The Seven of U.S.: Simulation and the American Suburb

摘要

The detached, single-family suburban home has come to signify the national residential identity of the American people for the past eighty plus years and has recently come under the scrutiny of critique. Suburban America has generated an immediate, unchecked, and untapped ecosystem which has continually defined and will continue to impact the appearance and discourse of housing in the United States. The creation of perverse worlds of architectural image and domestic commodity is the resultant of a culture of advertisement and the creation of idealistic portrayals of the authentic "American" way of life. Absurd versions of their predecessors, these homes have been replicated over the course of the past decades to the point of an almost sinful representations of the suburban paradigms. Through misinterpretation, this realm of puesdo-architectural endeavor has developed a neo-vernacular architecture embodying a distilled reflection of the typical American consumer mindset and the developer's economic policy. This thesis seeks to analyze the suburban house as commodity, as image, and as propaganda, through seven lenses of focus centered around the idealistic representation of the postwar American suburb and its physical actuality. Through appropriation and recontextualization of these seven tropes, a series of seven canonical houses will be created in critique of the current suburban architectural culture. "The Seven" will become a fatal strategy with the aim to implode the pervasiveness of the contemporary simulated suburb. This is an exploration towards the absurd.