The rest of Chapter 7, Affordable Houses for the Common Man, 124 - 137
(The sections on Balloon Framing, Cheap Land, High wages, The
Provision of Urban Services, Individual Effort and Home-ownership, and
The Process of Suburban Land Conversion.)
8, Suburbs into Neighborhoods, 138 - 156
Notes on the Readings:
Chapter 7.
Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. The most important think to understand is that it was a combination of factors which made suburbia affordable for middle class persons. We’ve already seen that cheaper transportation opened opportunities unavailable before. If one thinks about the slow and laborious process of making houses prior to the invention of the 2x4 and the machine-made nail (you saw some of this in the video from the Weald and Downland Museum), one realizes that there was no way to house large numbers of people in individual houses on individual plots of land without technological innovation intervening. Imagine how much it would cost to build Mr. Blandings Dream House if all the nails were individually made by blacksmiths.
To find out what balloon framing is, Click on the Engines of our Ingenuity logo, below. I may show you a video which will illustrate this later, together with other Engines of Ingenuity.
Chapter 8.
Here, the important thing to recognize is that there are multiple ways to measure size of communities. Perhaps the one we think of most often is population, which we can determine by simple count. But area is another measure... the number of square units (miles, kilometers, etc.) included in the political unit in question. A third is density of population (population divided by area). Be aware that it is the second which is being explained in this chapter. The process is annexation. The reasons for it and the reasons against it are the subject of this chapter. The last paragraph is rather ominous:
Resistance to annexation is symptomatic of the view that metropolitan problems are unsolvable and that the only sensible solution is isolation. Elite suburbs are communities encapsulated from the crises of urban capitalism, yet able to benefit and enjoy the system’s largesse.
We'll be seeing that some of the "flight to the suburbs" is just that: flight. What were people fleeing from?
For Tuesday, October 15
Welcome Back! Hope you were kind to any vikings you spotted.
No new readings for today. I'll be showing another DVD from the series "Pride of Place, entitled "Dream Houses" Which of these might be your Dream House? Do any of them more resemble the house of your nightmares?
"Generations of Americans have seen their freestanding houses as family temples. Men and women of great vision poured their energies into building houses that are complex self-portraits. [Dream Houses] examines the American home as a reflection of its owner's self-image"
Robert A.M. Stern
For Wedesday, October 16Houses for the Rest of Us
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: In honor of the Europeans who reallydiscovered America, Erik the Red, Lief Eriksson, Hagar the Horrible, and one Swedish-American remote descendant of the Vikings who likes to twit the Italians and Spanish who make such a big deal of Christopher Columbus, TUESDAY IS ABDUCTED AND HELD FOR RANSOM. Monday will be held in its place. This edict only applies to the domain of Roger Williams University.
(In other words, see you See you Tuesday!)
For Friday, October 18
Chapter 4 introduces us to the idea of comfort achieved through domestic furniture. The two terms, "Commodity," and "Delight" can roughly be equated with the ideas of functional and aesthetic qualities of things which furnish houses. An object demonstrates commodity if it accommodates itself to our needs, including our physiological needs. An object delights us if it maintains our interest and pleasure. About the time of the American Revolution we begin to expect our domestic furniture (at least some of it) to do both of these. Rybczynski suggests that in a world divided between "squatters" and "sitters" we need to be sure we don't assume one or the other of these postures is objectively superior to the other.
Internet Study Preparation Exercises:
1. Visit the Metropolitan Museum of Arts American Decorative Arts web site and locate the 1640 armchair, the 1740 Roundabout Chair, and the 1758 Easy Chair and think about how these demonstrate the evolution of the ideas of commodity and delight.
2. Take the Virtual Reality Tour of the Hart Room, and consider the ways in which it does, and does not represent qualities we expect of modern domestic rooms. Note that you can explore the major elements of the room in detail by clicking on them.
Three American Arm Chairs
These Three Chairs represent a little over 100 years in the evolution of the easy chair. Knowing very little about furniture, it still should be a fairly simple task to place them in sequence of development. Try it. Which is earliest, which is latest, which is intermediary? What makes you think so?
Read, in Rybczynski,
Chapter 4, "Commodity and Delight," pp. 77 - 100
To date, we've seen how houses evolve from single roomed, semi-public affairs to multi-roomed structures which allow for intimacy through the creation of privacy, and we've located the origin of this idea in northern Europe, chiefly Scandinavia. We've also seen the feminization of domestic space occur, through innovations of the Dutch. This day we'll add a contribution to the American House, courtesy of the French.
