“Most 21st century Americans live more like migrants or squatters than we would care to admit. The spaces we call “home” are generic, sometimes shockingly so. Very few of us live in a house custom-designed to our needs by an architect. The suburban landscape of cookiecutter houses is a literary cliché going back to the 1950s, and some urban observers cite the comparatively more diverse housing options of urban centers as one reason for their welcome resurgence in the last few years. In truth, none of this is new. Nor is it actually restricted to the suburbs. In any given decade, American builders and developers have tended to produce and reproduce a fairly limited range of housing types, the mix varying by region. One can walk into just about any 2-family house in Cleveland, and the plan won’t offer many surprises. One may even have developed an eye for distinguishing which decorative details are “original” to the mass development of these buildings in the first 2 decades of the last century. Anyone who looks for an apartment in the many buildings in Lakewood and Edgewater that date from the 1920s will discover a very limited degree of variety within a generic form. Moreover, an apartment building in Lakewood doesn’t look very different from one of similar vintage in Cleveland Heights. And a 2-family house in Cleveland doesn’t look that different from the one my immigrant grandparents lived in when I was a small child. But that was in Utica, New York…”
