Hello Friends! Sorry about the drama this week. Back to our regularly scheduled content!
Last week’s installment left us wondering: If architectural style isn’t going to help us identify common houses, what will?
In the world of vernacular architecture, floor plans are perhaps one of the single greatest ways to differentiate and identify certain types of houses for a number of reasons:
1) While the outside of some houses may look similar or exactly the same, their internal floor plans can be completely different, and vice versa!
2) There’s a clear historical progression of the number of rooms in a house and their various uses, which can be helpful in (roughly) determining the age of a house.
3) It’s possible to identify many floor plans from reading the exterior of a house - it just takes some practice!
The good news about floor plans is that a lot of our architectural vocabulary when talking about everyday houses already revolves around floor plans - we’re just not often aware of it. For example, a four-square house is called such because, well, it usually has four rooms per floor.
Sterling Homes, 1916. Via Archive.org. Public Domain
Alas, not all houses that look alike have the same floor plan! This is where homebuilding trends and regional differences come into play. For example, here is a four-square house that looks similar to the one above, but has a totally different floor plan!
Radford Homes 1909, via Archive.org. Public Domain.
In addition, houses that look relatively different from each other can have very similar floor plans. Taking the example of our first house, here is a house that looks different from it but has a very similar internal layout!
Sterling Homes, 1916. Via Archive.org. Public Domain.
As we can see, unlike architectural styles, floor plans offer a certain cohesion to different everyday houses from similar time periods.
We’re going to look at different floor plan typologies in-depth in other posts in this series, but in order to do so, an overview is needed.
Technology, Sociology, and the Layout of Houses
Before the Second Industrial Revolution, the layouts of most everyday houses were relatively simple, with a limited number of rooms and room functions. These pre-industrial houses are what most definitions of “vernacular” architecture refer to, emphasizing the heavily localized nature of their construction, entirely reliant on regional builders and their aesthetics, as well as material factors such as distribution of materials, types of financing, and land development/use. (Hubka 2013, 41; Gottfried and Jennings 2009, 9)
It’s important to note that regional differences and the design traditions of local builders are still extremely important today when examining common houses. However, it’s also important to understand that the industrialization of homebuilding and the housing market beginning in the late 19th century increasingly homogenized these design traditions and the role of local builders became developing nuanced regional traditions within a nationalized design fabric rather than the dominant determinants of housing forms. (Hubka 2013, 41)
There is a common misconception that houses got smaller as the 20th century moved forward. This is only true when talking about the houses of the elite, which indeed shrunk after certain sociological changes, such as the abolition of slavery and the reduction of live-in servants in the post-Victorian era.
The industrialization of national housing types ultimately brought down the costs of building homes with certain types of features. Several housing features that were previously accessible only to the upper classes such as modern bathroom and kitchen fixtures, dining rooms, closets, front porches, and larger, more private bedrooms became, through mass production, accessible to the middle and working class. For these classes, the average home sized actually increased in comparison to their previous dwellings. (Hubka 2013, 27)
Changing Patterns in Room Layouts and Uses
Pre-Railroad, Pre-Industrialization
Prior to industrialization (McAlester: pre-1850-1890), most working class houses were centered around the kitchen, with one or two other rooms for living, sleeping, and working.
1800s cottage in Custer Co., Nebraska. Image via Library of Congress. Public Domain.
One-room-deep (aka hall-and-parlor or “I” house plans) plans demonstrate the sparseness of these early work and kitchen-centric houses. At this time, many people often worked within their homes, or their homes were located on the premises of where they worked, such as sharecroppers’ cottages.
These early houses did not have the technological luxuries of today such as kitchen appliances or bathrooms. Each room had more than one purpose (Hubka 2013, 68).
Expansion of Industrialization
During the expansion of the railroads and the transition into industrialization (Hubka: 1860-1930; McAlester: 1850-1920), working and middle class houses developed three areas of domesticity: kitchen, living, and bedroom(s). The total number of rooms was increased from 1-3 to 3-5. The houses built for workers by the industries they worked for tended to be of this model. Below is a 1903 Radford prototype:
A more common subtype was the two-room-deep four-box (one-story four-square), as seen in this 1910 Aladdin catalog example:
At this time, the threshold between working and middle class houses was whether or not they had an internal bathroom or other utility spaces such as pantries or closets. At this time, thanks to the railroads and other technological developments, work began to be separated from the home; that is, many families began that familiar ritual known as the commute.
The Modern Era (post 1900)
Further improvements in homebuilding technology at the turn of the 20th century transformed the early industrial-era houses into our contemporary ideas of middle class domesticity that still exist today. House size increased from 3-5 to 5-8 rooms, with increasingly specified room types and modern utilities. By this time, thanks to the invention of the streetcar and later the automobile, almost all work was separated from the home as first and second generation suburbs flourished.
The bungalow was the first types of houses developed during this time, and its layout continues to be influential today:
At this time, specialized hobby rooms such as studies and sewing rooms began to appear in upper-middle class homes. This increasingly specific room use will soon devolve into contemporary tropes such as formal vs informal living rooms, game rooms, breakfast nooks, and laundry rooms.
(We know that this devolves into McMansion tropes as well - theatre rooms, anyone?)
That’s it for this week’s Looking Around! In our next installment, we’ll examine early industrialized home plans in more detail. Be sure to stay tuned for the Mississippi McMansion of the Week on Thursday!
If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon!Also JUST A HEADS UP - I’ve started posting a GOOD HOUSE built since 1980 from the area where I picked this week’s McMansion as bonus content on Patreon!
Carter, Thomas, and Elizabeth C. Cromley. Invitation to vernacular architecture: a guide to the study of ordinary buildings and landscapes. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008.
Gottfried, Herbert, and Jan Jennings. American vernacular buildings and interiors 1870-1960. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009.
Hubka, Thomas C. Houses without names: architectural nomenclature and the classification of Americas common houses. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013.
McAlester, Virginia, and A. Lee McAlester. A field guide to American houses: the definitive guide to identifying and understanding Americas domestic architecture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
In the world of vernacular (aka “everyday”) architecture, oftentimes architectural styles do not provide enough information when studying most of the houses built in any given neighborhood at any given time.
A good exercise in proving this point is the number of Real Estate listings that label a given house as being simply “Colonial.”
This is by no means the fault of misinformed realtors - it’s a result of a strange truth of talking about everyday houses: there really isn’t an commonly established or well-known stylistic vocabulary used to describe them. How can realtors or anyone else describe everyday houses when, for most new single family housing under a certain square-footage, architectural coinage exists as not much more than “Traditional,” “Contemporary,” or “Modern.”
We know that there are stylistic tendencies within these categories, but why don’t we meticulously articulate or analyze these tendencies like we did in the past?
The answers are not clear, though the elitist distaste for “mass housing” may play a part in it. What we now call “mass housing” (read: single family working class housing) was a mere blip on the academic (non-vernacular) architecture radar, studied in passing before moving on to other things.
That blip was still a blip, however, and it was called Minimal Traditional
Minimal Traditional
Ultimately, the architectural styling of a large chunk of everyday houses can be described as Minimal Traditional. This term was originally devised to describe the small, sparse houses built from around the end of the Great Depression to after WWII (roughly between 1935 and 1950.)
(the houses in color and the one in the bottom left all borrow from the Tudor Revival style that was popular with the elites from the 1890s-1940s)
The original Minimal Traditional homes were small enough to be built during times of economic hardship and wartime scarcity; but after the war, the Federal Housing Administration quickly adopted the style in its Principles for Planning Small Houses, aka houses that were eligible for FHA and GI Bill home loans.
Minimal Traditional houses were kept sparse in order for them to be built inexpensively and rapidly. Between 1946 and 1949, 5.1 million of these homes were built. They were exercises in efficiency and utility, not far from the factory housing built by Sears, Aladdin and other mail order home companies in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Minimal Traditional FHA-Insured Home, 1941. Library of Congress
As many prospered in the 1950s, the Minimal Traditional style was gradually overtaken by the more spacious Split-Level and the rambling Ranch, though these are two terms that denote floor plan layout rather than explicit architectural style.
Here we reach the crux of the problem: for most common houses after 1940, architectural identification ends at Minimal Traditional. Certain terms, such as ranch and split-level, are employed to denote floor plan layout for a significant number of houses, but even the best field guides have not risen to the challenge of style and everyday housing after 1940.
We’re All Minimal Traditional Now
Minimal Traditional denotes a certain type of historic house, but, other than its small size, its other characteristics (including borrowing architectural details from other popular styles) are easily be transferred up to this current day:
This is why, when talking about everyday houses style is so problematic. Most styles are borrowed from both history and the current “high” architectural trends. The high-profile architectural trends of the last 30 years aren’t exactly transferrable to the average homebuyer (looking at you, Frank Gehry) - so, in their place, we’ve been borrowing more and more from the 19th and early 20th century.
But here’s the sitch:
Building a house with features belonging to a style from the past does not make it that style. A new house with Craftsman details does not make it a Craftsman house or part of a Craftsman Revival (a serious academic and professional undertaking in reviving authentic Craftsman architecture). A house that borrows details from the Craftsman style but none of the other aspects (period materials, interior organization, proportions, massing, etc.) can only be called Craftsman-influenced.
Our houses are not mere imitations of the past. Our borrowings of historical elements are executed in a way that reflects our current housing needs (e.g. attached garages) and scientific advancement (such as using new materials e.g. fiber cement siding or low-E windows).
How then, do we describe our common houses if they drift so nebulously within the realm of architectural style and influence?
Fortunately there are answers to this question – answers that will come next Saturday in the next installment of Looking Around! (Also be sure to stay tuned for next week’s Mississippi McMansion of the Week!)
If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon!Also JUST A HEADS UP - I’ve started posting a GOOD HOUSE built since 1980 from the area where I picked this week’s McMansion as bonus content on Patreon!
Architecture as a field has always been captivated by the houses of the elite - those who can hire architects, build large and high quality homes, and set trends for the next generations. While it is always enjoyable to look at street after street of high-profile houses and marvel at their fine execution and intricate architectural details, we must keep in mind that these houses are not where most of us live.
Not until the latter half of the 20th century have architectural historians paid attention to the houses of the working and middle classes. This is partially due to the way architectural history has been studied since the Enlightenment as a scientific investigation of a rational, organic, evolutionary progression of different styles across time.
However this is a rather narrow view of how buildings work, and one that is architect-specific. The overall pool of examples considered to be architecturally significant pales in comparison to the total number of buildings we visit, work, and live in.
Architectural history and preservation have always preferred buildings left virtually untouched and in pristine condition. For most of us, our houses are not museums - they are places we live - places that grow as we grow. We build additions, decks, and other secondary structures; we enclose our porches in order to add a dining room; we redecorate to our tastes and the styles of today.
Most people live in houses that have been repeated in some form - whether its ‘tract’ housing, prefabricated homes, or rowhouses in cities, we live in places we can afford, with varying degrees of customization to give these homes a touch of our own style.
For as long as they’ve existed, these houses have been derided as the sterility of ‘mass culture.’ I’m sure we’re all familiar with the song “Little Boxes.” This is, ultimately, an elitist critique. The truth is, not everyone can afford an architect. (Though, to be fair, hiring an architect is more feasible than most people think it is.) Still, when so many struggle to put a roof over their and their family’s heads, it is more than a little disingenuous to say that the accommodations of normal people is “not architecture.”
McMansions are so disappointing to us because they are the homes of the upper and upper-middle classes who used to build houses that were interesting, that set the stylistic trends later codified by architectural history. While they are now included in guides like A Field Guide to American Houses, the usual objectivity is put aside, replaced with an air of disdain, as if to say “this is the best you could come up with?”
In some ways, McMansions have leveled the playing ground of architectural discourse. The wealthy are no longer the tastemakers - they can’t be relied on to build the best looking houses anymore. Their new housing is no longer considered rife for architectural preservation in the same way it was earlier in the 20th century.
In this landscape, a shift in the discussion to the houses of the rest of us seems warranted. People want to know what’s special about the houses they live in, and the fact those of us in architecture cannot give them an answer most of the time is perhaps why so few people are interested in architecture to begin with. It is a playing field that exists beyond their means.
The goal of this blog was to use a type of housing everyone is familiar and emotionally invested in (read: angry about) to teach people about architecture, or at least develop within them an architectural sense of humor.
The truth is, our houses are interesting and they are worthy of the same kind of attention as rambling Queen Annes and expansive, Georgian estates.
Hello friends! Today’s house is very special in that I’m not quite sure I’ve ever seen a house that botched the Tudor style as bad as this one has.
This 1987 house can certainly be considered “unique.” Enjoy a lovely selection of 6 bedrooms and 5 baths, coming in at around 6000 square feet. This princely estate can be all yours for around $800,000 USD.
Sadly, there’s no pic of the foyer, but fortunately the dining room gives us a glimpse of it:
Dining Room
I love how they could afford real columns on top of the half-wall but not for the other supports in the room, which are incredibly cringey.
Formal Living Room
My senior prom was less formal than this. Statistically, it was only a matter of time before Degas made it into the mix of artists people vaguely recognize enough to put in tacky frames on their walls. RIP.
awesome kitchen
This is one of the only kitchens I’ve ever liked the whole time I’ve been doing this blog, let me have this.
Informal Living Room
I have definitely been wicked drunk on a couch that looks like this. Shoutout to my college days.
Master Bedroom
Friendly reminder that Little House on the Prairie was not intended for use as an interior decorating guide.
Master Bathroom
Honestly, at this point, I’d love to live in a place with a porch or other outdoor area.
Bedroom 2
Pretty sure I saw this bed in a twitter ad for Architectural Digest. Shoutout to spinsterhood, the only sport I’ve ever been good at.
Bathroom 2
his and hers level: the kinds of dudes my sister’s into.
Rec Room
fun fact: Windows 98 teal is my favorite color
embarrassing fact: I would love some white 90s track lighting in my apartment.
Other (??) Rec Room
Something something Jane Eyre except the woman in the attic is a family in a secret basement with an air hockey table. Lin-Manuel Miranda, are you listening?? This could be huge.
Suspicious Office
The dog picture should be required for every psychiatrist’s office because look at it.
Well, folks, we’re all out of house. You know what that means!
Rear Exterior
The only thing I can give them props on is consistency in their huge windows. Also for keeping their trees. Trees are…excellent as heck.
Well, that does it for Minnesota! Join us tomorrow for a post on cute little houses in the Minimal Traditional style, and how they’ve managed to morph into, well, McMansions. Next Thursday: Mississippi!
If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon!Also JUST A HEADS UP - I’ve started posting a GOOD HOUSE built since 1980 from the area where I picked this week’s McMansion as bonus content on Patreon!
