ABSTRACT
“Every civilization gets the monument it deserves,” according to César Daly, nineteenth-century urban thinker and perceptive observer of Paris’s modern makeover. 1 Elaborating on this notion in his seminal book Bourgeois Utopias, Robert Fishman describes how suburbia’s domestic architecture, shaped by mostly open and single-family residential land uses, cleverly reconciled the paradox of community building based on private property. Tracking the typology from its origin in eighteenth-century London, through its ostensible zenith in the postwar United States, to its purported quick demise in sprawling Los Angeles, he illustrates how the suburban ideal embodied middle-class culture, which celebrated family life and newfound affluence shaped by the workings of modern capitalism.
