If you search the Internet for an image of “the suburbs,” inevitably a certain kind of view will flood your screen: dozens of aerial photographs that position the viewer far above curvilinear streets with regularly spaced houses set on postage-stamp lots. These familiar images suggest that suburbs are places best understood as large-scale planned units to be examined from afar. In Detached America, James A. Jacobs rightly and productively brings us back down to earth with his probe into the design and marketing of postwar suburban tract houses.In the literature addressing the impact of suburbanization on the American domestic landscape, few studies have singled out the tract house itself as an object worthy of study. Fewer still have seriously considered the design and spatial evolution of houses as a form of evidence of cultural or social change. Jacobs takes up these important avenues of inquiry, tracking shifts in nationally popular housing designs from 1945 to 1970 by examining mid-twentieth-century popular shelter media and home-building trade publications, and by conducting spatial analyses of the changes revealed in housing plans and amenities featured in marketing materials. In looking at these patterns, Jacobs identifies and contextualizes critical shifts in how North Americans envision home and home life, many aspects of which remain familiar today. Equally important, he considers how the broader political economy of the housing industry converged with consumer culture and identity in the postwar period to generate—arguably for the first time—a national housing culture in the United States.Jacobs begins by introducing the key players and dynamics of the mid-twentieth-century housing market as shaped by home builders, the Federal Housing Administration, and the housing consumer. He describes how the federal government and the building industry transformed home building and home buying in the postwar period, working together to address a national housing shortage and make the housing market more accessible to white, middle-income Americans. According to Jacobs's analysis, this new political economy of housing had two significant outcomes. First, the federal government, via FHA minimum housing standards, instituted a national basis for new housing form and character for the first time in U.S. history, and most builders observed the new standards. Second, and more broadly, consumers’ perceptions of housing shifted so that the home began to be considered as a consumer good. In this new housing market place, producers and consumers engaged in what Jacobs calls a “sustained process of mutual education and interaction” that shaped middle-class aspirations and patterns of family life (2–3). Builders designed and aggressively marketed houses to “imagined consumers”—largely white, upwardly mobile nuclear family groupings either aspiring to or having already achieved some version of middle-class identity. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, builders and consumers capitalized on economic expansion, rising wages, equity growth in existing homes, and growing families to sustain a period of serial home purchasing. The result was an increasing differentiation in housing models, accompanied by, ultimately, distinctions in class lines across suburban areas.The greater part of Detached America focuses on this progressive differentiation of nationally popular suburban housing forms in response to consumers’ revised expectations of home life. Jacobs periodizes house forms appearing consistently across the United States from the 1940s to 1970 into three major categories: the minimum house of the late 1940s, the split-level and bi-level forms of the 1950s, and the “zoned house” of the 1960s. He characterizes this progression, as well as the speed at which these changes were implemented, as “one of the great milestones in the history of domestic architecture in the United States” (7).As a “universal starting point” for homes in a variety of price ranges and forms, Jacobs asserts, the FHA's standards for the minimum house unified the form and qualities of middle-class housing more in the mid-twentieth century than at any other time in the nation's history. Builders, seeking to capitalize on postwar housing demand and federal incentives readily adopted these standards in the immediate postwar era. Minimum homes were inexpensive, efficient, and small (typically five to six rooms), but they offered home buyers “modern” and technologically up-to-date dwellings that featured not only the latest in mechanical systems and standard three-fixture bathrooms but also kitchens with cabinets and continuous countertops, all designed to meet specified construction standards. The small size of these houses required multifunctional common spaces and sacrifices in social buffer spaces and privacy. In Jacobs's analysis, minimum houses aimed to achieve two major goals: first, to solve the postwar housing shortage as quickly as possible through affordable homeownership, and second, to reform living standards for the working and middle classes.As the postwar housing shortage abated and middle-class white Americans’ incomes and prospects improved, desires for more space and better design, as well as the concept of “casual living,” drove changes in the shape and form of suburban houses. New plans like the split-level and split-foyer or bi-level (commonly known as the “raised ranch”) broke down barriers between spaces of domestic work and leisure. These houses added slightly larger multipurpose areas that were designed to foster family “togetherness,” such as the “living-kitchen,” featuring an informal dining space, and the “kitchen-family room,” which opened onto casual seating areas. More formalized basement recreation rooms also became more common. Arranging these spaces within the envelopes of popular forms like the ranch resulted in the horizontal stretching or vertical lifting of these plans to respond to consumer demands at affordable price points.In the 1960s, spatial patterns in period housing plans shifted again as consumers began looking for more privacy, space, and separation of uses in the home, and as builders sought to entice consumers to “trade up” to newer housing models. The zoned house of the 1960s introduced more stratified divisions of public and private space than were seen in the previous two decades. The zoned house was not defined by any particular form, but rather by the designation of certain spaces as quiet and formal or active and casual. In these houses, living rooms transitioned to quieter, more sedate, adult spaces, while family rooms provided more finished and integrated casual, active spaces than basement recreation rooms. Large kitchens with eat-in spaces remained, but formal dining areas for special occasions also made a comeback. Entry foyers returned as important circulation spaces and social buffers, and two-story houses reemerged as a strategy for introducing greater separation between public and private zones. Jacobs calls this reversal of decades of spatial simplification in American domestic design “the most consequential and far-reaching rethinking of domestic planning since before World War II” (187). These changes signaled a new national standard for the normative function of the private house.The familiarity and persistence of many of the design and planning ideas Jacobs discusses in Detached America underscores the book's significant contribution. The mid-twentieth-century suburban tract home remains among the most common dwelling forms in the United States, and vast portions of the nation's population live much of their lives in these spaces. Jacobs offers a much-needed, socially informed examination of the design history and interior cultural landscape of these spaces. His research and periodization offer students and instructors in cultural landscape studies, architecture and architectural history, and historic preservation a serious and useful framework for engaging with these buildings that has previously been largely absent from the literature.Jacobs's research also highlights an unresolved tension in studies of suburban domestic design, where on the one hand we see increasing uniformity in popular suburban housing, while on the other we see indications of creative variation and regional difference. Jacobs acknowledges this tension, stating that for every trend he identifies, there will inevitably be numerous variations and exceptions (8). These differences and variations, however, find little treatment or attention here. The effect of the national viewpoint that Jacobs presents is much like that of the suburban aerial photo: from far enough away, everything begins to look the same. While this perspective is not without its merits, the literature on domestic suburban design has long suffered from an overemphasis on prescriptive norms and national scales, a focus that overshadows or ignores the messy, and often more interesting, realities of suburban spaces. Jacobs gives glimpses of this underlying creative messiness, such as when he describes how builders and consumers actively made and remade domestic space. Builders’ marketing tactics, market research, and market testing of houses at the local and regional levels, as Jacobs reveals, raise questions about how national trends intersect with regional and local specificities, and which has greater influence. The rigorous energy and attention that builders and their professional associations paid to design matters during the postwar period, as well as builders’ communication with their local markets, signal a design community deeply engaged at both scales.Beyond our understanding of suburban homes as objects, the argument in Detached America that interaction between builders and consumers shaped the American suburban domestic landscape is important and deserves more attention. While Jacobs leaves largely unexamined the impact of the consumer–producer dialogue at local and regional levels, his research effectively demonstrates that when we get closer to ground level, there is still much to learn about the suburbs, their makers, and the people who call them home.