Читать книгу Between Dream Houses and "God's Own Junkyard": Architecture and the Built Environment in American Suburban Fiction - Stefanie Strebel - Страница 5

Nowhere in the world does the suburb, or the sphere of suburbia, have a greater impact on national culture than in the United States. Having first been predominantly exclusive to the wealthier segment of society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – when they were “a sort of green ghetto dedicated to the élite” (Mumford, City in History 561) –, American suburbs became a phenomenon of mass production and artificial planning after World War II, and are now the home of more than fifty per cent of the country’s population. Once conjured up as a utopian ideal of a community by both urban planners and advertisers, the suburbs have come into remarkable disrepute since the second half of the twentieth century. They have developed from an imagined Arcadia-like utopia into a dystopia for many of their disillusioned residents, and they are accused of standing for everything that is wrong with modern society – be it in terms of materialism, consumerism or individualism. They turned out to be a dead end for many who were born and raised in them, and the voices of cultural critics, architects and urban planners turning against this environment have always been loud. The urban periphery is considered mundane, ordinary, repetitive, uniform and characterless. It is torn between city and countryside, between progressiveness and conservatism, and it remains a grey area, a space in-between, on both the geographical and the mental map.

Owing to the fact that the suburbs are a grey area and thus difficult to define, they are a border as well as a gateway zone, and they can occupy any spot on the spectrum between utopian ideal and dystopian nightmare at any time. As the character of Evan reads an old entry of his mother’s diary in the 1984 film Suburbia, what comes to the surface are the misguided utopian expectations the previous generation had when first moving to the outskirts: “They call it suburbia, and that word’s perfect because it’s a combination of the words suburb and utopia.” In order to stress the dystopian notion about these man-made landscapes, however, Evan’s friend points out that people back then failed to see that the suburbs would eventually become “the slums of the future” (Spheeris, Suburbia). In a similar vein, Ian MacBurnie, late professor of architecture, describes the sphere framing the city limits fittingly as a middle landscape:

The periphery, variously conceived as edge city, middle landscape, perimeter centre, or technoburb but consistently perceived by the majority of Americans as suburbia, presents a demonstrably ironic environment – one that promotes diversity at the retail-office-industrial level, where transformation is endemic, yet that enforces homogeneity at the residential precinct level, where continuity is paramount, and the myth of timelessness sacrosanct; one that embraces technology yet values artifact; one that is premised on democracy but perpetuates itself by manufacturing consensus; an incongruous, multilayered milieu that means what it reveals but does not readily reveal what it means; a concept whose implication is as yet little understood and whose opportunity is as yet ill considered. (MacBurnie 136)

Despite this quasi-schizophrenic nature of the urban periphery, the suburbs are regarded as convenient, comfortable, peaceful and safe. In the United States in particular, they have come to represent the preferred way of living of the average middle-class citizen since the immediate postwar years. Suburbia is an architectural manifestation of normality, conformity and mediocrity, with all these characteristics being a product of the symbiotic relationship between suburbanites and the built environment. The normal, conformist and mediocre aspects of people shape the architecture of the outskirts, and the normal, conformist and mediocre aspects of architecture shape their inhabitants.

A Brief History of the Suburb

Historically, even though suburbs – a term originating from the Latin “sub-urbe,” literally the inhabited land below a town, or rather below “the pre-urban nucleus, often fortified, sometimes a castle” (Harris and Larkham 3) – already existed in the Middle Ages and were mentioned in literature as early as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the concept of the suburb first made a significant impact on the Western world map in the nineteenth and then on a larger scale in the twentieth century. During that time, commuting between home and work became a new phenomenon: industrialisation promoted the development of public transport systems, the affordability and accessibility of cheap oil, but it also caused rapid urban growth which led to spatial problems and social tensions in inner cities. These developments prompted people who were able to afford a house and pay for transportation to leave the cities for the outskirts, and, in a historical context, the emergence of suburbia thus accompanied, or rather, the emergence of suburbia thus was a by-product of the modernisation of the world.

Now a mass phenomenon, it is widely assumed that the first suburbs in the present understanding of the concept came into being about two hundred to two hundred and fifty years ago in London, where during the Industrial Revolution, the arrival of large numbers of rural workers prompted the emerging middle class to purchase villas and country estates outside the city limits. Prior to this time, however, the outskirts had been a place for the poor and the outcast, and the city centre, in contrast, had been considered the prime location for life and pleasure. The dichotomy between city and suburb was a classic example of a physical and symbolic centre-periphery relationship, in which being in the centre signified acceptance, whereas the periphery was a place for those who for various reasons were expelled from the core, or who were denied access to the core in the first place.1 In many European cities, as opposed to the majority of American ones, this is still the case today. The “banlieu” of Paris is one of the most notorious examples in this context, since its social landscape mainly consists of immigrants unable to afford the high rents in the inner city. As a consequence, immigrants are pushed to the physical urban and symbolic social boundaries, which leads to dissatisfaction, violence and revolts.

Corresponding to the status of the suburban sphere of London prior to the Industrial Revolution, one of the earliest definitions of the term “suburb” – in use from the fourteenth to the mid-eighteenth century – is “a place of inferior, debased and especially licentious habits of life” (qtd. in Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias 6). Evidently, the public attitude towards this environment – in the United States much more so than in other countries – has changed drastically since then. According to Fishman (“Rise and Fall” 14), this shift in thinking initially had a close connection to Evangelical Protestantism in England, in the context of which the pleasures offered by the city became disreputable and were regarded as decadent. This fall from grace of the cities was favourable for the urban periphery, and even more so for rural areas back then. Now that the dichotomy between city and suburb is considerably less defined and boundaries are increasingly blurred, public perceptions and opinions regarding city and suburbia have shifted again. It is particularly since the late twentieth century, with the increasing visibility of urban sprawl and its impact on the environment, that American suburbia has come under renewed and reinforced scrutiny and has received its fair share of criticism. However, this circumstance did not necessarily lead to a reconsideration of the city as a better place to live, although there has been a trend for younger people to move back to urban areas in recent years. It is rather the case that there seems to be no residential utopia, and no ideal to aspire to anymore.

In addition to the fact that the American suburb is criticised as a concept, this criticism is itself criticised for being fashionable, and the accusations are sometimes considered superficial and ill-founded in their argumentation. It is often argued that it is simply fashionable to bring the suburbs into disrepute, especially among young people and intellectuals. As Hitchens (122) observes, anything suburban is continuously and sternly disapproved of by the country’s intellectuals, and along with the bohemian urban sphere, they would also rather choose the “idiocy” of rural life than move to the suburbs. Considering the wealth of publications, both literary and cinematic ones, which portray suburbia in a negative light, it cannot be denied that badmouthing this sphere is indeed fashionable. However, as already pointed out, whether it is justified to target suburbia with such vast amounts of negativity is a matter of dispute, not least a political one between conservatives, who tend to condemn the criticism, and liberals, who tend to criticise.

The Suburb in Popular Culture

All criticism aside, the suburb in the United States, which for a long time was merely a marginal phenomenon with limited cultural significance, is now the core, or the essence of the country’s society and ideology. As Coon (4) underlines, “[u]nderstanding American suburbia is an essential step toward understanding American culture.” Millard (220), too, points out that “[a]ny serious understanding of the individual and collective behavior of Americans requires a deep, nuanced understanding of suburban mindsets,” since “suburban ways of life have distinct consequences for practically every important aspect of a civilization: energy use, economic variables, sociopolitical attitudes, [and] cultural formations.”

The current cultural and political significance of the suburbs is especially impressive when considering the short time in which they evolved. It has been less than one hundred years since the outskirts began to flourish significantly and gain more influence. Until the 1920s, it was the city that exercised power in cultural and political domains, but since then, many urban centres have found themselves in an increasing state of decay, and their significance has diminished greatly. In political terms, it was especially in the 1996 election, with Bill Clinton and Bob Dole running for president, that due to the candidates’ heavy campaigning in suburbia, the loss of power of the city centres became apparent. As G. Scott Thomas (9) observes, “[t]he 1996 campaign, if nothing else, proved that cities are no longer strong enough to dictate national policy […]. Power has shifted to the smaller, quieter communities lying beyond the city limits. The United States has entered the Suburban Age.” Stilgoe, too, sees the suburbs as the driving force behind political decisions, and additionally notes that they are now also considered the hotspots of other cultural and economic domains:

Suburbs control state and national elections, suburbs consume the bulk of manufactured goods, suburbs sprawl across vast areas that defy traditional political nomenclature or topographical analysis. If opinion polls prove accurate, suburbs represent the good life, the life of the dream, the dream of happiness in a single-family house in an attractive, congenial community that inspires so many urban apartment and condominium dwellers to work, to save, to get out of cities they perceive as chaotic, inimical to childhood joy, unnaturally paced, incredibly polluted, and just too crowded. Suburbs now set standards – standards as simple as the “proper” sort and amount of domestic indoor space and as complex as the naturalness of a contrived forest – by which a majority of Americans judge cities and find them wanting. (Stilgoe 2)

There is no denying that in many metropolitan areas of the United States, life now happens in the suburbs. People cling to the suburban dream and often voice great satisfaction with their living environment despite the vast array of criticism targeted at it, and due to its perpetual appeal and ensuing ever-growing population, American suburbia remains in control of national politics.

Regardless of the seemingly happy suburbanites, and corresponding to their negative reception by critics, in popular culture, the suburbs have been portrayed in a predominantly adverse light in their various representations. As mentioned already, works of fiction set in this environment have a strong tendency to echo the critical attitude that was and still is voiced by intellectuals primarily, with authors heavily emphasising the idea of crumbling values and the general disillusionment this artificially created landscape has caused over the decades. While it used to be the American inner-city neighbourhoods that had a particularly bad reputation when it comes to decaying social and moral values, people have realised that suburbia is not exempt from decadence, and that it may in fact contribute greatly to the loss of social coherence.

This increasingly critical attitude does not change the fact that the suburbs remain the preferred living environment for the average American citizen, however, and that they thus have an enormous impact on politics as well as on cultural concerns. “The Suburbs Have Won” is the title of a 1997 article by Nicholas Lemann published in the online magazine Slate, in which the author describes how the urban periphery dominates both everyday life and popular culture in America. When considering the plethora of books, films, television series and songs that are based on suburban life, Lemann certainly has a point in acknowledging the victory and triumph of this sphere. Television series that take place in and are defined by a suburban setting have had a longstanding tradition in the United States, which is certainly owing to the fact that these shows are family-centred – and families, in the ideally shaped and stereotypical self-image of Americans, live in suburbia. This scenario is what the average audience can identify with since it represents their living environment in a more dramatic and embroidered version – a more exciting, a more interesting interpretation of their existence which nonetheless remains relatable.

The list of television shows set in the suburbs is seemingly endless and reaches back to the beginning of the format, when the traditional suburban sitcom family was born. I Love Lucy, one of the most popular and influential American sitcoms of all time, aired from 1951 to 1957 and featured the iconic Ricardo family. While the vast majority of the series is set in a New York City brownstone apartment building, the family eventually move to Westport, Connecticut – into “a quaint old early American,” as it is described in the episode “Lucy Wants to Move to the Country.” Rather ironically in the context of the current idea of suburbia as a figurative dead end, this is where the show comes to a close a few episodes later. Other popular sitcoms set in the outskirts at the time include The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-1966) and Father Knows Best (1954-1960), and in 1957, in the same year that the final season of I Love Lucy aired, Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963) premiered, a sitcom narrated from the perspective of a young boy named Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver. Leave It to Beaver is concerned with the idealised American family, and therefore contributed greatly to the way in which suburbia was and continues to be perceived, not least in terms of idealised nostalgic housing in “an old-fashioned neighbourhood filled with classic pre-World War II suburban architecture, a sharp contrast to the many monotonous ‘little boxes made of ticky-tacky’ that came to define suburbia in the years preceding, during and after the series’ initial run” (Wlodarczyk 15). These early examples of television families moving to or being rooted in the urban periphery paved the way for numerous subsequent shows set in the same environment and targeting a similar audience, such as The Brady Bunch (1969-1974) and various other family-oriented sitcoms, a tradition which was only seriously challenged in the late 1980s and 1990s with shows like Seinfeld or Friends, which, instead of focusing on the suburban family, were centred around the urban individual.

Out of the more recent and critically acclaimed series, it is arguably The Sopranos (1999-2007), Desperate Housewives (2004-2012) and Weeds (2005-2012) that stand out the most. Their respective narratives are typically based on the superficial normality encountered in the American suburb, with dark secrets, mysteries, scandals, crime and intra- or interpersonal struggles lying hidden beneath this deceiving front of mediocrity. While it is the definition of a drama series that it deals with said issues, it is by no means a coincidence that the urban periphery has often become the setting of choice for Hollywood as well as independent directors and screenwriters, as the suburban setting allows their stories to evolve in a highly specific way and thus reach their full narrative potential. With regard to suburbia, the central assertion of these stories is that normality is not only deceiving – as normality does not exist –, but that it is in fact eerie and disquieting. The stereotypical hypocrisy of mediocrity encountered in the suburbs makes them the perfect setting to bring this idea across in a parodic manner, bringing to the surface the dark underbelly that is inherent to them.

A variety of animated series, such as The Simpsons (1989-present) or South Park (1997-present), use the suburbs as more than a simple backdrop, too; their respective plots, it can be argued, would not work in any other environment, so that suburbia becomes a crucial element of, or motif for, the storyline.2 The Simpsons is set in the outskirts of Springfield, a fictional town in a deliberately undefined location in the United States. The fact that the geographical surroundings of Springfield are strikingly flexible – depending on what the plot requires, the city can border on deserts, the ocean, mountains, lakes, meadows or forests – makes the setting highly relatable, as viewers can make it their own and match it against their personal experience of suburbia.3 South Park, as part of the metropolitan area of Denver, Colorado, in contrast, is bound to a specific geographical location, and typically exploits the boredom and triteness of the suburbs by making the sleepy mountain town a stage for the extraordinary, the supernatural and the bizarre.

While television shows set in the suburbs have had a long history and have been springing up like mushrooms since the postwar era, there was a noticeable rise in mainstream cinematic interest in this setting towards the end of the twentieth century. This does not mean, however, that the outskirts failed to receive their fair share of attention before. Apart from visually framing adaptations of novels or short stories such as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), The Swimmer (1968) or Ordinary People (1980), the suburbs were often the setting of comedies, for instance The ‘Burbs (1989), but also of social dramas like Suburbia (1984), a film about runaway teenage punks squatting in an abandoned and decrepit tract house. Yet the sheer volume of mainstream Hollywood cinema focussing on suburban angst and receiving widespread critical acclaim especially shortly before the turn of the millennium is nonetheless striking. Films like Pleasantville (1998), The Truman Show (1998), Happiness (1998), American Beauty (1999), as well as Hollywood adaptations of novels such as The Ice Storm (1997), The Virgin Suicides (1999), and then later Little Children (2006) and Revolutionary Road (2008) have reinforced the position of suburbia on the map of mainstream cinema. This rising interest in suburban angst and anxiety is likely to have resulted from the fact that perceptions of sub- and peri-urban life continued to shift in the public eye and had become increasingly critical towards the end of the millennium, when there was a general atmosphere of anxiety in the population. All the above films portray suburbia in a highly negative light, focusing on escapism, despair, suicide, perversion, on deceptive normality as an eerie and disturbing suburban characteristic, as well as on people leading unconventional lives in houses that are the epitome of conventionality.

In literature, it appears as though the suburb is slightly more elusive than in the visual arts. With the exception of a handful of novelists, among whom John Updike and John Cheever are the most prominent, suburbia is not a setting or theme encountered consistently throughout the body of work of a given author. In contrast to the plethora and popularity of cinematic suburban representations at the turn of the millennium, there also appears to be no similarly obvious parallel development for preeminent literary publications. In addition, literary suburban narratives are often repetitive in topic and tone to an extent, which may be due to the stereotypical nature of the setting as well as its mediocrity and homogeneity. These characteristics certainly add to the lack of true diversity in suburban narratives, and this monotony is doubtlessly also the reason that the academic discourse on literary suburbia is far less pronounced than that of the urban, the cosmopolitan, or the multifaceted. Due to the city conventionally being the place where life truly happens, where the senses are stimulated, authors have historically been more inspired by the urban environment and have chosen it as a preferred primary backdrop for their narratives.

In spite of the perceived imbalance between novels set in the city and the suburbs, the distinctive characteristics commonly ascribed to the American outskirts have brought to life a new genre, the Suburban Gothic – a sub-genre of Gothic literature, as well as of Gothic film and television. These distinctive characteristics of suburbia refer to the feeling of eeriness that people sometimes experience when thinking of this space, which is likely to stem from the fact that the suburb is often portrayed as an architectural and social quasi-automaton. Interestingly, people often have this particular idea of suburbia without ever truly having been immersed in this environment, which demonstrates the power of popular culture, the arts and the media in shaping public opinion. Even though a large proportion of stories set in suburbia have a subtle Gothic undertone, the rise of a genre emphasising the Gothic aspect underlines people’s growing discomfort and unease towards the suburban sphere.

The focal points of the Suburban Gothic are anxieties associated with the suburb – anxieties which began to emerge with the rapid artificial creation of suburban communities from the mid-1940s onward. Among the most important literary representatives of the genre are Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972) and Anne Rivers Siddons’ The House Next Door (1978), but also more recent publications such as Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park (2005) belong to the Suburban Gothic. As far as film is concerned, it is arguably Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982) and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) that stand out the most, and the same holds true for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-1991) in television. The already mentioned drama series Desperate Housewives certainly has Gothic undertones relating to the secret world that evolves behind immaculate architectural façades, too. As Murphy observes in her book on The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture, “[i]n the Suburban Gothic, one is almost always in more danger from the people in the house next door, or one’s own family, than from external threats” (Suburban Gothic 2), and this is doubtlessly a central underlying premise of this highly popular series.

Although there has been an emphasis on the importance of the suburb in the United States and a focus on American texts and culture heretofore, it must be emphasised that the suburb is by no means an American invention, and that wherever in the world there are cities with adjacent flat or, as seen in many South American favelas, also mountainous land, there is bound to be a suburban sphere corresponding to the various definitions of the concept. Possibly due to the similarities of culture brought about by a shared origin and common language, most parts of the world permanently colonised by the British have suburban patterns that are comparable to those in the United States to a large extent, even though they often have a less pronounced presence in the social discourse, in popular culture and thus also in literature.4

While it is undeniable that the cultural output on suburbia is the most visible and perceptible in the United States, there are certainly works in other literatures of the Anglosphere that prominently feature the suburb as a core concept. In the United Kingdom, for instance, novels such as Leslie Thomas’ Tropic of Ruislip (1974), Julian Barnes’ Metroland (1980), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), as well as J. G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come (2006) are part of the literary suburban discourse. All these novels are set in the London metropolitan area, where the modern suburban history of England and the world began. Tropic of Ruislip and Metroland are both set in the Northwest London “Metroland” promoted by the Metropolitan Railway in the early twentieth century, whereas the story of The Buddha of Suburbia begins in the suburbs of South London. Only a few decades earlier, until well into the 1930s, the Metroland was still advertised as an Arcadian idyll, and it is therefore interesting to observe how attitudes towards this specific landscape had changed by the 1970s and 1980s. South London, in contrast, never enjoyed the same historical reputation as its north-western counterpart, and the humorous and somewhat sentimental attitude of boredom displayed towards this part of the city in Kureishi’s novel is therefore not a testimony to a change in public perception. The same holds true for Kingdom Come, Ballard’s last novel, which is set in a fictional suburb called Brooklands between Weybridge and Woking, and is thus also located outside the once-glorified Metroland.

Even though there are certainly more examples than the ones mentioned here, it cannot be denied that in comparison to the literary and cinematic output in the United States, suburbia is a concept that receives less emphasis in Anglo-European literature, and the same applies to other English-speaking countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. As Nathanael O’Reilly (xi) points out in his book on the suburb in the contemporary Australian novel, for instance, “[d]espite the fact that the vast majority of Australians live in suburbia, Australian narratives are rarely suburban.” The widespread representation of this environment in literature and popular culture is therefore a phenomenon that is attributed predominantly to the United States, and suburbia as such must be considered a far greater socially and environmentally determining force in this country.

Despite the emphasis on literature, film and television here, when it comes to popular culture in both the United States and other English-speaking countries, it must be pointed out that the impact of suburbia is by no means limited to these cultural domains. The suburban experience has also been expressed in music, most notably in the iconic song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, composed in 1962 as a satire targeted at the mass development of suburbs and their middle-class conformity. “Little Boxes” was also used as the theme song for Weeds, which popularised the piece among a new audience more than forty years after its first release:

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,

little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same.5

There’s a pink one and a green one, and a blue one and a yellow one,

and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

(Malvina Reynolds)

Another important cultural statement is the song “Suburbia” (1986) by the Pet Shop Boys, which was inspired by the violence and social tensions in the already mentioned eponymous 1984 film by Penelope Spheeris – “Let’s take a ride / and run with the dogs tonight / in suburbia” (Pet Shop Boys) –, as well as by the Brixton riots. Furthermore, a more recent example in music is the 2010 album The Suburbs by Arcade Fire, in which the band musically portray the processes and conflicts of growing up in the urban periphery with songs such as “City with No Children,” “Suburban War” or “Sprawl I (Flatland)” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).” The album went on to serve as an inspiration for Spike Jonze’s half-hour dystopian short film Scenes from the Suburbs (2011), which was a tight collaboration between Jonze and the band. Apart from music, the suburbs have also found their way into the arts of painting and photography, in which one of the most prominent suburban tropes was born: the aerial shot of rows upon rows of uniform tract housing stretching into infinity. Arguably the most comprehensive overview of the cultural representation of this landscape can be found in Rupa Huq’s outstanding 2013 book Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture, in which every genre of popular culture from literature to rap music is covered.

The Architectural Suburb and Its Literary Representation

When it comes to architectural concerns, the deep embeddedness of the suburbs in popular culture also becomes apparent in the fact that contemporary social and planning-related developments in this environment are an ever-recurring topic in popular online magazines such as The Atlantic or CityLab. From an architectural point of view, it is exactly this close-knit tie with popular culture that makes the suburbs less interesting for this field of study, since architecture considers itself to be a high art that strives for aesthetic appeal. The symbolic elevation of the architect over other building professions is already present in the etymology of the term (Greek: “ἀρχιτέκτων,” meaning chief builder, or Old English: “heahcræftiga,” meaning high-crafter), and finds its repercussion in the buildings designed or constructed. As architectural critic Nikolaus Pevsner once famously claimed, “[a] bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal” (Pevsner 21).

From this proposition made in the early 1940s, it becomes obvious that architecture and suburbia are bound to have a difficult relationship with one another. Many would argue that the American postwar suburb is a place of non-architecture, and that it is a place shunned by architects with a serious claim to art. Architecture is in fact often looked at as an essentially urban or, historically, rural art – as seen in impressive high-rise structures and cultural or government buildings, and stately homes and castles, respectively –, while suburbia is accused of being a place dominated by mass production, cheap materials, mock styles and blandness. The suburb is the sphere of the “McMansion,” in the context of which people’s homes are the material embodiment of the fast-food philosophy. Nonetheless, owning a house in suburbia remains the epitome of the American Dream for a large segment of the population, not only due to the ideological implications of life in the urban fringes, but also due to the material house itself. The suburban house is an “indoor Arcadia,” or an “Arcadia-within-an-Arcadia,” in which the ancient vision of utopian pastoralism “has been folded into the insular fortified ideal” (Archer 299). It is as though with the move to the house outside the city – even though its architecture has no claim to art –, people attempt to re-approach an architectural Golden Age and distance themselves from the urban Iron Age of decadence and decline.

The importance of the suburban house in American culture and its deep embeddedness in the American Dream are undeniable, and the place that people call their architectural home is one of the most important pivots in their lives. In his book The Poetics of Space – a phenomenological analysis of architecture – French philosopher Gaston Bachelard underlines the importance of the residential house, stating that “our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word” (Bachelard 4). However, in spite of its importance for the individual, architects show little interest in the suburban house due to it being a representative of vernacular architecture. According to Carter and Cromley (8), “[v]ernacular architecture is architecture that is pervasive. It is the architecture most people build and use, comprising buildings that are commonly encountered.” The neglect of the suburban house and vernacular buildings as such in the academic discourse may be due to the fact that people have not learned to appreciate this building type yet. As stated by Glassie (20), “[b]uildings are neglected for different reasons. Some are the exotic products of indigenous people in places unknown to us. But others are familiar, maybe too familiar.” This is why the suburbs are neglected in theoretical and critical discourse, even though “[t]he architectural historian who lavishes attention yet again on some canonical monument probably lives in a house of a kind that has wholly eluded serious study.” As pointed out by Lasansky (1-2), architectural discourse privileges the individual, or the creative genius, as well as Architecture with a capital A, although the built environment consists of Architecture to only five per cent; in other words, ninety-five per cent of it is built based on mass-produced plans, designed by unknown architects and non-architects. When considering that vernacular residential constructions are one of the most important building types in the everyday life of Americans, it is certainly unsatisfactory to say that buildings are studied or fail to be studied according to their importance, and even when deeming suburban architecture insignificant, this classification is proof of a certain lack of appreciation, which, as a consequence, leads to neglect (Glassie 20).

The differences between vernacular building practices and architecture as a high art are numerous, however, and they are not only visible in the end product, but they originate in the design process. According to Carter and Cromley (15), vernacular design processes differ from those of academically trained architects in “the availability of ideas.” Academically trained architects have the freedom to find their inspiration in all kinds of sources and aspire to uniqueness and innovation, whereas in vernacular architecture, the particular community of practice, as well as the intended audience or market, demands a more limited and self-contained range of ideas. This is the reason that the architectural end product needs to stay within conventional norms, and it thus tends to be conservative and based on replication. Vernacular architecture only allows for a limited number of slowly introduced changes and new ideas, until it is time for a revolution. As Carter and Cromley suggest, vernacular design is best understood through Claude Lévi-Strauss’ concept of “bricolage,” that is, the assembly of already existing parts to construct and create:

Trained designers formulate anew all elements of the designed product, while bricoleurs create a newly designed product out of old parts. Both are designing. […] [V]ernacular designers go about making design decisions by working from a commonly understood and shared ground of forms and materials that have been tested in a specific community over generations, in contrast to professional architects, for whom originality is an important concern. Yet, like academic designers, vernacular builders make design decisions about space, form, community values, and architectural meaning each time they build. (Carter and Cromley 15)

Despite the fact that creators of vernacular architecture engage in design processes, too, the lack of interest within the architectural discipline is certainly understandable when looking at other fields of study, in which vernacular or popular exemplars are similarly neglected. One of the few academic efforts to incorporate suburbia into a curriculum was Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s “Learning from Levittown” studio at Yale University in 1970, which in concept was the successor to their highly influential 1968 “Learning from Las Vegas” studio.6 The “Learning from Levittown” studio, too, sought to identify symbols and decode the landscape, but rather than to read and understand the commercial messages of the environment – as had been the case in the Las Vegas studio –, students were asked to decipher suburban landscape symbols in order to gain a better understanding of the middle-class individuals behind their creation (Lautin 317).

When it comes to literary and cinematic representations of the suburban house, these not only tend to reflect the criticism of standardised, mass-produced vernacular architecture, but also the individualism and complacency that go hand in hand with owning a disproportionally large house and yard, as well as the materialism encountered in interior design and décor. Yet in many cases, the house in suburbia also represents a form of sentimentality or nostalgia relating to childhood, which is often the only context in which it acquires a positive connotation. Generally speaking, there is a strong correlation between character and architectural representation, as well as between architectural representation and the reality of the built suburban landscape. Nevertheless, in order to justify comparisons between the materiality of suburban architecture and the immateriality of architecture in the written word, it is crucial to first define the relationship between the two disciplines.

The study of architectural representation in literature is certainly not a thriving field, which in many respects comes as no surprise when considering the nature of literary architecture. Literary descriptions of buildings are often too vague to give the reader a clear image of the built environment of a given text, and much is left to the imagination. Moreover, the two arts are often considered to be too distinct from one another in order for their relationship to be studied in detail. This has not always been the case, however. According to Leatherbarrow, architecture, literature and other arts used to be less clearly separated. What the arts were considered to share were theoretical principles concerning mimesis, decorum and invention. Literary narratives are situated in architectural settings imaginatively designed or envisaged by an author, and architecture has often provided the material embodiment of ideas that literary texts elaborated (Leatherbarrow 7). Despite there now being a more refined distinction between them on a theoretical level, the affinities between architecture and literature are numerous, and hence their influence on each other continues to be observed in physical material constructions as well as in immaterial literary ones. Novels inspired by specific buildings or even the entire oeuvre of an architect go a long way back in literary history and include castles or stately homes in classics such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) or Emily Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), with more modern examples being Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943) – inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright and his buildings, especially “Fallingwater” –, or Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room (2009) – inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s “Villa Tugendhat.” When reversing the source of influence, buildings inspired by literature include Steven Holl’s “House at Martha’s Vineyard” – inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) –, or “El Castell” by Ricardo Bofill – inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1926).

Architectural representations in literature and material embodiments of literary constructions come into being not out of sheer necessity – most narratives include buildings, and every building invariably has a pre-text or can be read as a text –, but because the two arts overlap to an extent, which provides space for playfulness in their interactions with one another. What both literature and architecture have in common is an ability to speak, especially in terms of rhetoric. Wolin suggests as an example the analogy between figures of speech and figurative operations in buildings. The author describes how language transcends its literal meaning by means of verbal shapes that come into being through figurative speech. These figures are given names based on their formal characteristics, such as hyperbole, prolepsis or alliteration. Throughout the centuries, figures of speech have been listed to a point of great refinement. However, as Wolin points out, the proposition of architectural rhetoric and expression is far more recent. She transfers the five canonical figures of speech – figures of sound, figures of resemblance or relationship, figures of emphasis or understatement, verbal games and intentional errors – into the architectural rhetoric, for instance by replacing figures of sound with figures of repetition and regularity, and verbal games with figures of overlay, displacement or disruption. Wolin claims that similar to the generic tree in linguistics, in physical constructions, too, we must assume the existence of, for example, an imaginary generic window (Wolin 17). Hence, both language and architecture, it can be argued, share the same guiding principles. Due to the similarities between the figures of speech of the two arts, a relationship can be established despite the dichotomy between materiality and immateriality found in architecture and literature, respectively.

Regardless of these similarities, mimetically (re)creating a material three-dimensional space is among the hardest tasks of a writer, a fact which certainly adds to the neglect of architectural aspects in literary criticism. In film, which has the advantage of being a visual form of art, architecture is of far greater concern and is widely discussed in critical studies. It would be misleading to claim that literature lacks the visual aspect altogether, yet as the visual aspect is exclusively present in a mental form derived from words, it is necessarily more fragmentary and subjective than that of the physical edifice itself. As Wolin (17) points out, “[a]rchitecture defies verbal representation. Even Alain Robbe-Grillet, with his meticulous litanies of dimensions and details, cannot describe a building that can be drawn, nor can Umberto Eco tell us what the column itself can tell us, despite pages of labored analysis.” However, this does not mean that architecture should be excluded from literary discourse. Even though words can never authentically represent a building, an approximation is certainly possible. Wolin (17), too, insists that “the verbal battle against the recalcitrant architectural object must be waged, even if there can be no victory; words may never capture architecture, but they are mediators, interpreters, agents of reconciliation.”

The idea of words as mediators is also present in McClung, who points out the independence of material and immaterial values and demonstrates how literature can establish a link between the two. In the case of literary architecture, this linkage is facilitated by the fact that architectural referents in a text are part of the experience of the reader and thus constitute remembered elements:

Literary architecture mediates between the discursive, immaterial values of the text and the implicit, material ones of organised spaces and constructed phenomena. While typically expressing the central preoccupations of the work within which it is located, literary architecture at the same time expresses the nature and values of architectural forms independent of the text. It thereby associates two otherwise mutually exclusive modes of understanding and judging: that of language, acting discursively through the unfolding of events and commentary in time, and that of phenomena, acting memorially through the linkage of discrete visual and tactile perception in combinations of the mind. (“Architectonics” 33)

Due to these affinities between literature and architecture, the dichotomy between the two arts does not defy reconciliation, and assigning too little importance to the architectural aspect in suburban narratives would leave a gap in the study of both setting- and character-related concerns.

Even though the relationship between literature and architecture is not an easily accessible one, and even though the lack of research interest in this field is thus understandable to an extent, this lack is simultaneously astonishing when considering that architectural constructions are a crucial part of the setting of most narratives. It can also be argued that the relationship between literature and any material entity is similarly elusive – geographical landscapes, physical objects, human bodies –, but to many forms of literary representation of materiality, far more attention is paid. Furthermore, having said that the study of architecture in literature is far from a thriving field, this is even more the case for the study of architecture in suburban literature. The vast majority of publications in this context have been written by architectural rather than literary scholars, among which John Archer’s Architecture and Suburbia (2005), which is interspersed with literary and cinematic examples, is one of the most noteworthy. Another highly interesting publication is Archi.Pop (2014), a collection of essays dealing with the mediation of (suburban) architecture in popular culture. In literary circles, very little has been written on the topic, however. One example is Jo Gill’s The Poetics of the American Suburb (2013), which includes a discussion of constructional features such as the iconic picture window in one of its chapters. Having already established that the suburbs are considered a place of non-architecture from an artistic point of view, this lack of publications on the topic is unsurprising. Yet especially when widening the definition of architecture to include buildings of any type, also those of the vernacular tradition, and when expanding the horizon to include the entire built environment of American suburbia, this man-made, often inorganically developed landscape is a highly interesting field of study also in its fictional representations.

The Fictional Suburb Between Utopia, Atopia and Non-Place

When considering that the majority of the suburban development in the United States took place in the twentieth century, the literary and cinematic period from the 1920s until the present provides interesting insights into architectural choices and urban planning. It demonstrates on an architectural and social level how the suburbs rapidly developed from places of organic growth into uniform quasi-utopias in Thomas More’s sense of the term – and as is the case for More’s island, their status as utopias is rigorously questioned in fictional texts. Furthermore, and in order to avoid the exceedingly negative dystopian connotation, the suburbs have often come to resemble atopias – spaces without borders –, or even exhibit traits associated with Marc Augé’s “non-place,” but this reality largely fails to find its echo in architectural representations encountered in contemporary fiction.

The non-place as defined by Augé is the opposite of the notion of utopia, that is, it exists, and the society it contains is not organic (Augé 90). Places are defined by notions of identity, historicity and relations, whereas non-places lack these attributes (Augé 63). Therefore, non-place stands in direct opposition to what the author calls anthropological space, which is shaped and developed “by individual identities, through complicities of language, local references, the unformulated rules of living know-how; non-place creates the shared identity of passengers, customers or Sunday drivers” (Augé 81). The notion of non-place refers to both physical built spaces and to the relationship that people have with these spaces – with the author naming examples of super-modernity such as traffic infrastructures, leisure and commerce (Augé 76) –, and it creates “neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude and similitude” (Augé 83). It is important to note, however, that places and non-places are not clearly separated, and there is always a possibility for a place to turn into a non-place (Augé 86). When looking at the history of American suburbia, it is striking how well Augé’s concept lends itself to an analysis of this built environment, as through the decades, the suburb has become strongly defined by a lack of identity and an absence of relations, by typical non-places like shopping malls and transit infrastructures, as well as by social isolation.

The architectural and social development of the suburbs from organic communities to quasi-utopias to atopias, or even to non-places, is mirrored in the structure of this book, which corresponds to the timeline of the suburbanisation of the United States from the 1920s until the present. In this context, it needs pointing out that historically speaking, Harris and Larkham (93-96) differentiate between three types of suburbs – residential, industrial and unincorporated –, but the primary focus of this book lies on the residential type. Each chapter begins with an outline of the decisive suburban developments of the period in question, with a particular focus on architecture, urban planning and design. After this general overview, two literary or cinematic key works are discussed in order to illustrate and elaborate on the architectural development of suburbia on a fictional level in the corresponding time frame.

Chapter one focuses on the 1920s, a decade in which the United States experienced a first suburban boom. The “Roaring Twenties” was a time when most of the country’s suburban areas still retained a sense of exclusivity and were predominantly affluent – which was mainly due to the cost of travel between the city and its suburbs –, and this affluence manifested itself in architecture, in interior design, as well as in consumer products, among other domains. The literary examples chosen for this period are Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, two works which not only portray the mentioned suburban affluence, but which are also set in the two metropolitan areas that were the first to be impacted by suburbanisation, that is, the Midwest around Chicago and Detroit, and Long Island, New York.

With the 1930s and early 1940s being dominated by the Great Depression and World War II, chapter two resumes the story of the suburbanisation of the United States in the postwar period, a time when new housing was needed quickly and cost-effectively. Mass production of development tracts on the outskirts of the country’s urban centres was the result, and it proved to shape the suburban environment decisively. At the same time, however, people were dreaming of Arcadian landscapes after the horrors of the war, and they were hoping to fulfil their dreams in the suburbs. Eric Hodgins’ Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is an example of people’s misguided hopes regarding life outside the city, as well as of the imminent threat that fast-paced building activities posed to rural areas after the war. As far as architectural mass production is concerned, John Keats’ The Crack in the Picture Window sheds light on the effects of this phenomenon on the average suburbanite, as well as on the largely irrevocable mistakes that have been made in the planning of the suburban landscape in the United States.

Chapter three loosely covers the aftermath of suburban mass production in the remainder of the twentieth century, when the outskirts still expanded rampantly, and when many people had lived in this environment long enough to be somewhat disillusioned by the experience. By the 1960s, the suburbs had already gained a negative reputation and were heavily criticised for a variety of reasons, most of which have persisted until this day. The 1960s were also the time when some of the most iconic narratives of suburbia were written, and when two of the most notable authors of suburban fiction, John Updike and John Cheever, emerged. However, in order to give this chapter a new dimension, the two selected novels, Anne Rivers Siddons’ The House Next Door and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, were published in the late 1970s and mid-1990s, respectively, and are not exclusively concerned with the ubiquitous discourse on triteness and conformity. The House Next Door was chosen as a representative of the Suburban Gothic, and the novel simultaneously portrays the changing and diversifying architectural landscape of the suburbs by means of the efforts of an architect to build a contemporary house among the omnipresent Dutch Colonials. The Tortilla Curtain, dealing with an important development related to suburban planning, was selected due to its focus on the gated community and the attempt to defend the suburban dream by means of the built environment.

With this phenomenon being the most defining characteristic of contemporary suburbia, chapter four deals with suburban sprawl. Since the 1920s, suburbia has never ceased to expand, and an overwhelming more than fifty per cent of Americans now live in this environment. In other words, the suburban population is presently larger than that of the urban and the rural combined. Many inner-city neighbourhoods have become deserted and dilapidated, and suburban sprawl has come to dominate the landscape. As sprawl has a highly elusive and visual dimension, when it comes to fiction, the medium of film undoubtedly provides a better representation of this phenomenon than the written word, which is why two films by independent director Todd Solondz are discussed. Within the context of his most celebrated film Happiness, the analysis mainly focuses on the architectural eclecticism that sprawl has brought to the American landscape, whereas within the context of his more recent release Dark Horse, the suburban infrastructure and the car-based lifestyle that is engendered through suburban expansion are scrutinised.

The concluding chapter offers a summary not only of the works discussed, but also of the contemporary criticism surrounding the American suburb as both a built and social space, and it outlines predictions about the future development of this environment. Furthermore, the question of the relationship between material buildings and literary architecture is addressed again, since this question underlies the discussion of texts in this book, but in the past was often perceived as an irreconcilable issue in literary criticism. Furthermore, attention is drawn to the differences between the physical suburb and its literary representation, as even though writers and directors are bound to be inspired by their built environment, they are equally bound to be inspired by the myths surrounding American suburbia, and these myths have persisted in fiction more than in reality.