The Selling of American Dwellings
By Cathryn Jakobson Ramin
In Colonial times, if someone wanted a house built, he didn’t call on an architect; he hired, instead, a master builder, a carpenter, and a stonemason. The result was usually a rectangular box, as unadorned as a Puritan’s smock. The evolution of the American home, from those days to contemporary times, is the focus of a fascinating exhibition called “Selling the Dwelling: The Books that Built America’s Houses, 1775-2000,” on display and open to the public in New York’s Grolier Club, a private establishment for book collectors and scholars.
The collection of domestic architectural pattern and plan books, pamphlets, and shelter magazines is not only splendid to peruse; it also tells the story of the American housing boom that set the stage for the real-estate crisis from which the United States is still recovering. Eric J. Holzenberg, the Grolier Club’s director, and the exhibit’s curator, Richard Cheek, spent more than a decade putting the exhibit together, tracking down more than three hundred items of architectural ephemera at flea markets, in garage sales, on eBay, and from antiquarian book dealers.