Bungalow Blitz – As they say, stick to low quantities for first printings, there’s always bound to be mistakes or the need to revise and update…
[Henry A. Savior, "Bungalows." Philadelphia: .John C. Winston. 1911. "Predominantly one story or a story-and-a-half high, bungalows typically had a wide front porch under an overhanging roof supported by stout, unornamented columns. Interiors were meant to reflect traditional craftsmanship, with hand-fashioned furniture, hardware, and light fixtures. Simple woodwork, built-in cabinets, and mantels reflected the honest use of materials."] – At the Grolier Club’s fantastic exhibit "Selling the Dwelling: The Books That Built America’s Houses, 1775-2000"(www.grolierclub.org/Default.aspx?p=DynamicModule&page…), closing THIS FRIDAY (Feb 7th). Run to see it.
www.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/arts/design/selling-the-dwelli…
"Selling the Dwelling: The Books That Built America’s Houses, 1775-2000" At the Grolier Club December 11 2013-February 7 2014; Curated by Richard W. Cheek
"In December of 2013 the Grolier Club will host an extraordinary exhibition on the history of the American Dream of home ownership. Over 200 rare books, periodicals, drawings, periodicals, and printed ephemera will show how the idea of “A Home for All” was marketed in the United States, first through eighteenth-century builder’s guides, then by nineteenth-century pattern books, and finally by twentieth-century house plan catalogues.
"The plans, elevations, and large, elaborate, and often colorful perspective views in these books fueled the growth of home ownership in America. The story begins in 1775 with George Bell’s reproduction of Abraham Swan’s The British Architect, credited as the first architectural book published in America. The show will contrast early American editions of luxurious pattern books for the wealthy with a selection of the more modest “builder’s guides” used by most Americans who desired to construct a house. As the Republic grew, and novel styles of design began to challenge Classical and Federal norms, new domestic pattern books such as Alexander Jackson Davis’s Rural Residences (1837) began to offer plans and elevations in the new Italianate and Gothic styles.
"After a hiatus in building during the Civil War, American house building resumed in earnest, fueled by an explosion of architectural book publishing, which now focused on providing house plans by mail. The trend begins in 1856 with Cleaveland and Backus’s Village and Farm Cottages and Cummings and Miller’s Architecture (1865), and grows throughout the 1870s with Hussey’s 1875 Home Building, and Palliser’s Model Homes for the People (1876).
"By the 1880s the quasi-periodical publications of Robert W. Shoppell’s “Co-operative Building Plan Association” illustrate the growing importance of magazines — Godey’s Lady’s Book, Ladies’ Home Journal, House Beautiful and House and Garden — as a vehicle for popularizing house designs. At the turn of the century, as the demand for more small houses increased, local millwork companies and national retailers like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward began to produce pre-cut homes that could be shipped by railroad for assembly by local carpenters. The exhibition devotes a special section to the advertising and marketing of this new mode of house-building.
"With so many different businesses issuing house plan books simultaneously, an incredible variety of often elaborately-designed and printed publications was produced, usually accompanied by other forms of advertisement such as home planning guides, company journals, flyers, posters, calendars and paper models. Focusing directly on the consumer, chiefly on women, this vast panoply of promotional material promised a tasteful, convenient, and comfortable dwelling to anyone who purchased the products and services or followed the advice being offered. The post-WWII home-building boom reinvigorated plan book production, with modernism gaining a foothold when the undecorated version of the ranch house became part of the vogue for wide, single-level houses in the 1950s and early 1960s.
"The exhibition tracks extensive and rapid changes to the literature of house building after 1970. The level of house catalogue publication declined in the 1970s and 80s, chiefly because large tract developers were making more of the design decisions for new dwellings than prospective homeowners were. Many smaller house plan publishers went out of business, and the supply of plan books was further diminished in the 1990s, as house designs became increasingly available on internet sites which offered CD-ROMS instead of printed catalogues.
"The evolution of the house design book in the United States is a long and complicated story, filled with architectural creativity and banality, commercial genius and excess, egalitarian and humanitarian ideals, literary and social ambition, can-do individualism, faith in progress and invention, and endless energy. All of these quintessential American traits are bound within the pages of the builder’s guides, pattern books, catalogues, and other forms of architectural literature that have competed for the financial and psychological rewards involved in designing and building a domestic haven for every citizen. Curator Richard W. Cheek highlights the more visually arresting and socially compelling examples of this genre, focusing on books that reveal the character of our country as much as they do the style of our houses."
Photograph by James Russiello
