Manifest Destiny: A Guide to the Essential Indifference of American Suburban Housing

——— Manifest Destiny Jason Griffiths

On 18 October 2002 Alex Gino and I set out to explore the American suburbs.

Over 178 days we drove 22,382 miles, made 134 suburban house calls and took 2,593 photographs. Our goal was not a place per se but more a collective view of contemporary housing. The distended sense of mass that characterises suburbia was important as it provided a counter-experience to our usual architectural tourism; rather than preplanned visits to single buildings, we sought out a general condition away from the urban core and within the continuous pattern of houses at the periphery of America’s cities.

Instead of the unique we sought the multidirectional, and instead of the specific, the placeless.

Our aim was to acquire an intimate understanding of the suburban environment through an uninterrupted tour of gently graded inclines and burnished concrete surfaces. Our approach was systematic: typically, we would look for the newest development or gated community and then attempt to drive every road within its confines in a deliberate circuit. On each visit we photographed houses repeatedly from as many angles as we could, including, if possible, from inside. We talked to owners, estate agents, builders and service workers and visited show homes, building sites and yard sales. Once we had exhausted the internal routes we would explore these developments from outside, along perimeter roads, highways and service routes.

Gradually, we began to form an impression of suburbia as the pursuit of a collective ideal that continually resists its denouement. This elusiveness became the focus of our research. Like an architectural pattern book, our visual account of the

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contemporary suburban picture records the fastidious and relentless pursuit of perfection played out in the houses and spaces at the edges of American cities. This is a realm where nothing, from the flow of water to the grain of a carpet, eludes inspection. Our experience suggested this pursuit as the very measure of the suburbanite (or, as Robert Fishman terms it, ‘techno-urbanite’), whose identity is gauged in the thoroughness with which they renew everything within their immediate environment. Privately owned single-unit homes regularly account for over two-thirds of the annual housing starts in the US, confirming the dominance of the suburban ideal in the ceaseless quest for an ideal place of repose. Suburbia is a complete place born of the manic restoration of arcadia, painstakingly reassembled and neurotically reinforced through social practice, law and an omnipresent desire to be well groomed and nice.

The tour set in motion an interest that stays with us today. Wherever we have lived, we have continued to visit the suburbs and build on what we discovered. Many of these photographs were taken around Phoenix and in the American south-west, where we choose to live and work. Here suburbia lies in abundance in its latest, most audacious form and yet frozen in a moment of doubt and stasis. Phoenix is a city (like Las Vegas) where the apotheosis of the suburban experiment now hangs in the balance — perhaps it will prove to be its greatest achievement, or perhaps the mark in the sand where the dream finally came to a halt.

What follows, in this introduction and the book as a whole, is an attempt to describe this experience through some of its most apparent characteristics. A labyrinthine

realm like suburbia offers no obvious set of hierarchies and priorities; instead we offer our observations in no particular order, grouped under headings that define each characteristic as we saw it.

—————————— Perhaps the most immediately apparent of suburbia’s characteristics is the absence of any constraint to its outer limits. Perimeter walls that appear robust have a curiously temporary feel, as if perpetually on the point of moving. In many places these walls open onto newly graded lots that are divided with preliminary road layouts. The land is scraped clean, compliant and ready for the next wave of housing — and there is something oddly acquiescent about the way this landscape appears unable to resist the expansion of the suburbs.

The suburbs contained within these walls seem intent on forcing the edge ever outwards. As a result, the delineation of suburbia’s limits has an episodic quality, marking periods of both expansion and inactivity. Development occurs in bands that bulge outwards at different points along the city’s boundary, revealed as a sequence that varies according to value, construction period and so on. By carefully choosing our route we were able to thread together a sequential suburban history of a particular city, tracing the points at which naturefocused 1970s housing (‘Willow Creek’ and ‘Falcon Run’ for example) gave way to the period homes of the late 1990s (‘Williamstown’ and ‘Gettysburg’). As we continued driving outwards, these zones faded from one to another with a kind of ebbing insistence, and only a gradual but clearly perceptible increase in property

values told us that we were slowly nearing the edge. When this edge didn’t actually appear, we would stop to get a better view from a rare high point in the terrain, only to be greeted with a vista of more rooftops stretching out in multiple directions. The overriding impression was that the city was unwilling to relinquish itself entirely to the surrounding countryside.

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The gentle loops and arcs of today’s suburban roads stand in contrast to the unyielding grid of the city’s road network.

Unsurprisingly, our attempts to drive each and every road within a development often resulted in complete disorientation. But rather than fighting this process of perpetually getting lost, we discovered it to be a prime way to experience the sense of abandonment that pervades these suburbs.

Accordingly, our journeys became deliberately labyrinthine misadventures of slow and directionless movement.

Our focus on the newest suburbs meant that we would often find ourselves in completed and yet apparently unoccupied places. In appearance, these outdoor suburban spaces had a ready familiarity, but in reality it is hard to describe just how disconcertingly abandoned they feel. It was, for example, very easy to take photographs without people in them, but almost impossible to find people when we wanted to include them. Standing in one spot, waiting for something to happen, the silence would only occasionally be broken by the ponderous movement of a car or the inevitable jogger or dog walker. As soon as they had gone, the quiet would come back and re-establish control.

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4 ——— Concluding Balustrade

This pair of non-identical balustrades terminates a straight flight of 15 stairs that opens onto a large double-height living room. Framed by a 25-foot slot that stretches almost up to the ceiling and decorated in a palette of cream and mushroom, this staircase seems to have been designed with sweeping entrances and exits half in mind. In keeping with these aspirations of domestic elegance, the handrail on the left-hand side extends the full height of the stair; the one on the right-hand side, however, is somewhat shorter. Measuring a total of 11 inches and supported by two balusters, this truncated detail appears to have resulted from a belated realisation that the stairway required a symmetrical conclusion or perhaps from an attempt to disguise the protruding stringer at the bottom. This imbalance is reflected in the actual staircase itself: while the substantial framing device of the slot, the length of the run and the adjacency to the double-height living room all suggest a scala regia-style feature, the actual width of the flight is that of a conventional stair — in fact, a standard codecompliant dimension for a single handrail stair. A lone handrail accordingly winds its way down the stairway and elbows neatly into its end post — a grand effort that is undermined by the stunted balustrade opposite, which has swiftly come to the same conclusion.

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14 ——— Many Views of the Country

From the 1960s onwards suburban designers have made a marked effort to restore a sense of uniqueness to the views from suburban windows. Responding to criticisms that the linear alignment so typical of 1950s developments produced a sterile and ultimately dehumanising effect, the architects of suburbia have returned to the bucolic setting of the earliest suburbs. This attempt to re-establish the prototypical picturesque relationship between the house and its surroundings is, however, significantly more difficult in the planned communities and close proximities of contemporary developments.

Now houses are arranged in a deliberately ad hoc manner, each juxtaposed with its neighbour in a carefully angular relationship.

1950s linearity has been replaced by curvaceous roads and cul-de-sacs whose pseudo-ruralism seeks to conceal any sense of repetition — an arrangement designed to transform ‘nowhere’ into ‘somewhere’.

Looking out from within this particular house you are left with the distinct impression that the designers’ efforts to reinstate the role of picture window — and the ideal of the contrived but convincing ‘natural’ — have been only partially successful. Today’s suburbia hankers after its prewar condition while trying to deliver houses at a profitable rate. This view appears to offer a compositional concession that picturesque aesthetics are yet to recover from the explosion of postwar mass production. In granting an unintentional op-art vibrancy to the suburban view, this window testifies to the fragmentation and dissonance that typify this hybrid of the picturesque and the mass-produced.

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16 ——— Un-Optioned Bonus

Many new suburban homes are advertised in plan with optional upgrades, described by sales managers as ‘bonus rooms’ which can be plugged into basic layouts to suit the particular needs of the purchaser. ‘Flexible’ and ‘plug-in’ are of course canonical terms in architectural discourse, though it is unclear whether their use in the suburban context represents a conscious invocation of architectural theory. Moreover, while the term plug-in might have been appropriated directly from 1960s Archigram, its use here confounds the technological optimism of that moment. These suburban plug-ins lack not only a technological formalism but also any respect for the concept of flexibility. Here, ‘flexibility’ applies solely to the design stage and is clearly not the open-ended interchangeability vaunted

by Archigram. On the other hand, ‘flexible’ also invites comparisons with modernist notions of the free plan and flexible programming and here there are more similarities. In a language strangely reminiscent of modernist rhetoric, this plan assures the purchaser that the unfulfilled option will allow them to programme the space as they wish. And while the architectural tenets of flexibility have been challenged by reality, the suburban experiment has produced a flexible space entirely its own. Un-optioned, this space has the potential to become a conventional bedroom but apparently lacks the conviction to complete itself. This un-optioned option of ‘Loft/Opt. Bedroom 5’ occupies a uniquely flexible position somewhere between the familiar and the unknown — a quasi-bedroom, quasi-open space poised perpetually in search of its defining function.

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Bathroom Open to Below Bedroom

WC

Open to Below Bath

Bedroom

Open to Below Loft/ Bedroom Bedroom

Bedroom

Bedroom

26 ——— The Descent of the Shed

A great deal of suburban architecture may be bought off the shelf in hardware superstores like Home Depot and Lowes. Here at a branch of Home Depot in College Station, Texas, a string of prefabricated garden sheds are arranged in ascending order outside the store’s front entrance. The structures are carefully spaced to create an enhanced perspective of rural typologies and conventional pitched-roof forms, almost like an evolutionary tree, while their rhythmic variation suggests the parametric sequencing of a core module. Regardless of size, each shed is formed from a basic family of elements, differentiated by the orientation and pattern of their pressed-board cladding, configurations of standard doors and windows and the contrast between their primary colour and their delineating trim.

In addition, some are oriented with side views while others present their gable ends. Today, sheds like these are more likely to be used in a domestic context than an agricultural one, and the vast majority of these structures will end up in the back yards of single-family houses. Here they will serve as understudies to the main house, underscoring the enduring legitimacy of this basic typology. In the meantime, however, they are lined up in front of Home Depot’s entrance like some typological bar chart describing the gradual reduction of the grand agricultural shed down to the suburban backyards of a small Texan City.

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34 ——— Model Construction

Most suburban houses are built on clear ground that poses few obstacles to construction, with builders typically sequencing works along a street so that one building trade follows another in consecutive order. This sometimes has the effect of generating streets that start with an empty site at one end and terminate with an inhabited house at the other. Accordingly, workers on the site may range from a concreting crew laying an initial slab to gangs of cleaners preparing a finished residence for final inspection. In between lie a series of incremental phases accompanied by the ancillary items appropriate to each phase of construction: bare slabs are attended by neat piles of 2x4 studs, and stick-framed forms by compressors and nail guns. The episodic formation of the street suggests an animated sequence which traces the gradual emergence of a single house from bare earth to its final state. Moreover, the ability to see this process in a single glance (an opportunity denied by the density and confusion of most other building sites) lends the suburban construction site a strangely idealised quality. Here, a latent rationale is laid out like a step-by-step, three-dimensional illustration of construction methodology which seems almost too perfect to be true. The homogeneity of each phase and the fastidious order of site-delivered materials have a quasi-representational quality while the blank OSB-clad forms resemble the digital models illustrated in suppliers’ catalogues. This order and abstraction bestows an artificiality that can only be achieved in such a compliant landscape. Perfection, it seems, only emerges from the stretches of clear ground on a newly graded suburban construction site.

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