Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture
(www.currentaffairs.org)
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But which is the most capitalist of styles?
The McMansion?
Or the split level?
Not an idle question here. There were two decades in America where quite literally 90% of the new houses were either split ranch or split foyer. You can drive around cities and identify the midcentury developments by when the house start looking samey.
Why doesn't she want a split level? if she doesn't want the 70s wood paneling or drop ceilings, plenty of them have been renovated.
And are there really no other types of suburban house where you live?
From what I understand, the reason for this was WWII. When the soldiers came home, they had four years worth of young men ready to marry their sweethearts and start families. Part of that was buying their first house. However, since the number of potential homebuyers outnumbered the number of houses, there was a housing shortage.
The solution they came up with was the prefabricated house. The prefab house could be built much quicker since they could mechanize the process of making the components and the construction workers got quicker, as they were building the same few houses over and over.
So, people were able to get a house quickly and affordably. The drawback was that you got, in the words of Malvina Reynolds, "little boxes that all look the same".
Eh....
Prefabs are a bit different.
What we call a prefab today is an outgrowth of a parallel development. See, during the 60's and 70's while builders were making split levels and ranches, mobile homes also emerged as a thing. Trailer parks.
By the 80's, the trailer park was dying out and the mobile home manufacturers decided they needed to innovate in order to survive. So they figured out how to build houses in halves, deliver them by truck, and then lift them onto poured foundations.
The houses of that 80's era are very easy to identify, they always look single story, ranch profile but not as wide as a 60's ranch, with a low sloped roof. These were really common where I grew up. They all had to be arranged in the same basic setup because they needed enough internal walls to keep them from collapsing while being driven to the foundation.
Prefabs never died out, you can still buy them today. But 90's developments started to move into McMansion territory.
Creating similar structures makes it easier and faster to expand. I live in a area where the houses age start around 1850 and they all look similar with near identical layouts.
Yes that was the Sears influence.
Back in the day you could order whole houses. The height of that era was about 1890 to the 1920's (and then briefly again after the war). You could order a precut house, shipped via boxcar. The whole concept died out when portable power tools and delivery trucks with cranes became practical after the war, at which point it was easier to just buy whole stacks of dimensional and sheetrock and build on site.