ABSTRACT
Here, extracts from social critic John Keats’s famous and widely-read The Crack in the Picture Window of 1956 set the stage for the contempt for “tract houses” that has been so prevalent among American architects and social critics (Figs. 48, 49). But Levittown historian Curtis Miner, writing about the Pennsylvania Levittown, makes clear the attractions of these tiny dwellings (quickly built, inexpensive to buy, each with its own yard), and their architecturally innovative character (Figs. 50, 51). Levittown plans showed clearly a development toward the “open” living spaces of modern architecture. Notably, entrances have almost always shifted to the side to accommodate the automobile; hence the traditional front porch of rural and small town dwellings is absent. Art historian David Smiley, drawing on recent discussions of the American “culture industry”, and working with plan books and magazine articles of the 1940s and 1950s, demonstrates that American consumers demanded houses that offered a mixture of traditional and modern components, and thus “participated in the reshaping of an authentic modernism” [Smiley] (Figs. 52, 53). Architect and landscape historian Georges Teyssot traces the history of American front lawns, which, in tract housing, came to be continuous, providing a new kind of shared public space while serving as a kind of substitute for a larger, more rural site (Fig. 54). Architectural historian Sandy Isenstadt analyzes the development of the “picture window” in the context of American views of nature and landscape, and suggests that the tract house reflects an American desire for “spaciousness”, rather than the influence of any major modern architects (Fig. 55).
