SANDY ISENSTADT. The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle Class Identity. (Modern American Architecture and Cultural Identity.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 327. $85.00

Sandy Isenstadt significantly extends our understanding of American architecture and social life through his exploration of the rise and commodification of spaciousness and the evolving phenomenon of the small house in the United States. In this lucid and insightful work, Isenstadt begins with a careful definition of terms that contextualizes the extended argument that follows. At the center of his enterprise stands the concept of spaciousness manifest in the small house. The small house is defined through its middle-class associations as much as by its scale. There are no definitive guidelines for what constitutes the small house, but rather the inference of emergent nineteenth-century values concerning domestic virtue, efficiency, and the idealized single-family dwelling. Spaciousness, as part of that formula, is “a new and distinctively modern category for domestic architecture, one that prizes perceptual effects, informs design decisions, comes in time to affect aesthetic regulation of residential neighborhoods, and that intersects with contemporary notions of personal, community, and national identity” (p. 9). Within this formulation, Isenstadt establishes the framework for a compelling architectural and social history about the ways in which architects and designers resolved the paradox of compact dwellings and the desire for openness around the perceptual rather than the physical nature of space. In the process, we discover how spaciousness operates at the level of a naturalized ideology that reifies middle-class identity around residential design.