The single-family home in North America has become a symbol through which the life goals of the middle-class family are expressed. The desire to live in a house associated with the idea of home, as opposed to the perspective of living in an apartment block (“housing”), is related to several factors: the “American Dream,” prejudice towards city life, and probably an admiration for the way of life of the first settlers, assuming a closeness to nature. Despite the inevitable densification of large urban centers since the 19th century, the phenomenon of low density and the myth of housing remain rooted in American culture.
“For them, the self contained, self-owned house become the dream-of objective” (Kalman, 1994, p. 596).
The house represents independence and serves as a refuge from an unstable and competitive environment, acting as a counterbalance and stabilizing force. Paradoxically, it is also linked to the values of mobility, change, construction, and remodeling.
“To move, either from one house to another - the perennially favourite activity of small-town America - or from one city to another, suggested the possibility of improving one’s social status” (Clark, 1987).
This aspect is important to understand that a light material like wood and a construction system that is easy to assemble, disassemble, expand and demolish, such as lightweight lattices, were developed and consolidated as the ideal supports to accommodate these values. The evolution of the common American home at the end of the 19th century involved the formulation of a new idea of domestic space, moving towards simplicity and informality, as opposed to the previous Victorian home model, which was based on decorative sophistication and spaces for representation. The bungalow, “colonial revival,” and “prairie style” were some of the aspects of this renewal. The first principle that began to be generally accepted was that of simplicity and the second was that of “honesty”:
“Wood was to look like wood, stone like stone” (Clark, 1987).
The renovation of the house was accompanied by a broad debate not only by architects, but also by organizations such as the National Home Economics Association and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, which aimed at a global modernization of the family and domestic space. This functional and stylistic evolution did not require any change or replacement of the structural type since the balloon-frame was perfectly suited to the new proposals, however market pressure required innovations, always towards economy. The bungalow phenomenon in California, for example, was a success story based on the evocation of an outdoor lifestyle, an image of comfort and security, but also on ease of construction and low cost (Clark, 1987).
The emergence of prefabricated solutions, in the tradition of nomadic peoples of the past who developed lightweight, low-cost and sometimes transportable shelters, was related to the need to house successive waves of settlers, immigrants, migrants from the countryside to the city and families on the move. The kits of pre-cut elements sent to assembly sites initially responded to colonial realities in North America, Australia, India and Africa. Wood was not the only material used in the solutions involved in these processes as metal structures were also a very suitable option. However, wood’s lightness and ease of transformation made it the material of choice.
The rationalization of the construction process is then followed by the optimization of the design process. At the end of the 19th century, architecture in the USA was not only carried out by architects (10,000 according to the 1900 census), but also, to a large extent, by non-architects (“near architects and non-architects”). Replacing the traditional system of Architect services, the system of offering Architecture through “mail-order” emerged, which consisted of creating a catalogue with the basic drawings of a set of solutions that could be ordered by mail to obtain construction documents and specifications that would allow the effective construction of the chosen model. Such were the services offered by the Cleaveland and Backus Brothers company of New York in 1856 in their catalog “Villas and Farm Cottages”. George and Charles Palliser’s 1878 catalogue “Palliser’s American Cottages” went a step further by inviting readers to write in asking for particular adaptations to suit their specific needs. In turn, this information was transmitted to Architects who were subcontracted by Palliser to develop the adaptations suggested by the clients. After carrying out the final review, they could pay and give the order for the development of the respective drawings (blueprints) and construction documentation (specifications).
The objective of the “mail order” system and others like it that emerged later was to avoid the consumption of time and resources in traditional meetings with the Architect, with proposals and counter proposals that increased the prices of the service:
“What Palliser provided was a mail order architect” (Gowans, 1987).
In 1883 Robert Shoppel in New York intended to go further when he published “How to Build, Furnish and Decorate”, a book that offered the services of an Architect for a fraction of the cost. The costs of the service would undoubtedly be an important argument: one of the large companies promised in its catalogues (“The Radford Amercian Homes” from 1903 and “Radford Bungalows” from 1908) to offer a complete construction document pack with the respective specifications at a cost of between $8 and $5, while the same services charged by Architects and competitors according to traditional practice would be between $75 and $100 (Gowans, 1987).
In the 20th century, companies such as Aladdin, Gordon Van Time, Montgomery Ward, Hodgson Company, and Sears, Roebuk and Co. offered vast catalogs of prefabricated houses. The Aladdin company introduced the Ready-Cut House in 1906 and sold approximately 65,000 homes. It presented a catalogue with 450 models ranging in type from simple bungalows to the most complex revivalist houses. George F. Barber was a builder who settled in Knoxville, Illinois, and as it was difficult to enter the local commercial network, he began in 1889 by selling prefabricated buildings that were then transported by train (Gowans, 1987).
Several other companies followed, with the Aladdin company in 1904 being responsible for the transition to large scale. The catalog models, in the case of this company, were created by the “Aladdin board of seven”, a project team with a “master designer”, several “master builders”, and “factory experts”, “but no architects” (Gowans, 1987). Each project was submitted for evaluation by the Master Designer to verify its accuracy, followed by the Master Builder's evaluation to assess functionality, resistance and structural harmony, ending the process with the Industrial Masters' assessment of waste savings, dimensional standardization and cost savings. The cost of this “board of seven” working on the development of a model could only be viable if the cost of the model was distributed among hundreds of homes sold. So only a large company with a large sales volume could support this type of approach. The 1919 catalogue even made a reference to the Architects’ design process which rarely considered the economy of waste in cutting material:
“When the architect overdoes something or makes a mistake, you pay for the project; When a contractor overdoes something or makes a mistake, you are the one to bear the costs of his mistake” (Gowans, 1987).
In addition to Aladdin, companies such as Sears and promoter William Levitt have left their mark on the history of the American home. The company Sears, Roebuk and Co. Between 1908 and 1940 he sold more than 100,000 houses, barns and apartment buildings. The houses were based on the balloon-frame system and were supplied in numbered pieces (the number of elements reached 30,000) and were accompanied by an instruction manual (Herbers, 2004). Developer William Levitt began building homes for soldiers returning from war in 1947, and by 1948 had achieved a production rate of 150 homes per week, thus achieving economies of scale that allowed prices to be dramatically lowered. His most famous project is Levittown in New York where he used the lightweight frame system, based on the classic 2''x4'' cross-section element (Herbers, 2004). These companies played a key role throughout the 20th century, with Sears releasing its last catalogue in 1940. Aladdin continued to manufacture homes until 1981, and Levitt & Sons filed for bankruptcy in 2007.
The companies that innovated by streamlining construction systems, processes and ordering methods were clearly geared towards responding to market trends, and in most cases were conservative in style and innovative in technology. These two characteristics seemed to be at the antipodes of the procedures associated with projects carried out by Architects, however some of the great masters tried to adopt the assumptions of the mass market, not always successfully, or almost always resulting in failure, as Colin Davis (2005) points out.
The wooden houses built in the 19th and 20th centuries in a context foreign to the erudite tradition of Architecture and largely “forgotten” by historians of Architecture probably played a more important role in the lives of the common man than the solutions of the paradigmatic and sophisticated houses of the Architects that appear in the books of Architectural History. In America the difference between the popular culture of the "catalog house" and the erudite culture of the "Architect's house" is expressed very clearly. The cultural context seems to be prepared to assume that in a framework of economic restriction the catalog house is a very suitable process. On the other hand, it is also more clearly assumed that the Architect's service is not at the same level as that of catalog houses, being essentially aimed at personalized solutions with artistic pretensions, and for this reason it is an expensive service.
Ultimately, as wrong as it may seem for an architect, it was somewhat accepted that the single-family home of the common man belonged to a neo-vernacular universe and neither contemplated nor required the intervention of architects.
Luis Morgado
Note: This post is based on a contextual chapter included in a doctoral thesis:
Morgado, Luis (2016). Doctoral thesis in Civil Engineering. Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa.