Review: A Field Guide to American Houses, by Virginia Savage McAlester

From the book review:

Virginia Savage McAlester’s marvelous A Field Guide to American Houses does for the residential built environment what it took me stacks and stacks of gardening books to do for plants: explain what you’re seeing and why it is the way it is, so that you can see the world around you in a new way. She wrote in the preface to the original 1984 edition that it is “a practical field manual for identifying and understanding the changing fashions, forms, and components of American houses,” so with book in hand (or possibly waiting for you at home, since the paperback weighs three and a half pounds) you should be able walk down any street in America and identify the style of every house you encounter.

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Many of the changes in house style were just a matter of fashion [...]. Local conditions had their part to play, of course — porches have always been far more popular in the South, for obvious reasons. But technological advances in heating, roofing materials, and construction techniques have also done a great deal to influence the forms and structures of American houses, and here McAlester’s opening hundred pages or so are invaluable.

Take roofing: traditional English cottages are typically thatched, but thatch will only shed water if the roof is pitched very steeply. Accordingly, a thatched building can’t be very deep — if you want to make it bigger you have to make it longer, because making it wider would require an impossibly high roof. The earliest buildings in the New World copied familiar European construction patterns wholesale, but the colonists quickly discovered that thatch didn’t stand up to severe New England winters and switched to covering their roofs with wooden planks or shingles — which, incidentally, will shed water at a lower pitch. And since those same long, cold winters made a larger house seem awfully appealing, and a square is a much more efficient way of enclosing the same area, the colonists quickly worked out a lower-pitched framing technique that could span a full two-room depth. Thus, by 1750, most American houses were closer to square than oblong. As for heating, I’ve discussed elsewhere the ways the switch from burning wood to burning coal changed domestic architecture; McAlester extends it to central furnaces (coal or, later, oil and gas) that could heat a large or irregular house without needing multiple stoves or grates.

But if we’re trying to identify a house from its exterior alone, the most dramatic technological change comes in the 1830s with the development of balloon-frame construction. This is more or less how most houses are built today — a skeleton of light-weight wood framing made of standardized dimensional lumber — so you’ll recognize it if you live in a part of the country where people are allowed to build things. You’re probably less familiar with the construction techniques that came before: solid masonry or heavy timbers. They’re both incredibly labor-intensive (if very sturdy!) ways of building, but when we’re looking at the shapes of houses, the most relevant factor is that they both make it very difficult to build a corner. Stone or brick are prone to erosion at the corners and need specially strengthened patterns to avoid instability, while corners in a timber frame require hand-hewn mortise-and-tenon joints. By contrast, with balloon framing, all you need to make a corner is a few extra boards and some nails.5 Irregularly shaped houses with many exterior corners suddenly became practical, and by the 1850s they were widespread.

And there is more about the technological changes that allowed the growth of suburbs, identifying different kinds of suburbs, etc.

The first of these transportation advances was the railroad. In fact “railroad suburb” is a bit of a misnomer, because most of the collections of houses that grew up around the new rail stops were fully functional towns that had their own agricultural or manufacturing industries. The most famous railroad suburbs, however, were indeed planned as residential communities serving those wealthy enough to pay the steep daily rail fare into the city. Llewellyn Park near New York City, Riverside near Chicago, and the Main Line near Philadelphia are all examples of railroad suburbs that have maintained their tony atmosphere and high property values.

The next and more dramatic change was the advent of the electric trolley or streetcar, first introduced in 1887 but popular until about 1930. (That’s what all the books say, but come on, it’s probably October 1929, right?) Unlike steam locomotives, which take quite a long time to build up speed or to slow down again, and so usually had their stations placed at least a mile apart, streetcars could start and stop far more easily and feature many more, and more densely-placed, stops. Developers typically built a streetcar line from the city veering off into the thinly-inhabited countryside, ending at an attraction like a park or fairground if possible. If they were smart, they’d bought up the land along the streetcar beforehand and could sell it off for houses, but either way the new streetcar line added value to the land and the development of the land made the streetcar more valuable.

You can easily spot railroad towns and streetcar suburbs in any real estate app if you filter by the date of construction (for railroad suburbs try before 1910, for streetcar before 1930) and know what shapes to look for. Railroad towns are typically farther out from the urban center and are built in clusters around their stations, which are a few miles from one another. Streetcar suburbs, by contrast, tend to be continuous but narrow, because the appeal of the location dropped off rapidly with distance from the streetcar line. (Lots are narrow for the same reason — to shorten the pedestrian commute.) They expand from the urban center like the spokes of a wheel.

And then came the automobile and, later, the federal government. The car brought a number of changes — paved streets, longer blocks, wider lots (you weren’t walking home, after all, so it was all right if you had to go a little farther) — but nothing like the way the Federal Housing Authority restructured neighborhoods.

The FHA was created by the National Housing Act of 1934 with the broad mandate to “improve nationwide housing standard, provide employment and stimulate industry, improve conditions with respect to mortgage financing, and realize a greater degree of stability in residential construction.” It was a big job, and the FHA set out to accomplish it in a typical New Deal fashion: providing federal insurance for private construction and mortgage loans, but only for houses and neighborhoods that met its approval. This has entered general consciousness as “redlining,” after the color of the lines drawn around uninsurable areas (typically old, urban housing stock), but the green, blue, and yellow lines — in order of declining insurability — were just as influential on the fabric of contemporary America.

A slow economy through the 1930s and a prohibition on nonessential construction during the war meant that FHA didn’t have much to do until 1945, but as soon as the GIs began to come home and take advantage of their new mortgage subsidies, there was a massive construction boom. With the FHA insuring both the builders’ construction loans and the homeowners’ mortgages, nearly all the new neighborhoods were built to the FHA’s exacting specifications.

Incidentally, I bought this book on Kindle and I think a hard copy would be better. Maybe better to find it at a library?