by Leopold Lambert

A picture of a family infront of their Levittown house (Cape Cod design), Tony Linck for LIFE Magazine, 1947 /// Found by Olivia Ahn

In the frame of a recent conversation recorded for Archipelago with designer Olivia Ahn about the research she has been conducted these last two years, I had the opportunity to re-articulate a few references that could compose a counter-history of American suburbia, as well as to learn additional ones thanks to her work. The latter focuses on the post-war invention of the suburban house as an architectural typology that simultaneously invents (or reinvents) an heteronormative gender performativity.

As I had the opportunity to write in Weaponized Architecture (dpr-barcelona, 2012), the rationale behind the creation of American suburbia is multiple and more strategical than usually admitted. Beyond the official historical version that insists on the ability for each member of the American middle class to become the owner of its own house, lies a political agenda that unfolds itself through the weaponization of the totality of scales of design. I will expose these interpretations through a form of zooming within these scales that start by the entire American territory and end with one of the smallest designed object, the drug, in order to propose a holistic examination of the strategies that lies behind suburbia.

Suburbia could not have existed without the individualization of transportation. Between 1936 and 1950, General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Trucks, and the Federal Engineering Corporation purchased the street cars and electric trains of 45 cities, and systematically destroyed them in order to create an exclusive dependency to the automobile industry that these corporations represented. Found guilty of conspiracy against the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, they were condemned to pay the ridiculous fine of $5,000. Later in 1956, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, conceived by the Einsenhower administration, reinforced this dependency by constructing 41,000 miles of interstate highways. These transportation axes thus allowed the necessary fluidity to live outside of cities and work in them.

As the name of the Act indicates, there was an explicit militarized agenda for the creation of these highways. Within the context of the cold war and the nuclear threat, the strategy that they unfold consisted in the maximization of military movement, as well as the territorial spreading of population and resources. Let’s examine these two purposes: the first one consists in the capacity for any of these highways to become instantly militarized infrastructures. It involves the simple transportation of motorized divisions from one point of the territory to another, but also the accommodation of military aircraft landing on them as NATO exercises in West Germany have shown in 1984 (see past article)....Continue Reading

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