"Winner of the 2016 PROSE Award in Architecture & Urban Planning, Association of American Publishers" "Winner of the 2016 Historic Preservation Book Prize, University of Mary Washington's Center for Historic Preservation" "Winner of the 2015 Athenaeum Literary Award (for Art and Architecture), The Athenaeum of Philadelphia" Barbara Miller Lane is Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritusin the Humanities and Research Professor in Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College. Her books include Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945, National Romanticism and Modern Architecture, and Housing and Dwelling. The fascinating history of the twentieth century's most successful experiment in mass housing While the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and their contemporaries frequently influences our ideas about house design at the midcentury, most Americans during this period lived in homes built by little-known builders who also served as developers of the communities. Often dismissed as "little boxes, made of ticky-tacky," the tract houses of America's postwar suburbs represent the twentieth century's most successful experiment in mass housing. Houses for a New World is the first comprehensive history of this uniquely American form of domestic architecture and urbanism. Between 1945 and 1965, more than thirteen million houses-most of them in new ranch and split-level styles-were constructed on large expanses of land outside city centers, providing homes for the country's rapidly expanding population. Focusing on twelve developments in the suburbs of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Barbara Miller Lane tells the story of the collaborations between builders and buyers, showing how both wanted houses and communities that espoused a modern way of life-informal, democratic, multiethnic, and devoted to improving the lives of their children. The resulting houses differed dramatically from both the European International Style and older forms of American domestic architecture. Based on a decade of original research, and accompanied by hundreds of historical images, plans, and maps, this book presents an entirely new interpretation of the American suburb. The result is a fascinating history of houses and developments that continue to shape how tens of millions of Americans live. Featured housing developments in Houses for a New World: Boston area: - Governor Francis Farms (Warwick, RI) - Wethersfield (Natick, MA) - Brookfield (Brockton, MA) Chicago area: - Greenview Estates (Arlington Heights, IL) - Elk Grove Village - Rolling Meadows - Weathersfield at Schaumburg Los Angeles and Orange County area: - Cinderella Homes (Anaheim, CA) - Panorama City (Los Angeles) - Rossmoor (Los Alamitos, CA) Philadelphia area: - Lawrence Park (Broomall, PA) - Rose Tree Woods (Broomall, PA) "In Houses for a New World, the Bryn Mawr professor emerita Barbara Miller Lane investigates the output of a dozen lesser-known tract house developers in four diverse regions--New England, the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, and Southern California--and treats the period's typical Cape Cods, ranches, and split-levels with the serious formal analysis once reserved for high-style architecture. . . . Her tour de force of research is all the more impressive because she has assembled documentation akin to that previously available on the residential work of important postwar figures such as Richard Neutra, William Wurster, and Marcel Breuer but largely overlooked for builders other than the Levitts."---Martin Filler, New York Review of Books "Lane uses original research, images, plans, and maps to illustrate the American suburb."---Shannon Sharpe, Metropolis "To her credit, Ms. Lane stoutly rebuts . . . Slurs, encapsulated in the popular song about 'Little boxes made of ticky tacky' and shows that 'these generalizations were largely false'. Far from being the refuge of whit

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