Barbara Miller Lane: The surprisingly modest start to McMansion sprawl

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Before World War II, Americans thought work would guarantee prosperity and upward social mobility. After the war, the American dream meant homeownership and spatial mobility, too. Young families wanted small houses in the suburbs.

New speculative builders answered this desire. In the first two decades after the war, tens of thousands of builders erected more than 13 million single-family houses in new suburban subdivisions. These dwellings looked radically different from the larger, two-story, blocky buildings of the suburban past: They were low-rise ranch or split-level houses.

The Campanelli Brothers — Michael, Joseph, Nicholas and Alfred, of Braintree, Massachusetts — were typical of these merchant builders. After they came home from the war, the brothers used an army-surplus truck to move gravel to construction sites. They branched out to build small developments near Braintree, then more ambitious subdivisions. Their firm rapidly grew into the leading homebuilder in the Boston area and later built in Florida and Illinois as well.

The typical Campanelli house was, as one buyer explained, 'a new kind of house' for 'a new time.' Instead of the larger, old-fashioned look, it had a low-pitched roof, like contemporary ranch houses in California, but still kept shutters or an occasional bow window for a faintly 'colonial' flavor. Campanelli houses had two or three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen large enough to eat in, and a garage. The three-bedroom version had about 1,000 square feet of living space. In the mid-1950s, the firm extended the kitchens to form a 'living kitchen' or 'family room.'

These plans were compact and 'open,' with far less division between rooms than before the war. The focus was on informal family activities — watching TV, eating.

In the front, a large 'picture window' offered passers-by and visitors a preview of the interior. The fenceless front yard ensured visual continuity with neighbors' houses and the street. Wide roads with sidewalks were laid out in curvilinear patterns.

How did the Campanellis arrive at these designs? They watched sales closely: They would begin a subdivision with a few model houses in various styles and continue building the model that sold best. What sold were the ranch houses.

The typical buyer was in a hurry. In most American metropolitan areas, new homebuilding had stalled as the country struggled with the Depression and World War II. This meant an acute housing shortage. Buyers were eager to get started on a new life with the new family, job and access to a Federal Housing Administration- or Veterans Administration-financed mortgage.

Because of discriminatory FHA restrictions on mortgages, people of color initially had little access to the new suburbs. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ethnic and racial minorities transformed the population of the early suburbs. However, rising land prices and interest rates began to close the suburbs to working-class populations.

New kinds of builders, often large corporations, produced larger houses, with more rooms for more specific purposes, aimed at ever-more-affluent buyers. The family home came to be seen as an investment that would be 'traded up.'

One result was the widely disliked, oversized 'McMansion' of today. Another is the tendency of young couples to seek nontraditional, center-city spaces such as lofts.

McMansions usually imitate monumental house styles of the 19th century, although they retain two features of the postwar era: the multifunctional living room (now called 'the great room') and the large 'living kitchen.'

The long-term picture of American suburban housing is one of sprawl and stylistic disunity. But for a while, merchant builders and postwar buyers created a new, attractive modernism for domestic architecture.

Barbara Miller Lane is emeritus professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and author of 'Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945-65.' She wrote this for 'What it Means to be American,' a partnership of the Smithsonian and Zócalo Public Square.

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