UC Berkeley

In the brief twenty-year between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, US home builders rehoused millions of Americans, reshaping the dominant character of domestic space and decisively shifting in the nation’s residential landscape from the city to the suburbs. Existing scholarship on the common, suburban tract house tends to treat the products of this housing revolution as interchangeable, rote objects and to address their makers as monolithic, anonymous capitalist forces. As a result, the common suburban tract house remains an undisciplined object that falls outside dominant histories of design.

There is, however, a rich design story behind common suburban tract houses. Seeing this story requires writing a design history of tract housing that looks at these objects not according to the prevailing standards of professional architecture or architectural design, but in the context of the design objectives, design values and design environments of their makers. This study examines the emergence of a culture of design practice among large-scale home builders in the decades bracketing World War II in order to construct a better understand the process of commoditized housing design and foster better interpretation and contextualization of common suburban tract houses as design objects.

Between the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) in 1934 and the late 1950s, home builders engaged in vigorous discourse on the nature and goals of their work in trade and popular shelter publications and the proceedings of building industry conventions and gatherings. The study draws on that discourse to examine how the political economy of housing development in the pre- and post-World War II periods, from an emerging US housing policy to treating housing as a commodity - shaped the builders’ design objectives, conceptions of “good design,” and the physical form and character of period housing. The study also examines builders’ design methods and practices, recasting the borrowing, adaptation, and merchandising of housing models as key elements of builders’ design work.

The study repositions the nature of authorship for tract housing, recognizing the builder as a design director who worked in tandem with multidisciplinary design teams and, most importantly, directly and indirectly with consumers to coproduce housing models. In these efforts, builders tailored their work to specific local conditions, reconciling economic, cultural, geographic, and social factors into the form of a material object. These dynamics make tract houses inescapably local material cultural expressions even when in dialog with national design trends. The collaborative authorship and coproduction dynamics of tract housing design and the localized adaptation of their forms also position tract houses as a form of vernacular architecture created in a dynamic and rapidly changing marketplace – a market vernacular. Like other forms of vernacular architecture, tract houses can be read as indices of cultural and social patterns at local and regional scale, as well as indicators of the diffusion and acceptance of design ideas.

The power of the local in tract housing design goes beyond the object itself, however. Even in the face of a rapidly organizing and nationalized home building industry, local markets remained important testing and proving grounds for new building and design ideas. The San Francisco Bay Area of California was a critical center of housing design leadership in the period. This study examines the work of three design leaders in the home building industry from the Bay Area – Henry Doelger, David Bohannon, and Earl Smith –to demonstrate how local design and production experimentation advanced the methods, practices, and habits of the larger national building culture during both World War II and the postwar periods. The Bay Area was an important point of diffusion for the “California method” of building, involving engineered design, precutting, selected preassembly, and staged sequential construction, later to gain fame in the Levitt & Sons’ Levittown, New York development. The region was also the first location for widespread construction of FHA-insured tract housing with cost-saving elements of Modern styling, pioneered by Earl Smith.

Smith, Bohannon and Doelger were able to influence national home building through the increased organization and professionalization of the home building industry in the mid-twentieth century, facilitated primarily through the National Association of Home Builders. Through networks of builder-to-builder exchange and industry-centered research, home builders codified and diffused bodies of design knowledge and best practices in design and production to solidify their position as the primary answer to Americans’ housing needs. The result was the emergence of a distinct design community that intersected with, but fundamentally differed from professional architecture and a burst of housing design development and creativity brought about not by architects, but by home builders.