Blue Sky Dream by David Beers Page B

the side of the garage, creating a kind of courtyard just before the pouredconcrete stoop. They liked, as well, the sparkles in the living room ceiling, tiny chips of glass embedded in the white flocking that twinkled by lamplight. They liked these modest nods to tradition and romance, though what they liked most was the functionality of the house’s design, the way, for example, that the kitchen, dining nook, and family room merged to created an unbroken expanse of linoleum. This was design for maximum efficiency in the flow of family life, an important selling point for my mother and father.
    Here was the deal sealer: By rising early and hurrying to the Clarendon Manor sales office on the day it opened, my parents had been first in line and so had managed to secure a prime lot. Lot 242 was one of very few that stretched wide around the bottom end of a cul-de-sac, a choice cut of land more than twice the size of a standard lot. Naturally, the price was higher: For an additional 8,500 square feet of Clarendon Manor soil, said the salesman, my parents would have to pay $200 more, cash up front. They were only too happy to purchase the extra emptiness.
    Once the papers had been signed, the rented house in Strawberry Park seemed to my parents all the more constricting and stale, a house not just used but used up. There was nothing to do, however, but to wait for Clarendon Manor to come into existence, nothing to do but make our visits to Lot 242 on warm evenings. Our rite evolved with the season. Early on, my father would go from stake to yellow-ribboned stake, telling us where the kitchen would be, where the front door would go, which windows would be getting the most sun. Later, after the concrete foundation and plywood subflooring were in and the skeletons of walls were up, we would wander through the materializing form of our home, already inhabiting with our imaginations its perfect potentiality.
    O ur home, like millions of similar tract homes built throughout America at the time, was said to be “ranch style.” Its soberhorizontality was said to owe itself to an old-fashioned, Out West wisdom about what a house should be. In truth, the design of our house owed more to a Frenchman named Charles Jeanneret, a man who found his optimism in mechanized shapes, even those (or especially those) made for war. Jeanneret, better known as Corbusier, was that prophet of Modernism who famously declared, “A house is a machine for living in.” He wrote this four years after the close of the First World War in his
Towards a New Architecture
, a manifesto containing, as well, these lines:
    The War was an insatiable “client,” never satisfied, always demanding better. The orders were to succeed at all costs and death followed a mistake remorselessly. We may then affirm that the airplane mobilized invention, intelligence and daring, imagination and cold reason. It is the same spirit that built the Parthenon.
    Corbusier’s theory was that houses, like airplanes, worked best when constructed according to rational, “universal laws.” One of these laws held that any machine, just like nature itself, must evolve toward ever purer forms. This is why the shapes of progress must look more and more like an airplane, must be ever more streamlined. This is why every bit of sentimental bric-a-brac was wasteful drag holding back our flight into a better future. This is why Corbusier hated Victorian decor “stifling with elegancies” and found the “follies of ‘Peasant Art’ ” downright “offensive.” Now was the moment to make “an architecture pure, neat, clean and healthy.” For, “We have acquired a taste for fresh air and clear daylight.” And, “Everything remains to be done!”
    Corbusier’s hugely influential “Purism” glorified not only the shapes of machines but the assembly line production machines made possible. He would exploit economies of scale. He would make the parts interchangeable. For the rationally