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Reviews
| The Seattle Bungalow: People and Houses, 1900–1940. By Janet Ore. Seattle, Wash.: Univ. of Washington Press, 2007. xviii+202 pp., maps, illus., diags., tables, notes, bibl., index. $24.95 pb (ISBN 0-295-98627-1).
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In The Seattle Bungalow: People and Houses, 1900–1940, Janet Ore has provided a new interpretation of the bungalow that is centered on owners and occupants. She presents the bungalow as an act of consumption, one in which the buyers have as much influence over the role the bungalow will play in their lives as do the designers and sellers. Shunning the romantic view of the bungalow as the production of craftsmen and the home of a nuclear family gathered around the prominent hearth, Ore instead examines ways in which the bungalow was modern, not preindustrial; a production of entrepreneurs, not high-minded architects; and a place for a range of commercial activities, not just a home. Her broad inquiry into this building type leads her into examinations of the construction industry, real-estate brokerage, and home industries in the early-20th century. This book will be an essential resource for historians examining modest housing anywhere in America in this period.
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Describing the bungalow as the first popular housing of the 20th century, Ore maintains that it set the direction for the rest of the century through its open plan and minimalist design, characteristics of the mid-century ranch house as well. She defines a bungalow through its form—a rectangular, open-plan house, one and one-half stories tall, with a broad gable or hip roof and a front porch—without the parlors of the previous century. Despite the importance of the plan in defining the building type, she includes only two plan drawings, one of the few drawbacks of this book.
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Concentrating on four neighborhoods in the north end of Seattle, Ore provides chapters on various approaches to the bungalow, its idealization, construction, marketing, occupancy, and legacy. Seattle's rapid growth in the early decades of the 20th century makes it an appropriate place to study bungalows, which sprouted up in the thousands. Ore also orients her story around the experiences of one family, headed by Orvill Stapp who built an idealized bungalow, suffered financial reverses, bought a speculatively built bungalow, and inhabited it along with various family-run businesses. This micro view, along with a number of interior photographs from the family, personalizes her larger story.
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The first major chapter concerns the idealized bungalow promoted by reformers who lauded its simplicity and handcraftsmanship. Ore even finds a bungalow neighborhood in Seattle, Beaux Arts Village, which was established by reformers who advocated the rejection of industrial goods and production and the adoption of artistic values. Despite their rhetoric, Ore maintains that reformers embraced modernism through the efficient and functional design of the bungalow, which also came equipped with the latest in domestic technologies.
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Readers of IA will probably be most interested in her chapter on the construction of bungalows. Ore examines changes in the industry that drove up the cost of small houses, such as the introduction of the three-fixture bathroom, which consumed a disproportionate share of the budget. In turn, she argues, builders looked for simpler, cheaper designs, and the bungalow fit the bill. Economies of scale achieved through building several bungalows at once allowed builders to specialize their building crews and gain savings through mass purchasing of materials. Builders also increasingly used standardized building components—quite the reverse of the handcrafted ideal promoted by bungalow idealists.
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Ore's contention that the bungalow was essentially an act of commodification is explained in her chapter on selling the bungalow. Here she examines the innovative marketing and financing techniques undertaken by the small-time entrepreneurs who built bungalows. Jud Yoho typified these builders. Among his strategies was to publish Bungalow Magazine, which included plans for which he credited himself as architect, although he was no such thing. Professional organizations for real estate brokers, builders, and architects responded to these entrepreneurial incursions into their territories with licensing requirements. The buyers were not passive consumers; they made deliberate sacrifices to own their own homes.
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How lower-middle-class homeowners, operating on the edge of affordability, inhabited these dwellings is the subject of the chapter on living in the bungalow. Generally, they were less likely to sanctify the bungalow by devoting it solely to domesticity. Ore found a remarkable number of examples of commercial activities in bungalows, including having lodgers and boarders, making and selling chocolate candy, filing lumber saws, running a small hospital, and printing a neighborhood newspaper. The domestic realm expanded and contracted to accommodate these uses, as homeowners manipulated their dwellings to serve their needs.
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| Each of these chapters endeavors to reposition the bungalow in the lore of American architecture. Rather than an idealized house, designed as a refuge from a complex, industrial world, the bungalow is an essentially modern building type: efficient, equipped with conveniences, built with highly industrialized methods and economical strategies, sold with new marketing and financing techniques, and occupied in flexible, income-producing ways. Bungalows are still popular today (if the 24,000 hits in Amazon Books is any guide), but their current romanticization obscures a much more interesting story of how a building type was developed for and changed by a lower-middle-class clientele. Janet Ore has fortunately brought this history to light. |
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