred Levitt, the architect for the Levitt Company, described as “the most efficient house ever developed in America.” These small one-and-a-half-storey homes with no eaves and steeply pitched roofs owed their origin to seventeenth-century fishermen’s cottages found along the shores of the northeast states. Developers revived the style for the mass house-building market as it could be easily and cheaply assembled out of stock parts, and “it dresses up the one-storey rectangle.” For the homeowner, they evoked nostalgia and quaintness with the added advantage of room to expand into the attic. House magazines heavily promoted the design and the Cape Cod was “approved” by the Federal Housing Association, which considered it an excellent example of a small house design.
The ranch house, the Cape Cod, the “conservative modern” and the “radical modern” as depicted in Architectural Forum, 1949.
The Levittown Cape Cod had its front door in the center and a shuttered window on either side, and was painted in a variety of colors, presumably to help the owners identify their home. In 1949, the company, which believed in “giving the public what they want,” introduced an enlarged Cape Cod with a redesigned floor plan. The living room was placed at the back of the house, with a wall-size double-glazed window overlooking the yard. The kitchen was moved to the front of the house, with the front door opening straight into the kitchen area. As Alfred Levitt explained, the front door would be used by both “the milkman and the boss coming to dinner … in a little house you don’t want the milkman going around to the back, past the bedrooms; it interferes with privacy.”
The Cape Cod style held its attraction throughout the 1950s, even for architect-commissioned houses. The architect Royal Barry Wills included Cape Cod designs in his 1954 book Living on the Level: One Story Houses, as he recognized that “there are so many people who like the simple symmetrical lines of the little Cape Cod house.” The book was “a practical guide for the general public seeking to commission a house.”
In 1949, Architectural Forum published a two-part article titled “The Cape Cod Cottage” in which it pointed out the paradox of an architectural design that combined the latest gadgetry with nostalgia:
… a little white cottage equipped with a vine covered wall – and a television aerial. It has quaint green shutters decorated with flowerpot cut-outs – and the latest in radiant heating. Tiny dormer windows poke in old fashioned charm from the pitch roof – and behind them fluorescent tubing illuminates the bobby-soxer’s dressing table.
… the true ranch house was generally one room deep and rambled all over the place.
Royal Barry Wills, 1954
Like the Cape Cod, the ranch house was quintessentially an American style. But where the Cape Cod style embodied tradition and the New England coast, the ranch house of the early 1950s was considered cutting edge, progressive, informal and Californian. This distinction between the two styles did not stop architects and developers from building both styles throughout the country and sometimes even merging the two.
The ranch house owed its origins to the vernacular architecture of the Spanish colonial adobe buildings of the southwest, the sprawling cattle ranch houses of the west and, more recently, to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. His Prairie homes featured low-pitched roofs, rough-hewn stone and timber, pronounced horizontal lines and deep eaves, all of which were incorporated into ranch house exteriors; and on the inside, the open-plan interiors of Wright’s small, one-storey Usonian houses of the 1930s anticipated the affordable family house of the 1950s.
The appeal of the ranch house was universal: from the suburbs of the Midwest to the homes of Hollywood stars. For the developer, the ranch house was simple to build and easy to replicate. Like the Cape Cod, the ranch had its detractors. In a 1953 article in the NewYork Times, John McAndrew wrote: “speculative builders cut so many corners that their styleless ‘ranch-house-type houses’ come into the world and proliferate without benefit of any architect at all.”
A marriage between a Cape Cod and a ranch house from Living on the Level (1954).
Defining a ranch house has its difficulties, as there are so many variations, some of which are due to climate or regional tastes and others to personal preference. For instance, in the southwest, ranch houses were often unadorned block-like buildings, whereas in the Midwest and on the east coast, they regularly incorporated features of Cape Cod homes. They do, however, have some common features:
• A low, rambling, asymmetrical profile.
• The use of informal or rustic materials and details, such as board and batten siding, vaulted ceilings with exposed rafters, and high brick foundations.
• Sparse interior and exterior decoration.
• An open-plan interior which blends the functional living spaces.
• The living area separated from the bedroom area.
• An attached garage or carport.
• A U- or L-shaped floor plan, which surrounds an interior courtyard or patio.
• Large plate-glass windows and doors that let in the light and open onto an intimate informal space at the rear of the building.
A 1950s ranch house on a street in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of several, they all have one storey with a low-pitched roof and a horizontal emphasis. However, each is different, reflecting the individual owner’s tastes. This house has a traditional brick finish with a mullioned front window.
This 1950s Charlottesville house is an amalgam of a ranch style and a Cape Cod.
This 1950s Charlottesville house uses traditional brick.
This 1950s Charlottesville house has large plate-glass windows, weatherboard exterior and a carport to create a more contemporary design.
Levitt’s 1949 version of a ranch house.
Ranch houses of the 1950s often turn their back on the street. Small windows are set high up in the walls of the front facade and there are no traditional welcoming porches. This reflects the search for privacy by the occupants, many of whom had grown up in overcrowded urban housing where family and neighbors were constantly present. Children played in the backyards of ranch houses rather than in the city streets, and only invited guests were entertained on the backyard patio.
In 1949 Levitt included “the ranch” among his latest offerings. It was the same basic box as the Levitt Cape Cod, but the form was longer and lower. High horizontal windows replaced the shuttered double-hung casements, and the roofline was flattened to accommodate angled decorative supports on the front facade. The living room had wall-sized windows and a doorway onto the patio. The 1950 model was somewhat larger than the previous design and included a carport. In 1951, a finished attic was added to the design.
Modernist architecture had its roots in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. During the 1920s and 1930s, several influential European architects emigrated to the United States, bringing their version of modernism with them. Two of the most distinguished, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, had been directors of the Bauhaus in Germany, one of the most prestigious schools of modern architecture and design in Europe.
The Bauhaus school was dedicated to the idea of reconciling the latest technology and engineering with traditional craftsmanship. In essence, the modernist movement, which grew out of its teachings, redefined the way in which houses were built and lived in. By employing the latest technology, it created a post and beam architecture, which eliminated the need for load-bearing walls, substituting them with walls seemingly made of glass. The result was light and airy interior spaces, which incorporated the outdoors. Ornament, both in and outside the building, was created by the structural elements.
Many Americans found the European style—or “radical modernist” architecture—to be cold and clinical. It proved antithetical to their taste for the cozy and quaint. Royal Barry Wills described modernism as a “Teutonic onslaught.” Some critics went even further, and under the influence of the Red Scare of the 1950s insinuated a communist plot at the heart of the movement, intended to usurp traditional American styles and values. In 1953 Elizabeth Gordon, editor of House Beautiful magazine, vehemently attacked the designs of both Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House, now widely recognized as masterpieces of mid-century modernist architecture:
Something is rotten in the state of design—and it is spoiling some of our best efforts in modern living … two ways of life stretch before us. One leads to the richness of variety, to comfort and beauty. The other, the one we want fully to expose you to, retreats to poverty and unlivability. Worst of all, it contains the threat of cultural dictatorship ... for if the mind of man can be manipulated in one great phase of life to be made willing to accept less, it would be possible to go on and get him to accept less in all phases of life.
The Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois (1951), designed by Mies van der Rohe. A simple elongated cube with an elevated porch and living platform situated close to a river and surrounded by majestic trees. The house is clearly distinguishable from its natural site by its gleaming white sculptural shape.
John McAndrew took a more balanced position in his New York Times article of January 1952, writing that there were two opposing points of view in modern architecture: “The classic, intellectual or predominantly formal one,” of which the best examples in his view were the Farnsworth House and the Glass House, “and the romantic, instinctive or informal one (which finds it happiest expression in many of the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright).”
Wright, who used the term “Usonian” in place of “American” to refer to his vision for a new architecture for the United States, considered his work to be rooted in the idea of an American style. He disliked being categorized as a modernist, claiming that they had copied his ideas. This was despite the fact that both Gropius and Mies van der Rohe were enthusiastic supporters and acknowledged Wright’s influence on their work, in particular his sense of the house as a natural earthbound form.
McAndrew concluded his article by saying that “most good modern houses … lie somewhere between these poles… They often manage to achieve a classic simplicity of form and to imbue it with warm and even romantic feeling.” His list of successful architects who achieved this middle way, which is sometimes referred to as “conservative modernism,” included Marcel Breuer. Breuer had studied and taught at the Bauhaus and, following his arrival in America, taught with Gropius at Harvard.
In 1949, Breuer was invited by his former student, Philip Johnson—then director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York—to design “a moderately priced house for a man who works in a large city and commutes to a so-called ‘dormitory town’ on its outskirts where he lives with his family.” The exhibit, which was part of the museum’s mission to promote modernist design, was built in the museum’s sculpture garden. It received an enthusiastic review from Architectural Forum:
…the house (which will be acclaimed by many for its fine design, but criticized by the unthinking as arty) … has one of the most logical, thoughtful plans to be found in any home.
Breuer’s house had cedar siding with bluestone on the floors and patio. The roof was composed of two opposing surfaces, the longer one over the living area and a shorter one over the bedrooms; the two sloped towards one another. As well as being an attractive visual feature and creating room for the parents’ private suite above the garage, the design eliminated the need for gutters and drains. All the rainwater collected into a single drain, which passed into the bathroom plumbing, thereby reducing the likelihood of frozen pipes. Breuer’s “butterfly” roof design became part of the modernist architectural vocabulary.
A house with a “slightly butterflied roof… Most criticisms of contemporary houses are that they are clinical, stripped and dull-looking. This house demonstrates just the opposite. It’s light, graceful and imaginative.” Living on the Level, Royal Barry Wills (1954).
Another attempt to introduce the general public to modern architecture was the Case Study House project initiated by the editor of Arts and Architecture magazine in 1945. The idea was to encourage leading architects to experiment with inexpensive industrial materials to help solve the housing crisis. The project, which ran into the 1960s, produced some outstanding contemporary buildings by architects, including Charles Eames, Richard Neutra and Eero Saarinen, but the designs ultimately proved too expensive and avant-garde for the average house buyer.
Exterior of Marcel Breuer’s “House in the Garden” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, May 1949.
Charles Eames’s house with adjoining studio near Santa Monica, California. The adjoining article explained that architects Ray and Charles Eames liked to live “without servants or cocktail parties,” their main concerns being “simplicity, functionalism and economy.” Life magazine, 1950.
An article titled “Best Houses Under Fifteen Thousand Dollars” (Life magazine, September 10, 1951) included a house built by Joseph Eichler, one of the few mass-developers who incorporated mid-century modern designs into his sub-divisions. He followed the building conventions of the Levitts, producing some 15,000 houses, many of them in the San Francisco Bay area. He was, however, always committed to modernism and his housing had a crisp, modern feel achieved with post and beam construction, large areas of glass and unornamented exteriors. To appeal to American taste, he replaced the steel used by many modernist architects for construction and decoration with an ample use of redwood. The house featured in Life was designed by San Francisco architects Anschen and Allen. It was a 1,350-square-foot, three-bedroom house priced at $13,900, more expensive and larger than a Levitt house, but still affordable for many in the middle class.
George Fred Keck was one of the finest modern architects in Chicago. His talent was to incorporate the technological and engineering achievements of the modern style with Wright’s organic aesthetic. In doing so, he created an Americanized version of the International style, which proved palatable to public tastes. In 1952, Keck designed a small subdivision of twenty-two houses in Glencoe, Illinois for a developer. These houses exemplified the merging of new technology and a pared-down European-style design with the American vernacular. The technology included passive solar heating and cooling, which reduced energy costs and created efficient comfortable living spaces.
The total cost of constructing the 1,500-square-foot Farnsworth House was $74,000 in 1951. The high cost was due in part to the escalating cost of materials as a result of America’s rearming for the Korean War.
Houses designed by architect George Fred Keck (1952) in the Forest Crest sub-division, Glencoe, Illinois. These three- or four-bedroom houses cost approximately $30,000. They had either a garage or carport. Tongue and groove siding was used on the exterior of the houses to achieve warmth and texture.
The best modern domestic buildings in the United States were undoubtedly homes custom-built for wealthy patrons. As John McAndrew noted, “Good modern houses are hardly ever mass produced (which leads to entirely standardized forms).” Instead these modern designs were “eagerly sought after by bright young couples.” According to Architectural Forum the Breuer house designed for MoMA would cost $27,475 to construct, a figure that excluded the land, architect’s fees, landscaping and services.
Stonorov’s interior, a response to the Rye conference, still maintained a degree of formality. It had a room dedicated to formal dining and a discrete living room, created to ensure some privacy for the adult family members. Spread in Life, 1950.