Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"In this groundbreaking study, Thomas C. Hubka examines the surprisingly ill-equipped houses of the broad middle class at the beginning of the twentieth century, charting the changes to the floor plan and the introduction of new technologies. Amply illustrated, Hubka’s study redefines the middle class and reinterprets its housing, offering a new understanding of how most Americans became modern."—Alison K. Hoagland, author of Mine Towns: Buildings for Workers in Michigan's Copper Country
"This book is the most important study of common American houses to appear in the past half century. Thomas C. Hubka draws on a lifetime’s investigation of working-class houses in the decades before World War II to show us how and why the single-family houses of the contemporary ‘middle-majority’ sprung from these modest dwellings. Hubka has established an agenda that should engross architectural historians for years."—Dell Upton, author of American Architecture: A Thematic History
"Architects, historians, housing advocates, and other people interested in the houses most Americans live in should find much to like in How the Working Class Became Modern."—Daily Dose of Architecture
"This lavishly illustrated book takes the reader on a visual journey of all types of common houses belonging to America’s ‘middle majority.’"—Technology and Culture
"Hubka’s book becomes the new bible of this architecture for material culture studies, architectural historians, and sociologists. "—CHOICE
"Hubka rises to the challenge of analyzing such a large number of structures (somewhere upwards of 80 million houses) on a national level."—Winterthur Portfolio
"Collectors will find the book illuminating for its contextual factors: the space and the place where collections reside."—New York-Pennsylvania Collector
Table of ContentsContents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Housing and Domestic Reform from a Middle-Majority Perspective
1. Headwinds to Researching Common Houses: Eleven Prevailing Themes
2. Two Worlds Apart: Domestic Conditions at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
3. Modern Houses for a New Middle Class: New Standards of Living
4. The Dwellings of Modern Domestic Reform: Cottages, Duplexes, Multi-Units, and Remodeled Houses
5. Domestic Life Transformed: How the Working Class Became Middle-Class in Housing
Epilogue: Response to Working-Class Improvement
Notes
Index
