American Homes
by Lester Walker
It's my web site and I can put the books where I want them. This one caught my eye as a possible source for information I could use in designing stage sets, so. Another person might have called it History and Archaeology or maybe Science and Technology; it well could fit either category.
Well, did it contain the stuff I hoped for? Too soon to tell. It will take me some time to begin drawing on what I found here: 103 chapters, 309 pages, and way more than the promised thousand illustrations. It's a staggering book. Walker set out to document, in images and language a layperson can understand, how people have designed and built dwellings in this country. Wait, did I say since or between? I did not. The descriptions begin with the first homes known here, earth lodges (rock shelters are found, not built), and end with one of those Larry Niven tubeworlds traveling in the Moon's orbit.
The focus, if such a word applies to such a work, is on the interplay of economics (what materials are available and suitably cheap), engineering (how do you keep warm in winter and dry on rainy days), heritage (what kind of house did your grandparents live in) and fashion (what did your architect admire when visiting London). Well, interplay is a theatrical idea. Let's see what we see.
First you have to understand a term or two, and there's a glossary in the back. An elevation is just a straight-up drawing: Here's what you see looking at the house from the front, or standing at the front door looking toward the fireplace. A view lets you see walls and roof at the same time. A plan represents the house where it intersects the ground it's built on. American Homes gives one or more elevations or views for every house pictured, but they are all exteriors; any information about rooms you have to get from the plans. Not to say that isn't a lot of information: From a careful plan (and these are careful plans) you can get the size of the room, what kind of view it offers to the outdoors, how it's warmed and cooled, what functions it performs and what kind of traffic moves through it. Useful data. The plan doesn't show how the windows were finished on the inside, what kind of wallboard was used or what color it was painted, or in most cases where the people chose to place their furniture. So the book leaves the designer still with a lot of work to do.
On the other hand, knowing that Americans of such and such a time just had one space to their dwelling, say their tipi or their 1580s Spanish cottage, really tells you a good deal about that one room. And you can make some inferences, such as that folks who build the outside of their house from wattle-and-daub ("a mixture of mud, stones and sticks") probably don't hang an elaborately framed portrait of Grampa Slappy over the credenza. So the scenic designer has background material that's probably about as good as what the costume designer has for such remote periods.
Let me get away from this narrow approach, though. Cripes, just think, a hundred and three chapters! It's tremendous, far more than I could take in even though I spread the reading out over a month or longer. Every major style-current gets pictured, not just "Craftsmen Cottage" and "Greek Revival" but also engineering innovations that affect design, such as balloon-frame construction. The drawings, scaled with both numbers and tiny people, are remarkably easy to follow: Walker draws a clear but not mechanical line, makes certain that key details stand out, links the parts in an obvious way, and adds callouts to draw your attention to the cedar shingles or the broken pediments that set one style apart from another. Views and plans are on the same scale.
Americans have probably made, what, 400 million dwellings, and Walker shows a thousand-odd here. Unless you live in one of the two surviving Medieval cottages in the Chesapeake region or a Frank Lloyd Wright creation in Oak Park, you won't find your house in here (or your grandparents' house; I've spent hours looking for that Woodlawn Ave. pile). That's a weakness; the two ways to get your house in appear to have been (1) Big-Name Designer and (2) Perfect Example. But where else are you going to go to find a thousand systematically arranged, cleverly described, well-crafted, intelligently labeled scale drawings of places where people live? I expect to spend years digesting what Walker spent years assembling. Good book. And through some oversight down at the publisher's (Black Dog & Leventhal) it's priced at only about $16.
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American Homes