When Less Was More
25th July 2010
Jayne Merkel is a Crustian of the Chattering Class.
Like the rest of her regiment, she makes her living by selling her opinions, and she is just chock full of ideas for those not as highly-credentialed as she (i.e. almost everybody) to Do More With Less, although I guarantee you that she doesn’t restrict her living space to 1200 square feet, unless it’s her condo in Maui.
But when it came to their houses, it was a time of common sense and a belief that less truly could be more. During the Depression and the war, Americans had learned to live with less, and that restraint, in combination with the postwar confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish.
Horseshit. They got small, efficient housing because that’s all that the could afford. My parents were of that generation, and I grew up in that environment — it was small because we didn’t have a lot of money, and it was efficient because that’s the only way to make small work. ‘Stylish’ didn’t enter into it; ‘stylish’ was the concern of people who had the income of, oh, say, Jayne Merkel. They wouldn’t have known Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Frank Lloyd Wright from Friedrich Nietzsche.
The apartments in the elegant towers Mies built on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, for example, were smaller — two-bedroom units under 1,000 square feet — than those in their older neighbors along the city’s Gold Coast. But they were popular because of their airy glass walls, the views they afforded and the elegance of the buildings’ details and proportions, the architectural equivalent of the abstract art so popular at the time.
And they were inhabited by soldiers returning home from the war and going to college on the G.I. Bill? Sure, I believe that.
But like much of American society, the middle-class home began to grow over time. The average size of an American house in 1950 was 983 square feet. Slowly, though, both more square footage and more amenities became part of the American dream, so that by 2004 the average home topped 2,300 square feet.
That’s because they, like my parents, bought more house as soon as they could afford it. (Not, of course, as quickly as today’s slackers, who think nothing of buying stuff they can’t afford to pay for.)
And, of course, there’s the ritual Two-Minute Hate of housing that she doesn’t approve of:
Sadly, many of the small, architect-designed houses of the postwar period have been demolished to make way for McMansions.
This is a process called ‘trading up’. If you can afford to live in a ‘McMansion’, you don’t settle for a ‘McHovel’. And, indeed, I doubt that Jayne Merkel lives in a ‘small, architect-designed house of the post-war period’. Such things, after all, are for the Little People.