Synopses & Reviews
A rare exploration of the racial and class politics of architecture, Little White Houses examines how postwar media representations associated the ordinary single-family house with middle-class whites to the exclusion of others, creating a powerful and invidious cultural iconography that continues to resonate today. Drawing from popular and trade magazines, floor plans and architectural drawings, television programs, advertisements, and beyond, Dianne Harris shows how the depiction of houses and their interiors, furnishings, and landscapes shaped and reinforced the ways in which Americans perceived white, middle-class identities and helped support a housing market already defined by racial segregation and deep economic inequalities.
After describing the ordinary postwar house and its orderly, prescribed layout, Harris analyzes how cultural iconography associated these houses with middle-class whites and an ideal of white domesticity. She traces how homeowners were urged to buy specific kinds of furniture and other domestic objects and how the appropriate storage and display of these possessions was linked to race and class by designers, tastemakers, and publishers. Harris also investigates lawns, fences, indoor-outdoor spaces, and other aspects of the postwar home and analyzes their contribution to the assumption that the rightful owners of ordinary houses were white.
Richly detailed, Little White Houses adds a new dimension to our understanding of race in America and the inequalities that persist in the U.S. housing market.
Review
"In this fascinating probe of the familiar suburban tract homes of the post–World War II era, Dianne Harris powerfully conveys how race and class were inscribed on the new metropolitan landscape. White middle-class America was born and raised in suburbia, a legacy we still live with today." —Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
Review
"Impressively interdisciplinary and marvelously attentive to telling details, intimate lives, and social structures, Professor Harris joins Dolores Hayden, Gwendolyn Wright, and other others in making the architecture and landscape of everyday lives illuminate the workings of a whole historical period. Little White Houses is a blockbuster contribution to the critical study of whiteness and to the history of the United States after World War II." —David Roediger, author of How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon
Review
"[Harris's] nuanced conception of the relationship between perceptions of racial identity, the fedeal systems of real estate financing, and the ways in which individual cultural choices defined the physical spaces associated witht the single-family home is thoughtful and well-executed. However, the crucial correction to architectural histories that overlook the myraid roles race played in assumptions about design consistently makrs the fundamental excellence of the text." —
American Historical ReviewReview
"Harris powerfully conveys the idea that socially conditioned personal, family, and even national identities are fashioned as much from material and spatial connfigurations of the home as from explicit political and cultural beliefs." —
Journal of Architectual Education"Little White Houses is both lots of fun and incredibly valuable" —American Studies
"Harris has contributed a major shift in perspective toward new and important ways to understand the history of postwar housing in the United States." —Antipode
"Highly recommended." —Choice
About the Author
Dianne Harris is an architectural historian and director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Nature of Authority: Villa Culture, Landscape, and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy and the editor of Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania, among other books.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Race and the Residential Sphere
1. The Ordinary Postwar House
2. Magazine Lessons: Publishing the Lexicon of White Domesticity
3. Rendered Whiteness: Architectural Drawings and Graphics
4. Private Worlds: The Spatial Contours of Exclusion and Privilege
5. Household Goods: Purchasing and Consuming Identity
6. Built-ins and Closets: Status, Storage, and Display
7. The Home Show: Televising the Postwar House
8. Designing the Yard: Gardens, Property, and Landscape
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index