THE CAPE COD
From an isolated seaside setting of sand dunes and fish flakes, this small white shuttered box has invaded the entire country.
Architectural Forum, March 1949
The first houses offered at Levittown I were Cape Cod cottages, which Alfred Levitt, the architect for the Levitt Company, described as “the most efficient house ever developed in America.” These small one-and-a-half-storey homes with no eaves and steeply pitched roofs owed their origin to seventeenth-century fishermen’s cottages found along the shores of the northeast states. Developers revived the style for the mass house-building market as it could be easily and cheaply assembled out of stock parts, and “it dresses up the one-storey rectangle.” For the homeowner, they evoked nostalgia and quaintness with the added advantage of room to expand into the attic. House magazines heavily promoted the design and the Cape Cod was “approved” by the Federal Housing Association, which considered it an excellent example of a small house design.
The Levittown Cape Cod had its front door in the center and a shuttered window on either side, and was painted in a variety of colors, presumably to help the owners identify their home. In 1949, the company, which believed in “giving the public what they want,” introduced an enlarged Cape Cod with a redesigned floor plan. The living room was placed at the back of the house, with a wall-size double-glazed window overlooking the yard. The kitchen was moved to the front of the house, with the front door opening straight into the kitchen area. As Alfred Levitt explained, the front door would be used by both “the milkman and the boss coming to dinner … in a little house you don’t want the milkman going around to the back, past the bedrooms; it interferes with privacy.”
The Cape Cod style held its attraction throughout the 1950s, even for architect-commissioned houses. The architect Royal Barry Wills included Cape Cod designs in his 1954 book Living on the Level: One Story Houses, as he recognized that “there are so many people who like the simple symmetrical lines of the little Cape Cod house.” The book was “a practical guide for the general public seeking to commission a house.”
In 1949, Architectural Forum published a two-part article titled “The Cape Cod Cottage” in which it pointed out the paradox of an architectural design that combined the latest gadgetry with nostalgia:
… a little white cottage equipped with a vine covered wall – and a television aerial. It has quaint green shutters decorated with flowerpot cut-outs – and the latest in radiant heating. Tiny dormer windows poke in old fashioned charm from the pitch roof – and behind them fluorescent tubing illuminates the bobby-soxer’s dressing table.
From an isolated seaside setting of sand dunes and fish flakes, this small white shuttered box has invaded the entire country.
Architectural Forum, March 1949
The first houses offered at Levittown I were Cape Cod cottages, which Alfred Levitt, the architect for the Levitt Company, described as “the most efficient house ever developed in America.” These small one-and-a-half-storey homes with no eaves and steeply pitched roofs owed their origin to seventeenth-century fishermen’s cottages found along the shores of the northeast states. Developers revived the style for the mass house-building market as it could be easily and cheaply assembled out of stock parts, and “it dresses up the one-storey rectangle.” For the homeowner, they evoked nostalgia and quaintness with the added advantage of room to expand into the attic. House magazines heavily promoted the design and the Cape Cod was “approved” by the Federal Housing Association, which considered it an excellent example of a small house design.
The Levittown Cape Cod had its front door in the center and a shuttered window on either side, and was painted in a variety of colors, presumably to help the owners identify their home. In 1949, the company, which believed in “giving the public what they want,” introduced an enlarged Cape Cod with a redesigned floor plan. The living room was placed at the back of the house, with a wall-size double-glazed window overlooking the yard. The kitchen was moved to the front of the house, with the front door opening straight into the kitchen area. As Alfred Levitt explained, the front door would be used by both “the milkman and the boss coming to dinner … in a little house you don’t want the milkman going around to the back, past the bedrooms; it interferes with privacy.”
The Cape Cod style held its attraction throughout the 1950s, even for architect-commissioned houses. The architect Royal Barry Wills included Cape Cod designs in his 1954 book Living on the Level: One Story Houses, as he recognized that “there are so many people who like the simple symmetrical lines of the little Cape Cod house.” The book was “a practical guide for the general public seeking to commission a house.”
In 1949, Architectural Forum published a two-part article titled “The Cape Cod Cottage” in which it pointed out the paradox of an architectural design that combined the latest gadgetry with nostalgia:
… a little white cottage equipped with a vine covered wall – and a television aerial. It has quaint green shutters decorated with flowerpot cut-outs – and the latest in radiant heating. Tiny dormer windows poke in old fashioned charm from the pitch roof – and behind them fluorescent tubing illuminates the bobby-soxer’s dressing table.
Ces résidences unifamiliales, compactes et fonctionnelles, sont inspirées du cottage Cape Cod, un modèle d’habitation popularisé aux États-Unis pendant les années 1930 et 1940 par le catalogue Sears-Roebuck. Construites à partir d’un nombre très limité de plans, ces maisons partagent plusieurs caractéristiques communes, entre autres, les petites dimensions, le toit à double versants fortement incliné et le parement en déclin de bois[24]. D’une architecture simple et répétitive, ces maisons, érigées à l’aide de nombreuses composantes préfabriquées, imitent dans leur conception la production de masse de l’effort de guerre.