On his book Indoor America: The Interior Landscape of Postwar Suburbia
Cover Interview of January 09, 2019
In a nutshell
There is no question that suburbs are one
of the defining features of the U.S. urban landscape, as well as the place where
most Americans have spent their lives since the end of World War II. The
interiors of cars, single-family houses and shopping malls are the everyday environment
inhabited by the majority of the population. Indoor America looks at
these all-too-familiar spaces through a novel point of view that twists the
cliché of lawns and backyards to chronicle how suburbia grew into a landscape
of interconnected interiors. As such, it is a cultural history that takes as
its primary focus the postwar era, roughly from 1945 to 1969, a time that
coincides with the apex of the suburban exodus.
Although there is a great number of books
on the history of suburbanization, none has focused on the predominant role
that interior spaces play in the daily life of residents, and how this state of
things came to be. The rise of suburbia since the end of the war is thus retold
by placing the pursuit of interiors at its center, exploring how all such
spaces, from automobiles to indoor shopping centers, functioned as escape
capsules affording a higher degree of segregation and insulation from the
perceived threats of urban life. Needless to say, the fears that drove people
out of the city and into the protective network of suburban interiors often stemmed
from the inability to deal with an increasingly racially mixed city, the
tensions that this diversity entailed, and the profound social changes of those
decades.
In the book, interiors are understood in
the broadest possible sense: the domestic space of single-family houses, of
course, but also cars, shopping malls, with detours into the fallout-shelter
craze of the nuclear age, air conditioning, and plans for completely enclosed
cities in the late 1960s. The narrative is structured as a journey across all
such defensive shells. It starts from the increasing popularity of the
closed-body car in the 1920s (when private transportation became the norm) and
ends on the macro-interiors of indoor city proposals, such as the unbuilt
Minnesota Experimental City project, Walt Disney’s EPCOT, and Paolo Soleri’s
Arcologies.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
There is no question that suburbs are one of the defining features of the U.S. urban landscape, as well as the place where most Americans have spent their lives since the end of World War II. The interiors of cars, single-family houses and shopping malls are the everyday environment inhabited by the majority of the population. Indoor America looks at these all-too-familiar spaces through a novel point of view that twists the cliché of lawns and backyards to chronicle how suburbia grew into a landscape of interconnected interiors. As such, it is a cultural history that takes as its primary focus the postwar era, roughly from 1945 to 1969, a time that coincides with the apex of the suburban exodus.
Although there is a great number of books on the history of suburbanization, none has focused on the predominant role that interior spaces play in the daily life of residents, and how this state of things came to be. The rise of suburbia since the end of the war is thus retold by placing the pursuit of interiors at its center, exploring how all such spaces, from automobiles to indoor shopping centers, functioned as escape capsules affording a higher degree of segregation and insulation from the perceived threats of urban life. Needless to say, the fears that drove people out of the city and into the protective network of suburban interiors often stemmed from the inability to deal with an increasingly racially mixed city, the tensions that this diversity entailed, and the profound social changes of those decades.
In the book, interiors are understood in the broadest possible sense: the domestic space of single-family houses, of course, but also cars, shopping malls, with detours into the fallout-shelter craze of the nuclear age, air conditioning, and plans for completely enclosed cities in the late 1960s. The narrative is structured as a journey across all such defensive shells. It starts from the increasing popularity of the closed-body car in the 1920s (when private transportation became the norm) and ends on the macro-interiors of indoor city proposals, such as the unbuilt Minnesota Experimental City project, Walt Disney’s EPCOT, and Paolo Soleri’s Arcologies.