6.5 Residential Speculation. Architectural experiments and real estate in the formation of postwar American suburbs – Daniel Díez Martínez

Reconversion experiments: towards a new industrial prefabricated domesticity

The war greatly altered the image that Americans had of large corporations in the country. Its role in the manufacture of weapons had been key for the Allies victory,¹⁴ which led to a collective spirit of unconditional support to private enterprises. Likewise, postwar design culture incorporated a blind faith in American industry and its mechanization processes, so that everything related to technical and technological issues acquired an unprecedented relevance.

The real estate fever unleashed after the war placed the domestic space at the center of a new technological, economic, and cultural revolution, so, the architectural thought of the time defended the thesis that the housing market had to absorb all of this new technological capital. By 1945, serial production applied to housing, assembly lines and new prefabrication systems were consolidated. New materials emerged while existing ones were improved; ideas such as programmed obsolescence were indoctrinated, whereas air conditioning, aluminum carpentry, double layer glass, fluorescent light tubes, steel profiles, plywood, or plastic materials immediately became the main characters in postwar domestic architecture. Architecture and the industry were finally progressing next to each other, which led to the emergence of convincing arguments in favor of a truly mechanized Modern Movement.

Sponsored by the Army, architecture magazines, cultural institutions, or business associations, the forties featured a proliferation of essays with a clear experimental vocation and theoretical tone, although with their roots embedded in the country’s reality and technical possibilities available at the moment. The MoMA New York bet heavily on this type of initiatives during the 1940s, launching an exhibition agenda focused on the interweaving of industrial design, architecture and war,¹⁵ complemented with the building of prototypes in its sculpture garden. In October 1941, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit (DDU) became the first full-scale structure built in MoMA’s garden. After the war, two more would follow, designed by Marcel Breuer (The House in the Museum Garden, 1949) and Gregory Ain (Exhibition House, 1950). On the other side of the country, in California, Arts & Architecture magazine launched competitions such as Design for Postwar Living (April 1943) or the legendary Case Study House (January 1945), which stimulated the cooperation between architects and construction products manufacturers, in a joint research venture that shared he idea of a military-industrial reconversion applied to architecture (^{Entenza, 1945}:39).

For a country dealing with a gigantic demand for housing, reaching an efficient method for mass production that reduced both budgets and execution times became an obsession resulting in countless experimental projects that explored the possibilities of standardized solutions and typified designs. Thus, the Eames bragged that the steel profiles frame in their dwelling, the Case Study House 8, had been assembled by five men in only sixteen hours (^{Eames, 1950}:94), a record that would soon defeat Raphael Soriano with his prototype for the construction company Eichler Homes: “three workmen needed only two and a half hours to erect the modular framework and roof decking on the 5-room, 2-bath Eichler home,” stated an advertisement for the United States Steel company published in Arts & Architecture magazine on December 1955. On the other hand, Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann patented The Packaged House, a housing project entirely prefabricated according to a strictly modulated but flexible system, based on the repetition of standardized components of easy assembly and transportable in packages (^{A&A, 1947}). Architects ran all kinds of projects that filled the pages of architecture magazines and patent offices to fuel the debate on the middle-class house of “194x”, as Architectural Forum called the initial post-war period. However, the experience that was yet to come posed a quite different scenario from the one designed on their drawing boards.

Companies take command: housing for all and the configuration of a new suburban landscape

Implementation of mass-production processes was undoubtedly a determining growth factor for housing construction and sale rates during postwar years. Communities such as those developed by the Levitt & Sons company, known as Levittown, refined a constructive method that provided really low prices and execution times. In 1950 Time magazine devoted a cover to its president, William Levitt, who was treated like a true national hero for having dared “to be the most potent single modernizing influence in a largely antiquated industry” (^{Time, 1950}: 68). The magazine analyzed the construction of the Levittown at Long Island, New York:

On 1,200 flat acres of potato farmland near Hicksville, Long Island, an army of trucks sped over new-laid roads. Every 100 feet, the trucks stopped and dumped identical bundles of lumber, pipes, bricks, shingles and copper tubing-all as neatly packaged as loaves from a bakery. Near the bundles, giant machines with an endless chain of buckets ate into the earth, taking just 13 minutes to dig a narrow, four-foot trench around a 25-by-32 ft. rectangle. Then came more trucks, loaded with cement, and laid a four-inch foundation for a house in the rectangle. After the machines came the men. On nearby slabs already dry, they worked in crews of two and three, laying bricks, raising studs, nailing lath, painting, sheathing, shingling. Each crew did its special job, then hurried on to the next site. Under the skilled combination of men and machines, new houses rose faster than Jack ever built them; a new one was finished every 15 minutes (…). Levittown is known largely for one reason: it epitomizes the revolution which has brought mass production to the housing industry. Its creator, Long Island’s Levitt & Sons, Inc., has become the biggest builder of houses in the U.s (Time, 1950:68-75).

As a result of the low cost manufacturing of these houses combined with mortgage subsidies and tax deductions for the new dwellers promoted by the government, buying a two-bedroom house in Levittown was much cheaper than renting an apartment in New York. Thus, many Americans did not hesitate: the day the homes of the New York Levittown went on sale, eleven million dollars in absolutely identical two-bedroom houses were sold (^{Hayden, 2002}:23).

Levitt was not the only one who applied prefabrication techniques in the construction of large-scale residential neighborhoods. In Southern California, the extraordinary postwar demographic growth – encouraged by the 850,000 veterans who moved to the Golden State in response to housing promises made by the state and local governments (^{Starr, 2002}:193-194) – offered a true architectural urgency scenario. Los Angeles County population was 2,785,643 people in 1940. In 1950, once the war ended and after the period of greatest growth immediately after, the population had increased by 49 % and reached 4,151.687 people The nearly 50 % growth rate remained stable for a decade, and in 1960 population had reached 6,038,771 people (^{Time, Census Bureau, 2018}). In only twenty years Los Angeles inhabitants had multiplied by three, a growth driven by initiatives such as the Kaiser Community Homes,¹⁶ which at its peak in 1947 built twenty houses a day (^{Cuff, 2000}:257), or cases like Lakewood, that turned from a small town in Los Angeles County in 1950 to a city of over 70,000 inhabitants in less than three years – an urban operation that earned it the name of ‘instant city.’ But Lakewood was not the only one. That pattern was accurately repeated following avaricious real estate operations that in record time prompted a constellation of satellite cities orbiting Los Angeles, in a seemingly unstoppable process that enriched a few, while “altering forever the map of the Southern California” (^{Dear, Schockman and Hise, 1996}:99).

Architecture without architects and urban planning without urbanists

It is fair to acknowledge that operations by Levitt, Kaiser, or Lakewood managed to answer the huge demand for homes that existed in the United States in an unprecedented democratization of housing. However, its quality was arguable. All the talent and research eagerness in these developments focused on issues related to construction efficiency or speed, while only rarely in exploring solutions that offered unconventional spatial and formal resources. The search for greater pragmatism banished the figure of the architect to the point that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) drafted a regulation for the design of its homes according to which any builder who opted for a sophisticated architecture that did not conform to its rigid design standards would be penalized with a reduction of mortgage values in homes for sale (^{Wright, 1981}:251).

Of course, there were exceptions and not all housing developers were the same. In California there were cases like Joseph Eichler, who between 1949 and 1966 hired renowned modern architects like Raphael Soriano or Archibald Quincy Jones to build over 11,000 homes, most of them located in the San Francisco Bay area (^{Adamson, Arbunich and Braun, 2002}:22), or that of Robert and George Alexander, whose field of action was Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, where between 1955 and 1965 they built a total of 2,200 Alexander Homes for the middle class (^{Niemann, 2006}:177). “Develop a relationship with a builder, do good work, and you won’t need to go ringing doorbells to get new clients” (^{Newman, 2009}) said William Krisel, the main architect behind the Alexanders developments. However, this type of actions constituted a drop in an ocean of architectural mediocrity.

Critical voices raised in the sixties, such as that of David Travers, Arts & Architecture director between 1962 and 1967, who in 1966 felt sorry that “the house has been abandoned to commerce at a time when suburban land surrounding major cities from Los Angeles to Philadelphia is being covered with tract developments like oozing Camembert” (^{Travers, 1966}:9). Travers justified the situation with fundamentally economic reasons: individual and customized houses were much more expensive than houses built by large real estate developers, whose processes for the repetition and mass production of houses greatly reduced construction costs and, therefore, sale prices. In his opinion, the situation was worrisome:

Only three percent of the new homes that are currently built are architect designed (…). Moreover, the usual large developer lacks faith in the architect’s ability to design a saleable product. At a recent depressing seminar, three of Southern California’s most successful developers said emphatically that architects were too far removed from the marketplace. “Floor plan, o.K., but stay away from elevations and specifications. We know what will sell.” (^{Travers, 1966}:9).

On the urban scale, the scene was equally devastating. North American cities kept growing, yet the plans that regulated the form of postwar residential fabric were timid, if not nonexistent.¹⁷ Thus, urban development was left at the mercy of real estate operations that promoted improvised and convulsive growth, spurred by a period of prosperity and protected by a speculative economy supported by the aid that state agencies in charge of housing regulation provided to the country’s largest developers. Private developers received state funding to buy farmland in remote locations away from consolidated metropolitan areas, where hopefully no urban plan existed, and could thus “raise houses instead of potatoes” (^{Hayden, 2002}:61). The construction of roads would connect these new residential neighborhoods with the areas of economic activity in the cities, and although the government’s official position was that this suburbanization process had positive effects on society, the truth is that the adoption of such model also answered to a direct request from the largest car manufacturers (^{Conn, 2014}:175). Corporations such as Ford or General Motors had made great efforts in the production of weapons during the war, which allowed them to establish as a powerful lobby in the post-war economic scenario. The ideal of suburban life and the daily use of cars guaranteed the growth of their interests.¹⁸

In the second half of the 1960s, critics began to raise their voices against the decentralized and sectorized city that prevailed in the United States, arguing that the economic costs, energy consumption, environmental impact, and social imbalances derived from this model could no longer be ignored. The architect and ecologist James Marston Fitch lamented that cars were dissolving the cities’ urban fabric to the point that American society was “persistently unable to see the difference between the street and the road” (^{Fitch, 1961}:17). His words were especially harsh against the great metropolis of Los Angeles, where in 1961 two thirds of the urban surface was occupied by roads, highways, and parking, which shaped – in his view – a “frightening spectacle” (^{Fitch, 1961}:28). This model of urban development ignored aspects of the city that were acquiring major relevance in those years, especially in postmodern proposals to recover the meaning of cities and the architecture defended by architects such as Robert Venturi or Aldo Rossi, on either side of the Atlantic. The cities’ urban center, dense and complex, was for Fitch the point of greatest concentration of human creativity throughout history. However, the growth patterns adopted endangered the existence of these centers and, therefore, also the cultural development of civilization itself: “the creativity of the urban center will no more survive subdivision and dispersion across the countryside than would the human brain survive a similar distribution across the nervous system” (^{Fitch, 1961}:17) .

CONCLUSIONS

Although the suburban house has been installed in the collective imagination as ‘the American Dream house,’ it would be more precise to associate it with the consummation of the desires and aspirations of the houses’ manufacturers and sellers, rather than to those of their dwellers and buyers, or those of the architects back then. The destiny of domestic postwar architecture was conditioned by the enormous demand for housing accumulated over the decades. Therefore, it did not have much to do with a revolution in the way of conceiving the house as with a change of a business paradigm that transformed the way of managing its construction and sale: the multitude of small contractors and local retail building companies prior to the war was reorganized into a small number of gigantic real estate developers that operated on a national scale implementing an iron grip on a solidly articulated construction industry. Therefore, it were these companies, with the approval of the state agencies, were the ones that took control of the course of postwar American cities.

The limited disposition of real estate entrepreneurs to take risks led them to bet on traditional homes, far from any attempt of architectural experimentation. In 1956 Levitt & Sons commissioned a housing prototype for its next Levittown in Willingboro, New Jersey, to Richard Neutra, who during the war had gained an experience in the design of low-cost prefabricated workers housing for the Los Angeles military industry. Levitt ended up dismissing Neutra’s proposal, as he considered that its markedly modern appearance would throw back potential buyers – not so much for a taste issue, as for the simple fact that the FHA could refuse to grant his coveted tax aid for purchasing a house that moved away from the conservative design criteria they had set (^{Longstreth, 2010}:171-172).

Such a conservative climate inhibited any possibility of experimentation. As regards the MoMA experience, we know now that the first attempt to build a prototype in the museum garden – a Usonian House, as part of the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition, American Architect exhibition program, opened in November 1940 – was aborted by John D. Rockefeller, who had imposed certain restrictions on what could or could not be done on the plot he had donated to the museum, located in front of his own house (^{Fullaondo, 2010}:61). Later on, Ain and Breuer’s houses would be built, which although turned out to be brilliant examples of avant-garde residential architecture, did not pay any attention to criteria based on the economy of means or serial production. The prevailing pragmatism relegated them to the category of useless and capricious projects, and the program of housing construction in the museum was canceled.

Even experiments such as the Case Study House program, which had been planned from the beginning as a collaborative exercise between the architects’ research capacity and construction products manufacturers, was harmed by such an approach. The program’s implementation depended entirely on private investment, so that none of those houses could be executed if they did not have the financial support of manufacturers. Materials, therefore, ended up playing a role related to the financing of housing construction and advertising that guaranteed Arts & Architecture’s viability rather than to actual experimentation. In fact, some manufacturers decided to become clients and commissioned their own homes to the program, such as Bethlehem Steel or the furniture distributor Frank Bros. The Case Study 28, the last one built within the program, is a clear example of the extent to which the balance of forces was decompensated and the experiment perverted. Its sponsors, a real estate developer of luxury homes (Janss Corporation) and a bricks and ceramic manufacturer (Pacific Clay Products), took control of the entire process and distorted the very essence of the program with a gigantic and luxurious housing completely lined with brick, a system alien to the program’s material identity. The houses were no longer a celebration of constructive experimentation or the way of inhabiting California, but a sign of the power of the American company.

The business anxiety of the great real estate companies and constructors buried the reflection and experimentation exercises of the ‘little’ architect, who could not find his place in the business gear that was defining the American suburb: (real estate) speculation had strangled (architectural) speculation.