The Modern American House
Spaciousness and Middle Class Identity

This book examines how architects, designers, and landscape designers worked to enhance spatial perception in middle class houses visually.

Sandy Isenstadt (Author)

9781107675063, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 June 2014

344 pages
25.1 x 17.5 x 2 cm, 0.82 kg

'Isenstadt's book shines as a model of interdisciplinary writing … His scholarly thoroughness and rhetorical openness make his work a pleasure to read and contemplate.' The American Historical Review

Sandy Isenstadt examines how architects, interior designers, and landscape designers worked to enhance spatial perception in middle class houses visually. The desire for spaciousness reached its highest pitch where it was most lacking, in the small, single-family houses that came to be the cornerstone of middle class life in the nineteenth century. In direct conflict with actual dimensions, spaciousness was linked to a tension unique to the middle class - between spatial aspirations and financial limitations. Although rarely addressed in a sustained fashion by theorists, practitioners, or the inhabitants of houses themselves, Isenstadt argues that spaciousness was central to the development of modern American domestic architecture, with explicit strategies for perceiving space being pivotal to modern house design. Through professional endorsement, concern for visual space found its way into discussion of real estate and law.

Introduction: spaciousness, history of a visual effect
1. The small house era
2. The production of spaciousness
3. Spacious interiors
4. Looking at landscapes
5. Glass horizons
6. 'The view it frames': a history of the picture window
7. Cultivated vistas
8. The ruler and the eye: the compensations of spaciousness
9. Conclusion: this excellent dumb discourse.

Subject Areas: Social classes [JFSC], History of architecture [AMX], Houses, apartments, flats, etc [AMKD], Theory of architecture [AMA]