In Detached America, James Jacobs offers a detailed account of the architectural evolution of suburban houses in the US from 1945 to 1970. Focussed on a crucial era in American suburban history, marked by the rapid, federally subsidized proliferation of suburban housing, this book is the first to offer a close, nuanced account of how and why suburban architecture evolved during this period. Jacobs, a historian for the National Parks Service well versed in architectural history, offers a number of original, sometimes subtle, insights into the evolution of house designs. He is ultimately interested in using the suburban house as a kind of text, a cultural artifact that reflected (and shaped) evolving social values in the postwar era. His source base includes home designs, national building industry journals, shelter magazines, surveys, advertisements, popular media, and case studies of suburban developments in Pittsburgh and Washington, DC.

The book is divided into two parts. The first explores the interplay between the builders and buyers of suburban homes in shaping home design. On the production side, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) wielded crucial influence, stimulating the building industry while also promoting racial segregation and ultimately providing a baseline for design standards. Jacobs identifies the importance of small-scale builders, who “constituted a significant majority of active builders nationwide during this period” (20), though they were overshadowed in the public eye by mass-builders like the Levitts. Builders perfected a three-pronged marketing strategy that included extensive newspaper advertising, the innovative use of model homes which seemed to tap into the emotional aspects of postwar consumer culture, and home design itself, which was remarkably responsive to consumer preferences. In the postwar period, builders evolved from skilled craftsmen to a nationally cohesive industry, savvy as marketers and self-promoters. Consumers, meanwhile, played an equally pivotal role. They lived in a social milieu that vaunted home-ownership, nuclear families, racial sameness, and upward mobility. This was the “imagined consumer” of the building industry, and builders cunningly catered to these social values. Jacobs offers interesting insights into the home industry's embrace of “trading up” as a marketing strategy, akin to the business culture of planned obsolescence in this era of material abundance. Builders aimed to teach Americans the value of new, better housing, although they betrayed class bias in doing so.

The book's second half looks closely at the architectural evolution of newly built postwar homes. Jacobs discerns three key phases: the era of the minimum house (1945–55), the era of “casual living” (1955–1960s), and the era of the “zoned house” (1960s and later). These phases characterized both small- and large-scale developments, reflecting the nationalization of building standards and styles across regions. In the first phase, the “minimum house” dominated suburban house construction. Shaped by FHA standards to ensure eligibility for federally backed mortgages, the minimum house was a simple design: four to six rooms, arranged separately, lacking good circulation pathways. Homes were small (from 1940 to 1950, typical square footage shrank from 1,177 to 983), and rooms served multiple functions as a result. At the same time, a modern, well-equipped kitchen and bathroom became standard, a trade-off for the home's other shortcomings. While this design was the quickest way to alleviate the intensive housing shortage after the war, and while desperate home-seekers were satisfied at the outset, it did not take long for consumer opinion to change, particularly in terms of the desire for more space. Builders initially responded by simply adding an additional room or two. But they incorporated more substantial stylistic changes during the next phase, “casual living.” Jacobs shows that by the mid-1950s, Americans embraced this new relaxed, friendly, supposedly effortless lifestyle, which catalyzed key changes in suburban house design – namely the incorporation of the open floor plan, a downstairs recreation room, and, in wealthier homes, outside living areas (like patios, decks, and terraces). The kitchen transformed from an isolated workspace to “one of the main centers of household activity, merely with the addition of space for a table and chairs” (140). In this iteration, home design reflected the prevailing cultural values of family togetherness and neighborliness. By the 1960s, design evolved yet again into “the zoned house,” a larger home organized into clusters of rooms with similar functions. Reflecting an emerging cultural ideal of privacy within the home, it called for two zones for daytime living – the active/casual family zone that included a family room and kitchen, and the quiet/formal spaces of living room and dining room. As an ad for Pittsburgh's “Ladies Choice Home” put it, this allowed for “carefree family life and gracious entertaining,” an amalgam of domestic pleasure with a dignified social face. Jacobs asserts that this change represented “the most consequential and far-reaching rethinking of domestic planning since before World War II” (187).

The author's clear command of architectural analysis is both a strength and a limitation of the book. On the one hand, Jacob's keen sense of architectural detail yields a number of fascinating insights, such as the shift from family togetherness to privacy as expressed in interior layouts. On the other, his analysis of the relationship between builders and American culture at times left issues of causality unclear. For example, he might have drawn upon recent work on postwar suburban policy around heteronormativity to flesh out why the suburban house was associated with the heterosexual nuclear family. And while Jacobs is deeply sensitive to the dynamic quality of suburban architecture, he takes a fairly static approach to larger ideas like a “suburban ideal” and suburbia itself. Jacob's emphasis on new, emergent architectural forms leaves unanswered what happens to these places over time, how new suburbanites have reimagined the values and possibilities even in older designs, something he might have addressed in the Epilogue. When Jacobs asserts, “The largest of the houses constructed at the end of the 1960s … no longer represent the domestic ideal for contemporary home life in the early twenty-first century” (209), he ignores the ways new generations of suburbanites – of a much broader class and race/ethnic profile – inhabited postwar homes. These older homes represent a part of the living suburban landscape, and they embody their own cultural values – even the value for “the old” – suggesting a more complex story requiring attentiveness to the social history of these places, perhaps transformed in meaning by the new suburbanites inhabiting them. Recent scholarship and commentaries on the historical importance of suburban diversity, and the possibly anomalous nature of the postwar era in the longue durée of American suburban history, suggest a deeper, richer context for the important story that Jacobs has narrated. Still, his work brings fresh insights into the design of the postwar home, and the tremendous longevity of those norms even into our own day.