Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America

摘要

We are awash in studies of the postwar American suburb, but most, architectural historian Dianne Harris tells us, have forsaken any real attention to the normative whiteness attending how its domestic spaces were envisioned, valued, promoted and sold. She details the consolidation of a racialized way of seeing, one taught - in magazines, on television's newfangled 'home shows', by buildings themselves - through a suasive, natural-seeming set of non-verbal 'spatial rhetorics'. House forms 'became poignant ciphers for whiteness' (p. 1), she argues, but the average American seldom interrogated these codes, 'tend[ing] then as now toward much lower levels of spatial literacy than media literacy' (p. 266). Harris herself, however, is an appealingly close looker, and Little White Houses reinterprets a potent extract of postwar (1945 to 1960) visual culture, arrayed over ample, glossy pages that should entice even casual students of this moment.