Monticello, The Usonian House, and Levittown: The Making of the Modern American Home

Abstract

li' Historically ¿peaking ' · February 200l Alexander O. Boulton monticello,the usonian house,and levittown: The Making of the Modern American Home The search for the origins of the modern American suburban home often starts in Levittown, the planned community on Long Island built by William and Alfred Levitt after World War II. Both as a work of architecture and as a reflection ofwho we are as Americans, however, the modern American suburban home's real origins can be traced back to the nation's founding and die architecture ofThomasJefferson's Monticello. William and Alfred Levitt are not generally known as great architects. The tract housing suburban developments that they built and named after themselves in Long Island, New York, and in Pennsylvania, have long been scorned byarchitects, urban planners , and social critics. The name Levittown has become virtuallysynonymous with all die worst features of Cold War America. The lack ofaesdietic appeal is only one ofa number of criticisms that includes conformity, racism, and gender inequality. Nevertheless, the Levitt brotliers helped launch a revolution in American life. The development of the modern American suburban home was largely the result of a sudden release of consumerism following the Great Depression and World War II. During the 1930s and early 1940s, the housing industry, like other industries, had stalled. When GIs returned from the war and sought new homes for their baby boomer families, they hoped to escape from both the poverty and the uncertaintythat had marked the preceding years. They led one of the greatest migrations inAmerican history, fleeing from the cities in search oftheir own small plot of land and, with it, their place in die American Dream. The Levitt brothers were there to give them exacdywhat theywanted. Using assembly line techniques, which they had learned frombuildinghousingfor die militaryduring the war, they were able to manufacture dozens ofhouses a day, transforming farmland and forests into suburban tracts. The boom in housing stimulated all sectors ofdie economy. In the years after World War II, America led the world in die construction of automobiles, highways, shopping malls, and all the consumer goods—vacuum cleaners, washing machines, lawn mowers, barbecue grills, and televisions—that came to symbolize the good life. The new housing developments built by the Levitts and dieir manyimitators helped to shape new social patterns that came to define the American way of life. For many, the American family reached its apex ofperfection in the 1950s. It was the heyday of the single wage-earner, nuclear family, immortalized in a new American art form, the television situation comedy. The new American suburban middle class emerged as a potent political force as well; by die end ofthe century the suburban "soccer mom" became the constituent most courted by both political parties. However, some social critics were not so sanguine. As Americans fled the cities, they became, the critics said, not only physically, but also emotionally distant from their fellow citizens. As federal funds shifted from die cities to the suburbs, many urban areas went into decline. Crime and drugs proliferated in die cities and a new form ofintolerance, hiding behind die face ofapathy, emerged in die suburbs; black Americans were excluded by racial covenants and by lending institutions from purchasing houses in Levittown and odier suburbs. In addition, feminists accused the new housing patterns ofcreating virtual prison cells for suburban housewives who were physicallyremoved from each other and die life of the nation. Environmentalists, at the same time, complained that the new developments wasted natural resources and diat an increasing dependence on die automobile polluted the environment. The Levitts, ofcourse, were not responsible for creatingall ofthe promises and problems ofmodern America. They only occupy a prominent place in a long line ofhistorical developments that reach backto die Founding Fathers. The critical linkbetween Levittown and die era of die nation's founding is perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright. Sometimes identified as America's greatest architect, Wright is probably most famous for building die great show homes ofwealthy businessmen such as Edgar Kaufmann's Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, and die house for Frederick Robie in Chicago, or for public buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. YetWright's mostinfluential buildings were the small, relativelyinexpensive...