Indoor America: The Interior Landscape of Postwar Suburbia appears at a poignant time in the United States. Only two years after its publication, much of the country is indeed largely indoors, sheltering in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public life as we knew it almost disappeared for a time as we rallied to recreate some semblance of it in virtual space. As our computers became windows to the world beyond, we also realized this new public life was more accessible to some than others depending on financial and technological resources. In Indoor America, Andrea Vesen-tini takes us back to another period when Americans turned indoors in large numbers, this time by choice. In the mid-twentieth century, he argues, the United States relocated the better part of private and public life to protected interior, and largely suburban, spaces. The book chronicles Americans' increasing spatial and social "interiorization" in the early and mid-twentieth century in three stages: encapsulation with the automobile, introversion in domestic space, and finally, full interiorization in places such as shopping malls and designs for indoor cities. While not mutually exclusive categories, these stages were part of a larger process of "redesigning the urban landscape as one of interconnected interiors" (17).
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