"Particularly after the war, FHA's endorsement of prebuilt subdivisions paved the way for developments like Levittown that did not adopt the assembly-line house but rather turned the entire site into a giant assembly line. Holes were dug, slabs poured, and framing hoisted simultaneously in a stepwise sequence across the whole of the site within a huge choreographed machine that was several thousand acres large and produced fourty [sic] houses a day. Earth-moving equipment lined up and dug the holes for several buildings at once or planted a uniform number of shrubs on the lot. Even appliances were delivered to several houses at once. The balance sheet for this kind of subdivision was restructured as well. The bottom line did not only correspond to an individual address but to a process applied to hundreds or even thousands of homes. Thus, a developer might evaluate the costs of pouring a thousand concrete slabs, and as a consequence of this new tabulation of costs, find new ways to economize in the building process. Reducing the thickness of a slab or of structural members on an individual home would provide negligible savings, but within a summation process, alterations to several thousand slabs or beams provided significant savings. From prefinancing, prebuilding, and prefabrication evolved an entirely new residential fabric in which all the negotiations among the pieces occurred all at once and would be undifferentiated by iterative growth over time. In return for more predictable resale value, the home buyer bought the house lot together as well as accepting simultaneous development of a very similar fabric throughout with more predictable resale value."
- Keller Easterling, from
Organization Space (1999).
Sounds like a very interesting book. But why $55? It's 215 pages. It should be half that.
ReplyDeleteThe linked edition is hardcover, my friend, and from an academic press at that.
ReplyDeletethere is a lot of truth to the ideas expressd in that book.
ReplyDeletehowever to be fair to the topic it is also useful to have a look at:
"The New Suburban History(Historical Studies of Urban America)", edited by kevin kruse. or similar. this text is not an apologist text like you might expect from peter gordon and his crew, but rather a social science and historical driven examination of suburbia that very strongly shows how the reality of suburbs was never as simple as a cookie-cutter, not as racially homogeneous as the conventional wisdom has it, nor as culturally vacant as books like the one this quote was exerpted from have perpetuated since suburbs began.
you would think the lessons from Gan's "levittowners"(1967) would have been enough to open peeople's eyes to the nuanced reality of suburbia, but instead we get this sort of predigested re-write from admittedly smart folk like easterling...doesn't anyone do original research anymore?
it is slightly annoying as the suburbs have real problems that require attention and this sort of mindlessly accepting metatheory is not going to advance things much further...