The second subject was architectural style. “When we started New Daleville, which is my first project, I felt very strongly about identifying a regional style that would be part of the architectural code,” he says. “Now I’m not so confident that we really know how to do this. Part of the problem is that there is such a wide range of styles in southern Chester County. There are ornate Victorian houses, classical Colonials, and plain farmhouses. Some of the towns have lots of brick, but some don’t. Fortunately, during this tour we got so wrapped up looking at building techniques that the subject of style didn’t come up.”
There is no general consensus about what role style should play in the design of neotraditional neighborhoods. Andrés Duany has tended to dismiss the importance of style. When he and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk published their impassioned critique of contemporary planning, Suburban Nation, they were unequivocal: “Traditional neighborhood design has little or nothing to do with the issue of architectural style.”1 Yet a big part of Seaside’s appeal has to do with its appearance. “Of course Seaside is fundamentally an exercise in nostalgia,” wrote Kurt Andersen in a sympathetic Time essay. “It manages to conjure the good old days impeccably, solidly, jauntily, even profoundly.”2 Developers understand the appeal of old-fashioned architecture. When builders up and down the Gulf coast copy Seaside, they make sure that their houses have picturesque porches, pastel colors, and tin roofs.
The Charter of the New Urbanism, which is the mission statement of the neotraditional neighborhoods movement, states that new developments “should respect historical patterns, precedents, and boundaries,” and that architectural design “should grow from local climate, topography, history, and building practice.” That sounds sensible; however, as Jason has discovered, there are problems with this approach. The first generation of neo-traditional developments was mainly in the South, which has a rich architectural heritage. But not all regions have an identifiable architecture. As the United States was settled, immigrants brought their architecture with them, and in a country where people were so mobile, “historical patterns” and local “building practices” became hopelessly muddled. Even in older places that are associated with specific building traditions, such as Cape Cod, there is a wide range of domestic styles: Victorian, Queen Anne, Richard-sonian Romanesque, and Levittown-era modern, to name but a few. As for the Cape Cod cottage, it has long since outgrown its regional roots and become a national style, as much at home in Michigan as in Massachusetts.3
Neotraditional developments fall into two camps with respect to style. Some adopt a more or less uniform style that evokes a particular time and place. This trend began at Seaside, and the person responsible, as much as anyone, was Melanie Taylor. She was born and raised in Miami, and before attending Yale architecture school she studied urban design at the University of Miami. There, one of her teachers was Andrés Duany, who encouraged her to become an architect. In 1982, when Seaside was beginning, she had just opened an office in New Haven with her husband, Robert Orr. When Duany heard that Orr & Taylor was looking for clients, he suggested they talk to Robert Davis. “We drove down to Seaside,” Taylor recalls. “There was hardly anything there: a sales office, Davis’s own house, and several cracker shacks that had been moved onto the site to fill up the one and only street, Tupelo Street.” Davis offered the young architects a commission, to design houses for six lots at the very edge of the site. The land faced a neighboring subdivision, and Davis figured that he would be able to sell the lots only if they came with interesting-looking houses. Taylor and Orr suggested something different: a cluster of fourteen small cottages centered on a common garden. What they had in mind was something like a nineteen-thirties motor court.
Davis agreed. He instructed them to do something that would reflect regional traditions. But Taylor was not impressed by the local architecture of the Florida Panhandle. “It was very spare, a sort of impoverished version of classical architecture. I was worried that if we imitated it literally, the result would not be very appealing. We needed to dress it up.” Taylor’s family was originally from the Bahamas, and she used the islands’ tropical architecture as a starting point. “I’m not a purist about style,” she says. “I’m fundamentally a romantic. I imagined the houses as flamboyant cousins from the Caribbean who had come to visit their poor relations in Florida.” The picturesque porches she designed were Bahamian; so were the pastel colors, although toned down for the harsher Florida light. Davis had a collection of old wooden brackets and pieces of decorative scrollwork that Taylor and Orr incorporated into the porches, which gave them a vaguely Victorian appearance. They added fanciful gates, gazebos, and benches in the garden. Davis named the little group Rosewalk, after his fiancé, Daryl Rose, to whom he gave one of the cottages as a wedding present.
Rosewalk was completed first, so it dominated the early media coverage of Seaside. It was what visitors remembered, and it was what the first builders copied. Although the code did not specify Victorian brackets and pastel colors, thanks to Rosewalk, these quickly became the hallmark of Seaside — and eventually of traditional neighborhood development itself.
What Orr & Taylor did at Rosewalk could be described as theming. Theming provides a coherent and instantly recognizable set of visual cues, to the home builders as the development is being created, and later to the people who live there. Theming, as David Brooks puts it, can “take something bland and give it personality and a sense of place.”4 Building according to a theme has a long architectural pedigree — just think of Marie Antoinette’s hamlet at Versailles — but its modern roots are in the late nineteen twenties in Southern California. Knott’s Berry Farm, outside Los Angeles, was an amusement park in the form of an Old West ghost town, with buildings that were moved from an actual abandoned town in Arizona.5 In 1953, when Walt Disney was designing Disneyland in nearby Anaheim, he copied the idea but went further, building not only Frontierland but also Adventureland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, and Seaside’s predecessor, a replica of an idealized nineteenth-century American small town, Main Street U.S.A.
Yet when Disney built a real town, it didn’t use a theme. The planned community of Celebration was undertaken mainly as a way of developing a piece of real estate that adjoined its Walt Disney World theme park near Orlando, Florida.6 Once the decision was taken to design a traditional-looking town, the planners, Robert A. M. Stern and Jaquelin T. Robertson, recognized that central Florida had an eclectic mix of architectural styles.7 Instead of mandating one, they gave builders a choice: houses could be Classical, Colonial Revival, Coastal, Victorian, French, Mediterranean, or Craftsman. An elaborate pattern book spelled out the details of each style.8
While theming represents a desire to create a consistent and instantly recognizable sense of place, Celebration’s eclecticism pragmatically accepted that architectural style is a matter of taste, and that urbanism has traditionally incorporated variety. I ask Jason Duckworth which approach he favors. He appreciates theming, he says, having learned about it from Davis, who doesn’t like eclecticism. But since he’s joined his father and become immersed in the business side of development, he has come to appreciate the advantage of offering buyers choices. He also recognizes that creating a themed community is not easy. “When the architecture calls attention to itself, it has to be done very well to be successful,” he says. As a novice, Jason is uncomfortable with trying to do too much. “We’re not trying to break new ground at New Daleville,” he says, somewhat defensively.
I ask Mike DiGeronimo the same question. DiGeronimo, a slow-speaking, thoughtful man, is an architect and planner who works for Looney Ricks Kiss, known as LRK, a Memphis-based architectural firm that specializes in neotraditional communities and has offices in Nashville, Celebration, Rosemary Beach, Florida, and Princeton, New Jersey. Following its agreement with the township, Arcadia hired LRK to review the builders’ house plans for New Daleville. DiGeronimo will be the “town architect.” The function of a town architect, another Duany and P
later-Zyberk invention, is to help builders understand and implement design guidelines. DiGeronimo and I are sitting in a conference room in LRK’s Princeton office, an old frame house just off Nassau Street. He comes down firmly on the side of eclecticism and agrees with Jason that a development with a theme is harder to build. It is also harder to market the houses, since home buyers like to have choices. To underline the importance of choice, he tells me about an LRK project in Michigan, where three builders offered houses in a variety of styles but one “preprogrammed” the lots, that is, he assigned specific styles to specific lots. He lost so many sales that after a few months he gave up and let people choose whatever they wanted.
DiGeronimo’s approach to style is equally pragmatic. “We tend to discourage builders from trying to build specific historical styles,” he says. “It usually doesn’t work out since they don’t know enough about the subject. We also think that often the money could be better spent elsewhere in the development, such as on landscaping or higher-quality materials.” I ask him what are the most common stylistic mistakes builders make. “They try to put together different pieces that don’t fit,” he says. “They like this porch and that door and that bay window, but they don’t know how to integrate them. They also often get the proportions and details wrong. So they end up spending money illogically, spreading the dollars around. We show them how to fix that.”
So what will the New Daleville houses look like? According to DiGeronimo, whose firm is currently town architect for Celebration, Disney’s eclectic approach won’t work here. “We won’t try to be stylistically accurate. Disney had the resources to develop a very detailed pattern book for builders to follow. High prices have attracted custom builders, who generally employ more skilled tradesmen. Also, Celebration is large enough to support a full-time town architect, while I’m only going to be at New Daleville half a day every few weeks.” So what’s the alternative, I ask him. “We’ll focus on the general massing, the details, and the scale,” he says. “You could call it a generic neotraditional approach.”
I’m interested in his answer. This is neither theming nor eclecticism. At first glance, “generic neotraditional” sounds wishywashy, but on reflection I realize that this is what American developers have always done. Stylistically consistent developments, such as Forest Hills Gardens or Seaside, are rare. So are developments where skillful architects have used specific styles. Even in Chestnut Hill, which has themed groups of houses, such as French Village, most of the houses that Woodward’s architects built can’t be categorized stylistically. They have stone walls and steep roofs, porches and dormers, but little, if any, historical detail. There may be a pediment over the front door, but that hardly makes them Classical. Most Americans would recognize them immediately — they are generic traditionals.
17
The Dream
One should not underestimate the importance of Levittown. It introduced the American public to modern production building and proved that standardization, mass production, and technical innovation could be successfully used to produce houses for a large market, not by manufacturing houses in factories but by intense standardization of the product itself.
Generic traditional houses are expressions of a common American taste. This preference is bound up in another national credo: the American Dream. The term acquired common currency in the nineteen thirties, thanks to The Epic of America by James Truslow Adams. “There is an ‘American dream’ of a better, richer and happier life for all citizens of every rank,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian wrote.1 However, for most people at that time, the dream of a better life did not include owning their own homes. Rapid urbanization had had a severe impact on the tradition of living in your own house. By 1930 fewer than half of American households were homeowners, and these lived chiefly in rural areas. City dwellers, except for a privileged few in garden suburbs, occupied rented tenements and flats.
During the Depression, the home ownership rate dropped to less than 44 percent. Then, thanks largely to postwar prosperity and the intervention of the federal government, it rebounded. Hoover’s Federal Home Loan Bank Act of 1932 and Roosevelt’s Federal Housing Administration stabilized the mortgage market and provided insurance for home mortgages as well as for housing construction loans. Since building had largely stopped during the Depression and the war, the demand for housing was huge. The question was how to meet it. Many people thought that they had the answer. Old New Dealers promoted government-built towns, but the bureaucracy was too slow in reacting to the accelerating demand. The followers of the European International Style proposed high-rise apartment towers. Buckminster Fuller unveiled the Dymaxion house, which was to be manufactured in an aircraft factory and resembled a flying saucer. The solution proved to be something entirely different and unplanned: mass-produced suburbs built by private developers or, as the housing historian Marc Weiss calls them, community builders.
“A community builder designs, engineers, finances, develops, and sells an urban environment using as the primary raw material rural, undeveloped land,” writes Weiss.2 The prototype for postwar community builders was Levitt & Sons. The firm built large planned communities — named Levittowns — in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. The first Levittown, begun in 1947 as two thousand rental houses on what had been potato fields in western Long Island, was part of Truman’s Veterans’ Emergency Housing Program. The popular demand for buying houses proved so strong, however, that the Levitts converted the rentals to ownership, acquired more land — ultimately 4,700 acres — and in only five years built 17,400 houses.
The selling price of a Levittown house was remarkably low: $7,500 ($48,000 in today’s dollars). Returning GIs could become homeowners with nothing down and monthly payments of only $65.3 The Levitts achieved dramatic economies — and a healthy profit of $1,000 per house — by reorganizing the construction process. The driving force behind this idea was William Levitt, the elder of the two sons. He had served in the Seabees, building barracks for enlisted men in Norfolk, Virginia, and he applied his wartime experience to the traditional world of wood-frame construction. Instead of building houses one at a time, he divided the construction process into twenty-six discrete steps, each performed by a separate team of workers, equipped with labor-saving devices such as power tools and paint sprayers. “One team would lay the slabs, another would do the framing, another the roofing and so on,” he later recalled. “What it amounted to was a reversal of the Detroit assembly line. There, the car moved while the workers stayed at their stations. In the case of our houses, it was the workers who moved, doing the same jobs at different locations. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever done that before.”4 To bypass unions, Levitt hired the workers as subcontractors. To speed up the work, he paid them not by the hour but according to the number of houses completed, and traded bad-weather days for Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.5 Thanks to such tactics, Levitt & Sons boasted that, at the height of construction, a house at Levittown was completed every eleven minutes.6
William’s brother, Alfred, a self-taught architect, was responsible for design. In 1937, when he was twenty-five, he had taken a leave from the family business to follow daily the construction of a single-family house in Great Neck, Long Island. The architect was Frank Lloyd Wright, and the house was one of his so-called Usonians.7 Wright had coined the term the year before to describe the prototype of the sort of house he visualized for Broadacre City. If he could not realize his urban vision, he could at least show people what a home in the City of Tomorrow would be like. Over the next two decades, he built more than a hundred such houses across the United States.
“The house of moderate cost is not only America’s major architectural problem,” Wright proclaimed, “but the problem most difficult for the major architects.”8 Of course, it wasn’t too difficult for him. To reduce cost, he invented a highly simplified and modular method of wood construction. He eliminated the basement and the attic, and replaced the garage with
a carport. He introduced a novel form of heating — under the floor. He made the kitchen a small work area and combined the living and dining rooms into a single space. He used polished concrete floors and exposed wood walls and ceilings — natural-looking as well as economical — and designed built-in furniture. Thanks to such innovations, he was able to build houses — beautiful houses — for as little as $5,500, at a time when his Fallingwater cost $166,000.9
The Great Neck house, one of the first Usonians, was larger than the houses that the Levitts would build; it cost $35,000 and took ten months to construct, but it had a powerful influence on young Alfred.10 His first Levittown house was a 750-square-foot cottage, with two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen. The interior was small, but an unfinished attic had space for two extra bedrooms, and the sixty-by-one-hundred-foot lot left plenty of room for expansion. The model was called the Cape Cod, which conjures up a traditional image (as it was intended to), but the design incorporated several Usonian features, such as no basement and radiant heating in the floor. The Cape Cod was only the beginning. To attract buyers, the Levitts changed models every year, which allowed Alfred to introduce more innovations. These included open plans that combined kitchen, living, and dining spaces; central fireplaces; built-in televisions; and carports. Following Wright’s example, Alfred planned the house on a two-foot grid that was laid out with string on the building site as a construction guide. He used modern materials, such as plywood instead of planks, and sheets of gypsum wallboard instead of hand-laid plaster. Thus the young developer became an unlikely conduit for disseminating Wright’s ideas into the American mainstream.
Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Page 15
