On his book Indoor America: The Interior Landscape of Postwar Suburbia
Cover Interview of January 09, 2019
A close-up
To those who do not have the time to peruse the book from cover to cover, I would recommend reading chapter five, which looks at windows and glass architecture in suburbia. Picture windows have become a trope of suburban life in film and literary narratives. This is possibly because they foreground so many of the tensions elsewhere disguised in suburban design. The separation between inside and outside and the controlled penetration of the outer world into the domestic interior is one such example. Because of unique design strategies, suburban architecture allowed residents to incorporate only those elements of the outside world that did not endanger the family’s privacy, such as a constructed image of nature that excluded a vision of the street, and thus of public life.
The chapter also gives a sense of the
peculiar methodology used to write about suburban interiors as a cultural
landscape. Transparency in architecture is addressed through the analysis of actual
buildings, such as Richard Neutra’s modernist houses and Cliff May’s ranches in
Los Angeles, but also through imaginary spaces. There is one section examining
the role of windows in urban and suburban sitcom narratives like I Love Lucy
and The Goldbergs, and another on the depiction of picture windows in
Douglas Sirk’s film All That Heaven Allows.
The first chapter on the rise of the car in
the interwar years, a phenomenon that paved the ground for postwar suburban
sprawl, is another part that should not be missed in order to understand the driving
forces behind suburbanization. The mass relocation of Americans further and
further away from the center of cities has often been referred to as “white
flight” by many historians and commentators. This term is derived from the fact
that most of those who left the city for suburbia were white Americans at a
time when the number of African Americans moving into the metropolitan core was
on the rise. There is no doubt about the segregationist motives behind the
growth of suburbs, but segregation was pursued in several ways besides taking
up residence in a newly built subdivision. The very infrastructure of
automobile transportation, which is the connecting tissue of the sprawling
American city, was devised as a public space that individuals could share
without coming into contact with each other thanks to the car’s protective
interior, a form of microsurgical segregation.
[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
A close-up
To those who do not have the time to peruse the book from cover to cover, I would recommend reading chapter five, which looks at windows and glass architecture in suburbia. Picture windows have become a trope of suburban life in film and literary narratives. This is possibly because they foreground so many of the tensions elsewhere disguised in suburban design. The separation between inside and outside and the controlled penetration of the outer world into the domestic interior is one such example. Because of unique design strategies, suburban architecture allowed residents to incorporate only those elements of the outside world that did not endanger the family’s privacy, such as a constructed image of nature that excluded a vision of the street, and thus of public life.
The chapter also gives a sense of the peculiar methodology used to write about suburban interiors as a cultural landscape. Transparency in architecture is addressed through the analysis of actual buildings, such as Richard Neutra’s modernist houses and Cliff May’s ranches in Los Angeles, but also through imaginary spaces. There is one section examining the role of windows in urban and suburban sitcom narratives like I Love Lucy and The Goldbergs, and another on the depiction of picture windows in Douglas Sirk’s film All That Heaven Allows.
The first chapter on the rise of the car in the interwar years, a phenomenon that paved the ground for postwar suburban sprawl, is another part that should not be missed in order to understand the driving forces behind suburbanization. The mass relocation of Americans further and further away from the center of cities has often been referred to as “white flight” by many historians and commentators. This term is derived from the fact that most of those who left the city for suburbia were white Americans at a time when the number of African Americans moving into the metropolitan core was on the rise. There is no doubt about the segregationist motives behind the growth of suburbs, but segregation was pursued in several ways besides taking up residence in a newly built subdivision. The very infrastructure of automobile transportation, which is the connecting tissue of the sprawling American city, was devised as a public space that individuals could share without coming into contact with each other thanks to the car’s protective interior, a form of microsurgical segregation.