Building The Dream by Gwendolyn Wright

Author:Gwendolyn Wright [Wright, Gwendolyn]
Language: eng
Format: azw
ISBN: 9780307817112
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

The living room in a bungalow in Tacoma, Washington, ca. 1910, shows a “progressive” interior: easy to clean, simple, and fashionable. The furniture combined straight-backed Mission oak and curved wicker porch chairs. Some remaining bric-a-brac has been put behind the leaded-glass doors in the built-in bookshelves flanking the plain brick fireplace. (illustration credit 9.4)

From the Midwest came another prototype, as the English Tudor, favored by arts and crafts advocates, merged with the sharp horizontal lines employed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his associates. The resulting “prairie style” was almost devoid of historical references. The white stucco cube with simple bands of dark wood and casement windows did not look back to any period of the past. Builders across the country, but especially in the Midwest, quickly adopted this idiom. Writing in the National Builder, James Casey praised the prairie-style bungalow, declaring: “The new type of home, now so popular, has utility for its fundamental principle. It aims to eliminate all that is superfluous, and to embody all modern improvements.”12

The Colonial Revival also found advocates across the nation. Its simple foursquare plan and white clapboard façade evoked the moral tone of restraint and sound judgment in yet another way. Carpentry and Building magazine proclaimed the New England colonial cottage to be an architectural expression of the entire country’s common heritage of good sense and egalitarian principles. “The people really want a combination of wholesome, strong, simple effects, and especially good, livable things, with fair and moderate cost,” wrote the editors. “And that is what the present generation is getting at last.”13

These new and simpler bungalows did not necessarily cost less than the elaborate Victorian dwellings of a generation before. Interest in regulating health and increasing domestic efficiency meant that a larger proportion of construction expenses—often 25 percent—now went into household technology. Modern systems supplied the home with power, heat, and numerous services. The first House Furnishing Exhibition, held at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1906, was a multi-industry effort to educate the public on the immense quantity of labor-saving devices and economical mechanisms available to homemakers. Magazine advertisements became more numerous, and they began to suggest the more elusive aspects of products: their scientific exactness, modern allure, and relationship to family comfort and pride.

Once residential construction picked up after 1905, the bathroom was considered an essential part of the middle-class house. The production of porcelain fixtures—toilets, bathtubs, sinks, and trendy features such as toothbrush faucets and sitz baths—increased markedly during the first decade of the new century. Factory-produced lead pipes replaced wooden pipes made on the site. At first, pipes were left exposed, partly from pride in the shining sanitary aesthetic, partly from lingering doubts about the danger of trapped gases. By 1913, built-in bathtubs and sinks were on the market, making claw feet and visible pipes seem like old-fashioned clutter. The compact bathroom, its walls and fixtures gleaming white, became the mark of modernization.

The sudden prominence of the kitchen also confirms that the cult of household technology drew from a generalized popular interest in science as well as particular technical innovations.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.