Post-WWII techniques made it possible to provide inexpensive single-family unattached housing for ordinary citizens. Two-bedroom homes could be built fast, cheap and in large numbers. Suburban homes popped up like dandelions spreading ferociously across the ground. The picture window looked over them. Residential architects felt that a change in style was needed for the change in attitude after the war. Wasn't everyone filled with optimism? Homes and interiors reflected a renewed, forward-looking spirit. They were airy, open spaces filled with well-edited clean-lined furnishings and the latest appliances.
Having a picture window was being an American patriot. It was pastoral. It made for a humble home. It welcomed the landscape from outside. It was cozy, lofty, and let the sunshine in. It promised shared viewpoints and values with every other American in the neighborhood. It showed the insides of the every-day activities -- quiet routines of an idealized happy family. 
House after house, street after street, neighborhood after neighborhood, city after city -- the picture window symbolized a kind of democracy. Didn't everyone want a harmonious family, social mobility and individual fulfillment? Isn't that what suburbia is all about?
A democracy of the same. Same houses, same families, same lives, same thoughts and same beliefs. After all, wouldn't social and cultural homogeneity develop a well-tuned focus on the progress of the group over the individual?
Television shows helped as a guide. Families were perfect. Nobody ever raised their voice and all problems were resolved equitably. Women were delighted to cook and clean. They dressed in pearls and high heel shoes. Their hair was always perfectly teased and sprayed, their lipstick cleanly in place and their waist-line trim as they waited for their husbands to arrive home. Their job was to keep their families and their homes running efficiently and to be desired by their husbands. Their husbands were men and worked hard to keep the family happy by affording things. This was the message shown to a generation who were supposed to grow up and emulate their parents.
Conformity doesn't foster tolerance or assistance. It suppresses problems. How could problems erupt within a supposed quarantined, perfect and protected space?
Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is
~ Peggy Lee
8 comments:
You've really hit the nail on the head with this one.
The subtext of a Picture Window is an aversion to privacy, the implication being that behind every broad expanse of glass, are families whose lives are blandly conformist. Nothing to hide, when all is perfectly perfect, and every family was like every other, at least in theory.
The Picture Window looked out across a lawn devoid of privet hedges, trees or any other form of botanical screening, straight into that house across the road that was the clone of ones own. In other words, a pretty picture~or was it?
Toby, you've explained this much better than I.
I love that you have started adding your drawings to the blog. And sweet T.
Charlie, aren't pets the dearest to our hearts. They only know true love.
While that may have been the case when these houses were built, judging from my neighborhood it is no longer true. Our house was built in 1954 and has the picture window in the back looking out over the garden. We've lived here 14 years and I've found it a more friendly welcoming neighborhood than my more urban neighborhood of historic victorian houses close together. And of course by now all the landscaping has matured and these houses are surrounded by trees and gardens.
My parent's home had a both a large window in the front and the back overlooking the parkway. At dusk, my mother always closed the drapes for privacy. I remember walking by my neighbor's houses at night and I could totally look into their living rooms and see what they were watching on TV.
ms. wis., very true and no doubt the neighborhood was and certainly is still very friendly. I was more alluding to the gender roles during that time -- not as much flexibility as we have today.
Anonymous, although I am a fan of floor to ceiling glass windows, in an urban environment one would always have to be aware of the sun setting and close the drapes. I tend to forget (in my older home with much smaller windows) and walk around with rollers in my hair or a green face mask on as neighbors walk by.
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