The Homecoming, N.C. Wyeth, 1945
Better Homes and Gardens cover, 1947
foreign energy. From a vision of living in balance and stewardship with the land, we descended into a reality lacking any measure of resilience and sustainability, especially notable for our individual and community disconnect from nature. This was—and by and large remains to this day—a model that came to be recognized as industrial scale home building in vast affordable single-family housing subdivisions. It is most commonly referred to today as production home building. It has done exceptionally well as a business enterprise and to an extent has provided over the years entry-level housing options to a significant number of middle-income Americans. However, as the model became an institutionalized norm and began to falter, it was given a new name: Sprawl Development. By whatever name, it was marked by its demand for social conformity and separation, uniformity of home design, a deadening form and site repetition, and almost always a use of the lowest common denominator of construction technologies. (See images on page 7.) The rise of this new paradigm first overshadowed and then all but obliterated learning from and updating living local building traditions and vernacular design. That bucolic suburban landscape popular in post-war images slowly morphed into the picture of a relentless suburban expansion dominated by the needs of the car to the detriment of just about everything else. The house, and the land it would sit on, were scaled down and regularized for the convenience of builders, banks, and buyers. Predictability—such an understandable desire in the aftermath of a global war—had become a stifling sense of conformity and regularity.
It is easy to mock the optimistic images and the reality behind them in hindsight, but for millions, even the pared-down versions of those mid-1940s visions represented a dream: one that seemed possible and attainable then, but now far less so. It is critical in our day—some eighty years after that experiment began in earnest—to acknowledge that for many it appeared to be a dream made manifest. But understanding that this appearance of a dream has become a litany of deficiencies is one of the challenges in combating the sprawl paradigm.
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GROWING AWARENESS OF THE FAILURE OF THE SPRAWL MODEL The 1973 oil embargo was an awakening to the tenuousness of access to the energy sources that supported and literally fueled the post-WWII model for growth accommodation. The shocking realization of American dependence on offshore energy, the availability and price of which was not controllable, cast a profound doubt on the viability of the post-WWII fundamental assumptions of American suburban life. Could growth always be met indefinitely by expanding out towards cheap land? By the latter part of the 20th century, the unintended consequences of this great experiment with low-density suburban sprawl development so dependent on ever-expanding roadways and dependency on cars were becoming clear. The impact wrought by this system on families both in financial burden and social life was increasingly clear. The cost of operating cars; the time
