1. Building The Dream Gwendolyn Wright Pdf To Jpg File
2. Sophia Bender Koning
3. Gwendolyn Wright History Detectives

Building The Dream Gwendolyn Wright Pdf To Jpg File

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BUILDING THE DREAM A Social History of Housing in America. By Gwendolyn Wright. Illustrated. 329 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. $18.50.

GWENDOLYN WRIGHT is an architectural historian. In this volume she ignores the stately public buildings that generally capture the attention of her profession and concentrates entirely on the relatively neglected field of domestic architecture. She traces the design and styling of American homes and their relationship to contemporary ideas, technology and society, from the initial European settlements on the continent to the various housing designs of the present day. While the book is not technical enough for the student of construction or detailed and precise enough for the student of national or local housing policy, it should nevertheless be of interest to those who want to understand why suburban homes and city apartment houses in the United States look the way they do.

Miss Wright has some interesting things to say, particularly as she outlines the connections between social goals and the emergence of a large home-building industry in the 20th century. She also quotes from a goodly number of newspaper and magazine articles of the past hundred years, which express more clearly than sociological abstractions possibly could the emotional links Americans have made between home ownership and the whole broad subject of human progress.

She begins with a discussion of Colonial architecture and a detailed description of the antebellum South with its mansions and slave quarters, which, she notes, were related in design to African shelters. She goes on to discuss factory housing at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and to point out the persistent moralistic strain that came to the fore whenever a factory owner decided to provide homes for his female employees. Moral uplift was as much a part of the design as the roof and doors, with community space included for reading aloud from the Bible or other suitably serious works and with printed rules of deportment to keep young women out of trouble.

In the chapter called 'Advantages of Apartment Life,' Miss Wright finds that Americans extolled the apartment house from its inception, not merely because it made more intensive use of urban land possible but because it promised freedom from housekeeping chores in order to develop one's cultural faculties. As she describes it, the apartment house became the subject of a kind of oratorio in which a chorus of manufacturers of building materials and furniture makers harmonized on the marvelously liberating effect apartment house living would have on wives trapped in big houses. For them the conveniences of elevators, central heating, doorman service and sometimes even maids and cooks provided by the management promised spare time in which to become future lovers of the arts. It is interesting that, in America, the multiple dwelling started as a means for sheltering poor families. To distinguish the apartment house from its humbler predecessor, the tenement, the special services and extravagant architecture of early apartment houses became commercially essential. In the case of single-family detached homes, industrial America moved from housing the rich to housing middle-class and lower-middle-class families. In a chapter with the appealing title of 'The Progressive Housewife and the Bungalow,' Miss Wright talks about the inspirational qualities of the small house or bungalow, suited to the needs and pocketbooks of middleclass America. Although its name came from the Hindi word for a Bengal-style house, the American bungalow offered, for the first time, a truly indigenous example of domestic architecture. It was simple and so efficient that it became available to large numbers of Americans of relatively modest means. Writing in the Hearst magazine House Beautiful in 1902, Isabell McDougall conveys the excitement many felt at the new bungalow kitchen: 'Everything in her temple is clean with the scientific cleanliness of a surgery, which we all know to be far ahead of any mere housewifely neatness.'

Sophia Bender Koning

Essentially, what Miss Wright sees in her survey of the last hundred years of American housing design is the glorious optimism of the 'New Era' in which new technologies would lead the way to a better, freer world. Henry Demerest Lloyd, in The Congregationalist, wrote presciently of the meanings of the women's liberation movement, even though he saw it as a sloth might, upside down: 'Power will flow in every house and shop as freely as water. All men will become capitalists and all capitalists co-operators. ... Women, released from the economic pressure which has forced them to deny their best nature and compete in an unnatural industry with men, will be resexed....' Reading this in the context of the multiplying lists of labor-saving devices for the home - vacuum cleaners, carpet sweepers, hot-water heaters, refrigerators, toasters - is like thumbing through an old photograph album and finding a snapshot of your mother dressed for the high school prom.

Gwendolyn Wright History Detectives

Given the excitement and vision of the early builders and designers, it is hard to accept the fact that architecture did not fulfill the dreams of perfect housing in a modern world. Of all the arts, architecture, with one foot planted hard on technology, insists that it will have the most benign effect on human life. It is difficult to appreciate modern architecture's accomplishments, because they are so much less than promised.

In the parts of her book describing the nation's efforts to produce housing for the poor, Miss Wright affects a sardonic tone. Her disappointment in the results of political programs to subsidize housing is extreme. Perhaps after all the early optimism she found in doing her research, she herself expected too much, because in fact, the Federal, state and even, in some cases, private and municipal housing programs directed at people of limited income have not been the uniformly dreary mess that Miss Wright sees. Public housing, in particular, gets drubbed by Miss Wright, who seems not to have noticed the many successes that should fairly be placed alongside those unquestioned failures of which she speaks at length.

The trouble with the rather snide remarks that Miss Wright echoes, and that were made originally by other, more thorough students of the political and economic aspects of housing, is that such rhetoric did not produce better programs; generally, the criticisms only helped destroy programs that had produced some valuable housing. Of urban renewal, Miss Wright says only that it provided the opportunity for major profits, not noticing or caring that the program also provided sites for important nonprofit cultural and educational institutions, for limited-profit cooperatives for familes of modest income and, in some cases, even for low-rent publicly owned housing. It is a far more complicated subject than she seems willing to grant.

'Building the Dream' should not be read for its understanding of government or for solutions to our national housing problems, but rather for its understanding of the connection between the housing produced by the private market and the dominant social values of the times in which that housing was built.