This lucidly written and well-illustrated book examines how the effort to create the appearance of spaciousness in individual dwellings has shaped middle- and upper-class housing in the United States. While recent real estate trends mean that fewer and fewer “middle-class” buyers can afford much spaciousness of any kind, in this book Isenstadt engagingly traces the role and desirability of spaciousness in American housing design. It joins earlier books whose authors have also tried to find larger patterns in the North American residential environment, notably those of Sam Bass Warner, Gwendolyn Wright, Robert Fishman, Kenneth Jackson, Margaret Garb, along with many others. In Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), Warner emphasized the importance of new transportation technology in changing American residential patterns in the nineteenth century, while in Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), Wright looked at the importance of domestic ideologies. In Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), Fishman situated American suburban patterns in their larger Anglo-American cultural context, while in Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), Jackson first called attention, among other things, to the importance of the racially discriminatory policies of the early twentieth-century real estate industry (and eventually parts of the federal government) in shaping segregated postwar suburban ways of living. More recently, Garb and other urban historians have focused on issues like the nineteenth-century social and economic mechanics of home ownership, which have had many subsequent effects on American life generally (Margaret Garb, City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Strangely, little of this kind of scholarship has made its way into canonical architectural history, and Isenstadt’s book is a welcome attempt to widen the focus of the field along these lines.

The book is organized into nine chapters, after an introduction that outlines the concept of spaciousness in American dwelling. The first chapter begins with the eighteenth century, and Isenstadt calls attention to plan books like John Wood’s Series of Plans for Cottages or Habitations for the Labourer (1781), which he suggests may well be the first builder’s guide for small houses to be published in English. Isenstadt situates the development of affordable or small-scale homes within their larger context of picturesque landscape design and nascent Enlightenment ideas about housing for all social classes. Isenstadt’s story then segues to the United States, where the importance of popular magazines, easy credit, and the writings of essayists like the Reverend Edward Everett Hale on the value of homeownership are duly noted. He skillfully integrates landscape design concepts from A.J. Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted into this familiar story, along with housing-reform efforts like those of Lawrence Veiller, the tenement reformer and ardent opponent of urban multifamily dwellings. More specifically, architectural directions are considered in chapter 2, notably the Prairie School work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the humble and widely popular bungalow is also given its due. Interiors and techniques of illusion are the subject of chapter 3, while chapter 4 takes up in earnest techniques of landscape design. Chapter 5 examines windows in American residential design, and manufacturers like Corning enter the picture, along with a too-brief discussion of early twentieth-century German debates on transparency.

Isenstadt’s story again returns to the United States, with a discussion of how ideas about transparency shaped the residential works of Richard Neutra and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. His tracing of the recognition of the emerging commercial value of the view then leads in chapter 6 to a history of the picture window, that icon of postwar suburban prosperity. The picture window’s ambiguous property of allowing both total transparency from without and the ability to better survey the surroundings from within has been recently dissected by Beatriz Colomina in her Domesticity at War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), and here Isenstadt traces its earlier history in considerable detail. The next chapter takes a look at the “inside-outside” visual relationships, both those enabled by the picture window and those created by building and landscape design elements. Chapter 8 considers the “cheap luxury” of “the compensations of spaciousness,” and argues that the American suburban retreat organized to create a sense of spaciousness has allowed for an “indifference to the actual world.” A brief conclusion then relates some of the themes of the book to the work of artists such as Robert Irwin, Bill Viola, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, and Dan Graham, and to architects like Diller + Scofidio.

The Modern American House is clearly the product of much thoughtful effort, but at the same time it also vividly demonstrates the difficulties of attempting to widen the field of architectural history by engaging larger cultural constructs like “spaciousness.” The core audiences for architectural history tend to be interested in either examinations of particular formal and technical strategies and their outcomes in specific projects, or in the ways that the social values encoded in works of architecture can be critiqued and challenged. The material that Isenstadt works with here, however, is not especially promising for either approach. Architecturally it is mostly quite familiar, and there are whole libraries devoted to the consideration of every conceivable formal and social dimension of American houses. He demonstrates considerable scholarly depth and interpretive sophistication in guiding the reader through this vast material, but at points one does wonder how much new can really be said about much of it. The stronger and more interesting parts of the text attempt to go beyond such well-known (though undeniably important) design exemplars like Downing, Wright, or Neutra into areas like landscape design and various related decorative and commercial directions, but the ambitious chronological scope of the book makes some of these excursions seem superficial.

There is also some ambiguity in Isenstadt’s interpretive stance, which is partially hidden by the gigantic range of material that he so deftly surveys. His main argument is that the American focus on a residential sense of spaciousness ultimately shaped both American and what he calls “other kinds” of modernism. Presumably what he means by this is that both American and other kinds of modernism can offer only an illusion of engagement with nature, rather than some kind of more authentic experience. This is an interesting argument, but the book does not really focus on modernism per se, at least as it is normally defined. To do so would require an in-depth consideration of early twentieth-century European debates about housing and new technologies, which are referred to only in passing, if at all. The result is that one is often left with the sense that the author knows more about the history of modernism than he conveys in this text, and some readers may this find puzzling. Just as Isenstadt is able to briefly recount the gist of the writings of Walter Curt Behrendt and other European architects on glass and transparency, he could have also concisely summarized some of the main conclusions of various early twentieth-century Continental discussions about housing. Consideration of the common roots of these European housing debates in the American residential examples that he examines here at length might logically have then led back into a fuller account of how modernist ideas actually played out in the United States.

One lacuna would then be obvious: a discussion of the way that concepts of spaciousness also shaped the form of public housing. Such an account, which looked at both American residential and modernist mass-housing ideas and their varied and often antithetical outcomes, would greatly sharpen the main lines of the book’s argument. It might also have helped to clarify why similar design values about space, light, family life, and closeness to nature have produced such radically different results in different circumstances. Nevertheless, Isenstadt’s book is a welcome and substantial contribution to the literature on American housing design.