Indoor America: The Interior Landscape of Postwar Suburbia

By Andrea Vesentini

Cars, single-family houses, fallout shelters, air-conditioned malls—these are only some of the many interiors making up the landscape of American suburbia. Indoor America explores the history of suburbanization through the emergence of such spaces in the postwar years, examining their design, use, and representation. By drawing on a wealth of examples ranging from the built environment to popular culture and film, Andrea Vesentini shows how suburban interiors were devised as a continuous cultural landscape of interconnected and self-sufficient escape capsules. The relocation of most everyday practices into indoor spaces has often been overlooked by suburban historiography; Indoor America uncovers this latent history and contrasts it with the dominant reading of suburbanization as pursuit of open space. Americans did not just flee the city by getting out of it—they did so also by getting inside.

Vesentini chronicles this inner-directed flight by describing three separate stages. The encapsulation of the automobile fostered the nuclear segregation of the family from the social fabric and served as a blueprint for all other interiors. Introverted design increasingly turned the focus of the house inward. Finally, through interiorization, the exterior was incorporated into the all-encompassing interior landscape of enclosed malls and projects for indoor cities. In a journey that features tailfin cars and World’s Fair model homes, Richard Neutra’s glass walls and sitcom picture windows, Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center and the Minnesota Experimental City, Indoor America takes the reader into the heart and viscera of America’s urban sprawl.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Nov 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813941806

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Midcentury: Architecture, Landscape, Urbanism, and Design Richard Longstreth, Editor

University of Virginia Press

© 2018 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2018

ISBN 978-0-8139-4158-5 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4180-6 (ebook)

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

A revised version of chapter 3 originally appeared as Sheltering Time: The Containment of Everyday Life in Nuclear-Shelter Film Narratives in Material Culture 47:2 (2015): 41–58, ©The International Society for Landscape, Place, and Material Culture, reprinted by permission.

A revised version of chapter 4 originally appeared as It’s Cool Inside: Advertising Air Conditioning to Postwar Suburbia in American Studies 55:4/56:1 (2017): 91–117, © Mid-America American Studies Association, reprinted by permission.

Every effort has been made to identify owners of copyright and supply complete and correct credits. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Frontispiece: Carrier Corporation ad. From Life, 12 July 1954.

Cover illustration: Motorola ad. From Life, 25 January 1963. (Illustration by Charles Schridde)

For Gilda,

who first asked where the people were, and then waited twelve years for an answer to her question

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1Together and Apart: Encapsulation and the Automobile

2The House of Anxiety: Introversion in Domestic Design

3The Lump in the Garden: The Fallout Shelter and the Inhumation of Everyday Life

4It’s Cool Inside: Advertising the Social Thermodynamics of Air-Conditioning

5A Vista of One’s Own: Glass Walls, Picture Windows, and the Interiorization of the Outdoors

6From Southdale to the Axiom: Design for a Better Outdoors inside the Mall

7Domocracy: The Life and Death of Great Indoor Cities

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.Sunrise over the United States from the International Space Station

2.Untitled cover illustration, The New Yorker

3.I Wish We Had One of Those! Life magazine cartoon

4.The Evolution of the Closed Car, illustration

5.Ford Closed Cars ad, 1924

6.Ford Closed Cars ad, 1925

7.Ford ad, 1928

8.Margaret Bourke-White, African American flood victims, Louisville

9.GM Oldsmobile ad, 1950

10.General Motors ad, 1958

11.Alexander Leydenfrost, Life Belts around Cities Would Provide a Place for Bombed-Out Refugees to Go

12.Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, from Hover, 1996–97

13.General Motors ad, 1947

14.Revere Copper and Brass Incorporated ad, 1942

15.Ford Motor Company ad, 1952

16.The Post-War House, plan

17.How Our Cars Have Changed Our Gardens, House Beautiful, 1956

18.The 1959 House Beautiful Pace Setter House (Graham Miller House), roofed court

19.The PM House of Built-Ins, front and rear

20.The PM House of Built-Ins, inner garden court

21.The House of Good Taste, Modern House, exterior, New York World’s Fair 1964–65

22.The House of Good Taste, Modern House, skylighted atrium, New York World’s Fair 1964–65

23.Nylon airhouses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

24.Plan for an underground restaurant and night club

25.Plan for an underground motel

26.Underground World Home, living room, New York World’s Fair 1964–65

27.Underground World Home, terrace with swimming pool, New York World’s Fair 1964–65

28.Safe, film still

29.Safe, film still

30.Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, from Twilight, 1998–2002

31.Ben Smith’s Family Shelter, Salt Lake City

32.Fallout areas twenty-four hours after detonation

33.Family Room of Tomorrow Fall-Out Shelter, ca. 1960

34.Carrier Corp. experimental lab test of their new central air-conditioning unit

35.Frigidaire ad, 1960

36.Mitchell ad, 1954

37.Ford Motor Company ad, 1959

38.Fedders ad, 1961

39.Fedders ad, 1957

40.General Electric ad, 1958

41.Harrison Radiator Division—General Motors Corporation ad, 1960

42.Harrison Radiator Division—General Motors Corporation ad, 1960

43.Borg Warner Engineering Production ad, 1955

44.Mueller Climatrol ad, 1955

45.Blue Star Home ad, 1965

46.Carrier Corporation ad, 1949

47.Lennox Industries Inc. ad, 1956

48.Carrier Corporation ad, 1954

49.Carrier Corporation ad, 1966

50.Revere Copper and Brass Inc. ad, 1944

51.Crosley ad, 1953

52.York—Division of Borg Warner Corporation ad, 1968

53.Lennox Live Better Electrically ad, 1969

54.Carl Perutz, Doghouse with a View

55.Robert Adams, Untitled, 1970–1974

56.Robert Adams, Untitled, 1970–1974

57.Edith Farnsworth House, north elevation

58.Glass House, exterior view

59.Edith Farnsworth House, preliminary version, plan

60.Glass House, plan

61.James and Orline Moore House

62.John B. Nesbitt House

63.Cliff May Residence #3, living room

64.Cliff May Experimental Ranch House #4 (Skylight House), living room and outdoor living space

65.Capitalize on the Good View—Screen Out the Bad, design guidelines

66.One-Man Remodeling Jobs, design guidelines

67.Andersen Windowalls ad, 1966

68.All That Heaven Allows, film still

69.Motorola ad, 1963

70.Motorola ad, 1961

71.Motorola ad, 1961

72.Santa Anita Fashion Park, section through central square

73.Southdale Center, interior garden court

74.Southdale Center, exterior view

75.Southdale Center, parking map

76.Plan for Wildwood Center, Milwaukee

77.Cherry Hill Mall, interior garden court

78.Rain fountain at Topanga Plaza

79.Santa Anita Fashion Park, interior court

80.The Galleria, indoor skating rink

81.Old Chicago Mall, interior

82.Midtown Plaza, interior court and Clock of Nations

83.Landmark, Lennox ad, 1959

84.Resort hotel beneath the sea, GM Futurama at the New York World’s Fair 1964–65

85.Antarctica weather center, GM Futurama at the New York World’s Fair 1964–65

86.Seward’s Success, commercial mall

87.Spaceship Earth geosphere, EPCOT Center, Walt Disney World Resort

88.R. Buckminster Fuller, plan for the Manhattan dome

89.Oscar Newman, plan for Underground Manhattan

90.Paolo Soleri, The Automobile Mystique and the Asphalt Nightmare

91.Paolo Soleri, Stonebow, cutaway drawing

92.The Truman Show, film still

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some might think that writing a book is a solipsistic endeavor carried out in stuffy interiors. However, I have learned that it takes a city to make one. Or rather, several cities, as this particular book was conceived in Atlanta (although I had little awareness of it at the time), grew into a different project in New York City, was mostly researched and written in London, and was finished in Venice. Throughout this journey across places and time, I met many people whose contributions deserve to be acknowledged. My deepest gratitude goes first of all to Barry Curtis and Steven Connor for encouraging me to undertake this expedition, when the destination was still unclear. Many other colleagues offered their guidance and professional advice along the way, especially Barbara Penner, Gregory Votolato, Jane Pavitt, Ben Cranfield, Lauren Barnett, Andrew Hewish, Elizabeth Johnson, Christopher Gonzalez-Crane, William Viney, Richard Martin, and Edwina Attlee, who was the very first reader when this was still a draft. I am also indebted to Francesca Bisutti for introducing me to American culture at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari. I will always look up to her as a model of what a professor should be. Emily Williams and Rebecca Wright deserve a special mention. It is not uncommon to find brilliant minds along the path leading to a PhD, but much more so to have found true friends.

Every city is made up of buildings calling for endless exploration. I would have never found my way had I not carried with me the London Consortium as a map. It gave me what any doctoral program should: the awareness that new knowledge can only come out of detours and imagination, open exteriors rather than sealed compartments. The research behind this book was also possible thanks to the resources made available by the British Library, the University of London’s Senate House, Birkbeck and UCL Libraries, and the Wellcome Library. Digital archives also provided the primary material under discussion. They were the small half-hidden joints that turned out to be treasure caves. Bill Cotter, John F. Ptak, Bradd Schiffman, Robert Scott, and Bill Young shared with me their expertise on postwar architecture and model homes. Several other people helped me during the adventurous process of image research, especially Christa Carr, Scott Drevnig, Tomas Feininger, Katharine Harmon, Jane Jeszeck, Beverly Leydenfrost, Pete Livingston, Larry McCallister, Barry Maitland, Joseph Masco, and Thomas Towe. Many institutions and archives also provided the beautiful illustrations that are an integral part of this book: Gagosian Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, the Huntington Library, the Rochester Public Library, the State Archives of Florida, Scala Archives and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Smithsonian’s Archives Center at the National Museum of American History, the Glass House, the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller, the Cosanti Foundation, Condé Nast, Esto Photographics, Getty Images and the J. Paul Getty Trust. Many of these images would not be in this book without the precious collaboration of Maria De Simone. If I ever get to build my own city, she would be the first one entitled to a personal monument.

All cities need a broad strategic vision to guide their development. A special acknowledgment must thus go to Richard Longstreth for offering his invaluable insights to improve the manuscript, to Boyd Zenner for enthusiastically endorsing this project, and to Mark Mones, Jane Curran, Cecilia Sorochin, Anne Hegeman, Jason Coleman, and everyone at the University of Virginia Press for bringing this book to life. I also wish to thank Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, for supporting the publication of this book with a grant.

After spending some time in a new town, every visitor wishes to meet other strangers along the way to tell them about his discoveries. I am grateful to Sara Beth Keough at Material Culture and Sherrie Tucker and Randal Maurice Jelks at American Studies for publishing parts of this research when it was at an early stage. I was also fortunate enough to present my work at the ASCA Cities Project at the University of Amsterdam, the 2012 and 2016 London Conferences in Critical Thought, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Royal College of Art, the Science Museum London, the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York, the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, and the American Studies Association of Norway. Birkbeck College and the University of London also afforded me the opportunity to share my ideas with the students of the School of Arts.

Along the way, I have been supported—and most importantly distracted—by many other friends in London, Verona, and Venice who have reminded me that the world extends well beyond the walls of this book: Juanmi Sánchez, Neda Mousavy, Cyril Bastanès, Camilla Pietrabissa, Fabio Viola, Adelaida Papadianaki, Paola Zanotto, Benedetta Borelli, Claudia Zini, Maria Stefanoni, Valentina Veloci, Sofia Monteforte, Irene Turri, Matteo Ierimonte, Silvia Mantovani, Stefania Sessa, Sara Scola, Federica Fusina, Valentina Greggio, Giacomo Pistolato, Sara Salmaso, and Giovanni Santoro, just to name a few. They have been a much-needed outdoors whenever indoor America was on the verge of swallowing me up. In Atlanta and New York, I gained my first knowledge of the American urban landscape through the friendship of Jacqueline Crowther, Fletcher Britt Arrowood, and Victoria Bianchi. I am also grateful to Bernardetta Palombo and Federico Neri for welcoming me as part of their family. My colleagues at La Biennale di Venezia Cristiana Costanzo, Francesca Buccaro, and Claudia Gioia have been incredibly supportive at the last stage of this project.

My parents, Gianfranco Vesentini and Cristina Zanni, have been the compass guiding all my wanderings. It truly calls for blind faith to believe in a project they will never be able to read in its original language (which is probably one reason I filled it with so many stunning pictures). My thoughts also go to my late grandmother, Adriana Limongelli Zanni, who passed away halfway through this journey.

I am not the kind of explorer who would last long on a one-man expedition. Gilda Neri has been with me throughout; she alone knows the resilience and determination it took for both of us to make it to the end of this journey. Some of the first words she ever spoke to me turned into this book. Since then, not a single page could have been written without her at my side. She was with me in every new place I visited, and she is now all the other cities I have left to explore.

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972

INTRODUCTION

Like every other foreigner, I met America twice. The first time was the dream, the second the nightmare. Unlike the latter vision, which usually materializes when one’s first visit to the country reveals it to be a real place untouched by Hollywood stardust, encounter with the dream is harder to trace. It builds up little by little through movies and other images. If I were called upon to identify the inception of my own American dream, I would pinpoint a particular image in a National Geographic book that I was given for my thirteenth birthday. It was a photograph of the sun rising over the United States, taken from the International Space Station (fig. 1). I became obsessed with it. As I looked in awe at the blurred patches of luminescent dots, I was enthralled by the thought that, far across the ocean, there might be cities as vibrant and thriving as the ones I was familiar with in Europe.

At age twenty-one, when I won a scholarship to study for one year at a university in Atlanta, my chance finally came to visit the land of my teenage reveries. The place I was presented with, however, was a long way from my expectations, and indeed from Venice, Italy, where I had lived until then as a student. After a cab drive to my downtown hotel, I walked around the neighborhood at 11 p.m. looking for a place to dine with my father. Our instincts directed us to the very center of the city: where better to look for a late meal? We proceeded along deserted streets lined by rows of office buildings and vacant blocks, anticipating some sort of Île Saint-Louis or Piccadilly Circus just around the corner. But Five Points, as the heart of the city was known, turned out to be a blank esplanade with few people in sight, and these few did not seem to be hunting for a hangout. In fact, they appeared stupefied, and annoyed at our presence. We trudged back to the hotel, hungry and puzzled.

Figure 1. Sunrise over the United States from the International Space Station, 2015. (Photo by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, Courtesy of NASA)

In the wake of our unsuccessful expedition, I tried to adapt to the new cityscape. The fact that I didn’t have a car forced me to walk whenever I wanted to travel outside the radius of the city’s negligible public transit system. I shared this condition only with those under the poverty line, such as the folk I had bumped into in the streets on my first night. Few people could navigate the city at all without a car. Downtown see-sawed: bustling with students and white-collar workers during the day; post-apocalyptically empty after sundown. Most of my friends lived in the city, but that seemed a temporary arrangement. Their families resided in suburbs so far out of reach for the carless that I could not visit my roommate when he was stuck at home after an accident. These places had an exotic look that had never been part of my dreamscape but always lurked in the back of American films and TV shows. I didn’t mind them very much, until I learned that they were the reason that downtown, where I lived, had been steadily abandoned year after year.

One day I received an email from a young Italian woman who was to join me the following semester and wanted to learn something about Atlanta in advance. I sent her some pictures I had taken in the first months. It does look nice, but there’s nobody around, she observed, Where’s the people? Where were the people, indeed? They’re indoors, I told her and realized after I said it how bizarre that was. Everyone was always in automobiles, houses, buildings, malls—anywhere but in the street. My own life, too, was mostly spent indoors. I often wore a sweater despite the sultry weather because I was rarely outside air-conditioned buildings. They were so chilly and dry it took weeks for my body to adjust to the temperature change.

My surprise grew when I moved back to Italy and met with some American friends at a traditional flower festival in the town of Spello. As we promenaded in the summer heat along the jam-packed alleys, one friend inquired about the pervasive body odor that, she complained, had been bothering her all over the country. I laughed and told myself she was not used to crowds and had seldom experienced sweat outside a gym. Then, I pondered. How could anyone consider it natural to spend hours inside a shopping mall and find human proximity in a street uncomfortable to deal with? How could something I deemed so incomprehensible be so commonplace for others?

This book is my own attempt at an answer. To ask where the people are is also to ask where they came from, what drove them there, and where they are planning to go next. Only later did I find out Jane Jacobs had raised the same question back in 1958 about an urban renewal project.¹ I was not the first to be staggered by this way of life. As far back as 1930, the same realization came as a shock to Jan and Cora Gordon, two travel writers from Britain on their first visit to Los Angeles.

The truth is the people seemed to venture rarely into the open air. If they wished to go out they slipped from the back door to the garage, shut themselves primly into a closed car, and drove away. If they wished to do the family shopping they drove into large open-air grocery shops, specially arranged so that they could select their provisions without getting out of the car. If they wished for distraction they drove to the sea or up into the hills and stared at the view through the wind-shield. …

The climate of Los Angeles-cum-Hollywood is a little like the benefits of Christianity—very much boasted about, but of little practical effect. For in this perfect climate we could not find one out-of-doors restaurant or tea garden; the windows of all these white, pink, blue, yellow, orange, and green bungalows and houses are sealed with fly-blinds of copper net. … To keep out a few intrusive insects, for we saw no mosquitoes, the inhabitants have got into the fly-traps themselves and have given the flies the liberty of all out of doors. Who needs zephyrs when you can turn on the electric fan?²

After the war, architect James Marston Fitch remarked that to a greater extent than perhaps any other nation, we Americans have become an ‘indoor’ people.³ Forty years later, planners Allan Jacobs and Donald Appleyard still bemoaned that public life in American cities took place mostly in protected internal locations.⁴ This became especially true for the American suburbs, where the hours spent inside a shopping mall or at home were welded together by those behind the wheel, in yet another interior.

These few voices ran counter to the assumption that California and America as a whole were embracing a new pattern of indoor-outdoor living, as Life announced in 1945.⁵ The hyphenated catchphrase became a mantra in postwar magazines, put in the service of advertising anything from cars to TV sets, and a dogma in architectural discourse. Sigfried Giedion saw in this trend the beginning of a new spatial conception in Western architecture. The interaction between interior and exterior space, he contended, marked a synthesis between the space-radiating volumes of fifth-century Athens and the understanding of architecture as interior space that prevailed from the building of the Pantheon until the mid-twentieth century.⁶ In understanding history as a progression toward modernism, he imposed this tripartite model onto a far more complex and often contradictory reality. Where would one situate the enclosed mall in this abstract scheme, for instance?

These claims sprang from the deep-seated conviction that spaciousness was connate with the American character. Here was a country with no Hadrian’s wall, no ramparts; with unfenced yards and land to spare. Having plentiful space at hand was what America was all about. It was on this assumption that the postwar mass exodus to the suburbs began. However, the focus on spreading out as the only guideline of decentralization has led many historians to forget that turning inward was as compelling a precept, not a mere collateral effect of this urban revolution. Suburbia is so often described through metaphors of fragmentation because what might at first look like an uninterrupted sprawl is in fact a collection of insular interiors: little boxes and big boxes held together by moving boxes. What is sprawl itself other than a metropolis with no clear entrance or exit, whose unmarked edges are counterbalanced by the ubiquitous boundaries woven into its fabric?

Since the publication of Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, a great number of studies have examined the American suburbs from multiple perspectives, including those of class, gender, race, and the environment.⁷ However, suburbia’s relocation of most everyday practices into indoor spaces has often been overlooked in such accounts. Suburbanization might be explained through heavy federal subsidization, or deindustrialization, or a growing need for privacy, but it is impossible to ascribe such a massive phenomenon to one single cause.⁸ One is thus inevitably forced to tell only one of the many histories.

Starting from 1945, suburban interiors increasingly functioned as a continuous cultural landscape: indoor America. The use of the word cultural emphasizes the ordinariness of such spaces, as well as how their design and use reflected the workings of cultural forces.⁹ Geographers have often restricted the notion of landscape to the outdoor realm.¹⁰ However, suburban interiors prove that we can also think of a landscape that extends indoors or is even deliberately set up to exclude the exterior. In fact, the novelty of postwar suburban architecture lies in its interiorization of the outdoors. The lack of public outdoor space upon which detractors of suburbia have often remarked is not the aftermath of bad planning or lack of interest.¹¹ It is not even, as its advocates claim, the democratic result of individual choices supplanting top-down regulation.¹² The exterior is not made legible because it is not meant to be: the indoors has swallowed up the whole landscape.

This shift surfaced in language long before it showed up in the actual built environment. From the nineteenth century onward, English placed the dual notions of inside and outside in a hierarchy. Indoors came to signify a cozy and safe interior. Outside became a dangerous, unsheltered space. Outdoors was no longer used to designate whatever was out-of-doors, but a landscape devoted to leisure, health, or the enjoyment of nature. One is never outdoors in the rain or on a trip to the outside: both have become value-laden words. These idiomatic distinctions are not found in other European languages. In most of them, being indoors is the same as being inside, al interior, dedans, drinnen, dentro—at most, one can be al chiuso, in an enclosed and often confining space. Outdoors brings to mind images of freedom and openness when used as an adverb (all’aperto, en plein air, al aire libre, im Freien). As a noun, however, it has no equivalent. In nineteenth-century America, the word began to be used to contrast the breezy suburban lifestyle with the cramped and insalubrious city.¹³ One such case was the book Out-doors at Idlewild, published in 1855 by Home Journal editor N. P. Willis to celebrate the benefits of his relocation to Cornwall-on-Hudson.¹⁴

The word was progressively released from the original meaning of being in an open setting. Postwar homemaking magazines testified to the fact that it was possible to be outdoors indoors, as long as architecture gave one such a feeling. J. B. Jackson lampooned this trend in a mock report of Mr. and Mrs. Panther’s story of suburban bliss. In order to live in close contact with nature, the fictional New York couple had moved to Connecticut into a Mies-designed, air-conditioned glass house with a maple tree growing through the ceiling and a picture window from which to contemplate the garden in full comfort. Technology domesticated the outside into the outdoors and protected the family from noise, pests, allergies, sun, and snow. It allowed them to "live indoors just the way we would live outdoors: freely and informally and spaciously."¹⁵ Jackson’s parody exposed exactly this linguistic mutation; the outdoors now signified a lifestyle of freedom, informality, and spaciousness, rather than a physical location. In bringing the outdoors indoors, suburbia contrived a hybrid urban-rural landscape based on the primacy of sight over the other senses. To see the outdoors was to be outdoors. Little did it matter if this was behind glass or evoked through artificial plants. The contradiction of an inside with no outside was thus resolved by internalizing the latter as a construct: a self-sufficient landscape containing its opposite.

Jackson’s satire also indicated that modernism and suburbia had many points in common despite their professed mutual dislike.¹⁶ Both treated the outside as a collateral effect, a tabula rasa on which buildings sat as objects in a blank gallery space. The Plan proceeds from within to without, proclaimed Le Corbusier in his 1923 manifesto; the exterior is a result of the interior.¹⁷ At a closer look, this building ethic was not a modernist invention. Reporting on his visit to the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a German art historian noted that in contrast to Germany, the modern American house is built entirely from the inside out.¹⁸ The famous modernist adage form follows function was, in fact, borrowed from American architect Louis Sullivan, who coined it in 1896 to argue that the outer shell of a building should only be an expression of its interiors.¹⁹ The idea goes at least as far back as Thoreau, who wrote in 1852 that good architecture grows from within outward, out of the character and necessities of the indweller and builder, without even a thought for mere ornament, but an unconscious nobleness and truthfulness of character and life.²⁰ According to this genealogy, the hierarchic understanding of inside and outside has its origin in America. Although many analysts have often resorted to blurred notions such as the modern, Western, capitalist, or Christian city to explain the rupture between interior and exterior or the private and public spheres, it is impossible to apply these often-Anglocentric blueprints to geographically and culturally distant regions. The confines of modernity, West, capitalism, and Christianity are too broad and fuzzy to account for the cultural specificities of urban models.²¹

What do Americans mean by suburban, then? Can the design and use of interiors help us determine what makes suburbs differ from cities? The city’s enduring obstinacy to univocal definitions asserts that a single conception of what it is across history, place, and personal beliefs does not exist. One is led to acquiesce, albeit reluctantly, to the notion that New York and Irvine could sit under the same nominal umbrella. And yet, Jane Jacobs’s indictment of postwar renewal projects as unurban urbanization suggests that urban is not the same as that which is located in a city.²² Her peculiar construct invites us to look for intrinsic qualities in the way urban space is conceived and experienced that would make it such.

In 1938, Louis Wirth identified large size, density, and diversity as the three defining factors of Urbanism as a Way of Life.²³ As a sociologist, he was inclined to see cities as population aggregates, instead of focusing on the role architecture played in constructing the notion of urbanism. When looking at an image, though, we can instantly identify the setting as rural, urban, or suburban, without being given any clue to the size of a settlement or its social makeup. What if we tried to designate a space as urban through its design? What would this image be? F. Scott Fitzgerald offers one example in a lyrical description of a New York evening seen through Nick Carraway’s eyes in The Great Gatsby.

I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the Park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.²⁴

Besides framing Nick’s role as an internal narrator, the passage outlines in beautiful prose the urban experience as one defined by the constant crossing of boundaries between inside and outside. City dwellers leave their homes through a door, hop on and off buses, descend into underground stations, rise back to the street, walk into an office with windows overlooking the same street they walked on, park their cars and get out to stroll along other streets where other windows will lure them inside, and—once they have entered a store to shop—the outside world will be framed by the same window that drew them in earlier. In a city, one is always drawn to the exterior when indoors and to the interior when outdoors.

Moreover, the outside looks very much like an interior. Since the nineteenth-century urban planner Camillo Sitte’s time, the idea of squares as roofless rooms and streets as outdoor theaters has not died out.²⁵ What makes Times Square a square and not just a heap of road-strip signs is the fact that these are so arranged to give the impression of enclosed space. For the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, the square signaled the primal enclosure from which a city is born, not as an ‘interior’ shut in from above, but as a portion of the countryside which turns its back on the rest, eliminates the rest and sets up in opposition to it.²⁶ From its genesis, the city is neither interior nor exterior. Even city parks are plots of land bounded by buildings rather than gaps.

Architects and city dwellers bridge inside and outside through design and daily practice. This makes interiors not just the empty back of an exterior, and exteriors more than mere containers.²⁷ What was Walter Benjamin’s fascination with Paris arcades other than an attempt to pin down urbanism as a never-ending state of transition in which the street becomes room and the room becomes street?²⁸ To be a flâneur was to have a seamless experience of one and the other.

This porosity of the urban landscape illustrates its ability to incorporate contrasts. Urbanism is "the