Deconstructing the Suburban Image: An Architectural Recovery of Place
An architectural designer excavates the emptiness of the suburban dream and offers an alternative way to create our places and spaces.
By Reuben Zeiset
The suburban home is central to the American imagination, symbolizing prosperity through the familiar elements of gabled roofs, manicured lawns, window shutters, and attached garages arrayed around curving streets and cul-de-sacs. This image gives the impression of a collective access to comfort, security, and the good life, whether one lives in Milwaukee or Miami. Since its emergence in the postwar era, suburban development has promised middle- and working-class Americans independence rooted in the financial stability of homeownership and an expanded architectural space to fill with consumables. The suburban home is the gold standard for the image of American success, as well as a commodity that secures one’s status and financial future in the narrative of flourishing-through-spending offered by a consumer economy. To own a house in the suburbs is to participate in the “American Dream.”
However, the architectural uniformity and commodification of the landscape required by this narrative fail to provide a robust account of place and community, reducing the American Dream to little more than a figment of the imagination. Suburbanites imagine that they will find freedom and security in their commodified home rather than by engaging place, communities, or relationships. Suburbia and the bland image of prosperity it projects neglect the ecological and geographical distinctions that shape the places we live in and love. Suburbia’s flattened representation of flourishing, which asserts a banal sameness across richly varied landscapes, fails to encompass the richness of a reality that can only be enjoyed through careful attention paid to our particular places. Beyond geography, it fails to account for the social environments, communities, and histories that contribute to our identities as members of the specific communities to which we belong. Responding to this failure requires forming a rich view of place’s role in our lives. A balanced approach towards architectural practice can provide a way towards this goal, using the tools and methods of the design process to imagine and create suitable settings for human flourishing. Using multidimensional architectural methods, place can become a collaborator with which to engage rather than an inconvenience to be ignored or obscured in favor of a uniform streetscape.
This architectural uniformity is a form of ecological and environmental neglect.
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American society has largely defined its citizens as consumers since the early 20th century, and the proliferation of “cookie-cutter” suburban development is emblematic of the American-as-consumer ideal. Since the 1950s, with its booming postwar economy and new federal homeownership incentives, both American lifestyles and landscapes were reshaped to fit that ideal. In the name of profitable development, wetlands were filled in, hills bulldozed, and forests razed, replaced by thousands of identical houses. Photographs of early developments reveal an astounding architectural sameness even across vast differences in geography and climate. Across the country, the same strategy of suburban planning was applied to a variety of landscapes, transforming terrain as different as the rolling hills of middle Tennessee and the wide plateaus of the Arizona desert into nearly identical neighborhoods.
This architectural uniformity is a form of ecological and environmental neglect. Instead of employing time-honored design principles to take advantage of natural patterns in varying climates and geographies, the suburban home stubbornly resists stylistic or visual differentiation. For example, dark, heat-absorbing roofs can be found in both the temperate Delaware River Valley and the hot and arid Sonoran Desert. Though a sensible choice for mid-Atlantic winters, these roofs require extensive air conditioning (and the accompanying energy consumption) to counteract their intensification of the hot Arizona sun. Light-colored and well-insulated roofs that reflect the sun’s radiant heat during the day would reduce the cooling load required to maintain human comfort. At an even more basic level, even the construction materials used for these homes are not differentiated by geography. Standardized timber construction is used in over 90 percent of American homes. Its use in the American Southwest requires timber to be shipped hundreds of miles from distant forests to support home construction at extensive energy and carbon costs. Instead of using distant lumber, homes in the desert Southwest could be constructed of adobe brick, which has been used by Native nations for hundreds of years. Derived from the plentiful desert soils, adobe both harnesses the arid heat for its manufacture and naturally regulates interior temperatures due to its thermal mass. It releases heat stored in the day throughout the night, minimizing the temperature swings that characterize arid climates. Suburbia offers instead a ready-made house-as-object that rejects this wise use of material resources in favor of a uniform image of American life.
Suburbia offers everyone the same thin image of featureless prosperity.
Wendell Berry has argued in his long career as a writer and farmer that the American project has been one of indefinite expansion for profit without regard to the specificities of landscape and locale, resulting in a disintegrated relationship between land and culture. Suburban development can be added to the list of symptoms of the cultural sickness Berry bemoans, alongside the Jeffersonian Grid and industrial farming. Suburbia’s disregard for ecological considerations in pursuit of a consumptive ideal oriented towards comfort and familiarity not only flattens our imaginations but is actively harmful to our planet. Suburban development is epitomized by the green lawn almost as much as the houses themselves. In efforts to cultivate this vision of flourishing, we replace the biodiversity of native ecosystems and habitats with monoculture grasses that not only require additional water and resources to maintain, but also offer little benefit to the ecosystems around them. Instead of a diversity of naturally flourishing landscapes, suburbia offers everyone the same thin image of featureless prosperity.
Each city has its own clone of income-indexed developments.
Moreover, the uniformity of the suburbs provides an undifferentiated backdrop for American life, perniciously undermining of local cultures and communities. Suburbia separates people from one another, isolating them on individual plots of land which are just large enough for privacy but too small for productive use such as crop cultivation. Suburban planning relies almost exclusively on cars for transportation, reducing the number of neighborly encounters on the street one would find in a city or town. This planning also disperses people’s workplaces, houses of worship, and recreational activities, disconnecting them from their homes and creating “bedroom communities” that are prevalent in large metropolitan areas. “Communities” is a misnomer here, since residents spend little time actually investing in community life. A suburb more often shares a tax bracket than any set of cultural values or norms. What gives definition to suburbs across the country is often not architectural specificity related to the unique characteristics of their associated city or region, but the square footage indicated by the wealth of their inhabitants. Each city has its own clone of income-indexed developments.
The suburb, aided by the concurrent development of interstates, car culture, fast food restaurants, chain stores, and television, enabled Americans across the continent to live a universal life. They could not only sleep in the same type of home, but also eat the same foods, wear the same clothes, and use the same products. Whether a family lived in Birmingham or Boston no longer affected their lifestyle in these significant ways; both have access to the same universal set of goods and culture. This universalization of consumption and culture, of which suburbia is an emblem and generator, enables families to move easily across the continent without radically reorienting their lifestyles in a new setting. As similar homes and developments proliferated across the country, the suburbanite could inhabit a place unaffected by and even completely unaware of its geographic or cultural specificity.
Its history of racial discrimination distorts suburbia’s prevailing image of American flourishing and exposes its failure to deliver on the promise of a universal good life.
But even as suburban development flattened the American landscape into a unified image of consumer culture, it failed to realize its own universal aspiration. While midcentury federal legislation increased mortgage accessibility for white Americans, it systematically excluded racial minorities, particularly African Americans. Redlining, a system of government-made maps and neighborhood classifications, was used by realtors and banks to deny mortgages to African Americans seeking to purchase houses in desirable areas. This federal legal regime was combined with a proliferation of restrictive covenants which legally forbade home deeds from being sold to non-whites. These regimes severely restricted Black Americans’ ability to participate in the expanded homeowning economy at both federal and local levels. While for the white middle class, the suburban home became emblematic of the American Dream, that same dream was made systematically inaccessible to Black families.
Even when legal hurdles to homeownership were removed, because minority families were excluded early on from accumulating generational wealth, they were still relegated to neighborhoods on undesirable land adjacent to natural or industrial hazards. This continues to disproportionately impact minority communities, as indicated by damages inflicted by Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey in New Orleans and Houston, respectively. Suburban development reified a system of segregation that continues to have effects well past the end of the de jure regimes that created it, perpetuating artificial distinctions of place along racial lines. Its history of racial discrimination distorts suburbia’s prevailing image of American flourishing and exposes its failure to deliver on the promise of a universal good life.
Architecture within the Christian imagination recognizes the wealth of knowledge and experience of others, including the people and communities for whom we are designing.
To recover a thick sense of place–one which both accounts for its virtues and repairs its distortions wrought by suburbia–we may turn to architecture’s disciplinary tools filtered through a Christian imagination. As a Christian and an architectural designer, my work aims to create future spaces of human flourishing in harmony with the unique places we live. Understanding a building’s site is critical to the beginning of the design process. Using the tools of architectural drawing, diagramming, and research, I analyze its topography, ecology, geology, and climate. This analysis first engages with Creation and its natural patterns before the knowledge gained is used to design the building’s orientation, form, materials, and structural system as will work best with the contingencies of place. By turning our attention first to the context, we designers and architects acknowledge its value and seek to work alongside rather than against it. Rather than impose a predetermined suburban form on the landscape, architecture practiced within a Christian imagination intervenes selectively to reinforce a place’s created order as it designs new spaces for human activity.
As projects progress through the various design stages, iteration and collaboration are key. Architecture within the Christian imagination recognizes the wealth of knowledge and experience of others, including the people and communities for whom we are designing. To respond to the needs and desires of local communities and institutions, we hold public hearings and community engagement sessions where individuals and stakeholder groups can advocate for their interests and voice their opinions. These forums are key to enabling local communities to have a say in their future built environment and play an active role in collectively designing a project. Alongside direct community engagement, architects and designers research their site’s historical significance to the community, city, and region. This research enables us design in a culturally attentive way that both respects and innovates upon the site’s historical uses and cultural past. By attending to these contexts, each new design and approach are tailored to the character of a specific community. The resulting building emerges from an understanding of the common goods, histories, and needs of the people it is designed to serve. From this knowledge, architects can create spaces that serve as focal points of community life and contribute to the flourishing of individuals, institutions, and society.
When filtered through a Christian view of Creation, fallenness, and ultimate redemption, the architect’s vision for the future is driven both by a deep attention to the present world and an imagination to create a better future. In his book Art and Faith, artist and theologian Makoto Fujimura describes imagination as “envisaging possibilities of new existence.” This possibility of a new existence provides the necessary motivation during the many months and years required to see a building come into fruition. We designers and architects engage deeply with places as a means of creating spaces that will become new sites of meaning and beauty for communities, institutions, and neighborhoods.
For the Christian, architecture is not the mere repetition of empty forms but an exercise in hope; hope that the places we gather, live, work, and play will be more welcoming, beautiful, and equitable than the present. This hope is something we put into practice as we create alongside our Creator, making new spaces that help define the shape of our lives and communities. Whereas suburbia offers a flattened image of human flourishing that reifies broken cultural and ecological systems, architecture within a Christian imagination attends to the ecological, cultural, and historical dimensions of the places we live. Architecture so understood enables us to design, build, and live, as Fujimura notes, “from a vision of the world to come, and not just from the broken realities [we] experience today.” This work aims at enabling the full flourishing of human communities by recognizing the unique value of the places and communities that shape us. One building at a time, this practice of architecture brings a Christian imagination into a flourishing reality, creating spaces that make possible a new existence in, as Berry puts it “a place on earth.”
All photos from Unsplash
Reuben Zeiset is an architectural designer who lives and works in greater Boston. Though now an urbanite, he was raised among the rural beauty of Lancaster, Pennsylvania and has been deeply formed by its landscape, communities, and faith traditions. Reuben’s thought draws from an ever-expanding set of influences in art, architecture, theology, and literature, but has most importantly been shaped by many long conversations with friends.
