Totem Magazine

TEXT N. Rain Noe PHOTOGRAPHY Bill Owens CAPTIONS Bill Owens

All photos from the recently reissued (Fotofolio) 1972 "Suburbia"
Reprinted with permission from Bill Owens archives

STEPFORD LIVES
I ENJOY COOKING, DOGS, CATS, KIDS, SOCCER AND LIVING HERE

This is our second annual Fourth of July block party. This year thirty-three families came for beer, barbecued chicken, corn on the cob, potato salad, macaroni salad and watermelon. After eating and drinking we staged our parade and fireworks.

"Our house is built with the living room in the back, so in the evenings we sit out front of the garage and watch the traffic go by."

HUMAN CIVILIZATION
   If aliens have been observing us develop as a species, when we got around to building suburbs, one of them must have been shaking his head(s) as he looked through his binoculars. "Zorg," he'd say to his friend. "Take a look at this: you can't believe what these idiots are doing now."
   Or maybe they'd be excited for us. Suburbs are, after all, a rather alien concept for human living; a contrived and decisive system of dwellings conceived by myopic "visionaries" from the same generation of people who thought plastic was indestructible and cheeseburgers were good for you.

WHAT HAPPENED?
In the beginning we had caves, which were drafty, but you couldn't beat the rent. Then we moved up to huts. Followed by groups of huts, which got pretty crowded. Eventually someone invented the elevator and the huts got really, really tall. (My apologies for condensing the entire History of Architecture into a few glib sentences.)
   But after decades of banging it out in Metropolis, some people came to a realization: Hey, this kind of sucks. I live right on top of my neighbors (and even worse, they are different from me - their food smells funny, and I've never heard of their god). My living room is the size of an elevator and I'm lawn-less! Where am I? Who am I?
   The invention of a different kind of elevator, one that had four wheels and went sideways, enabled people to forget about the Z-axis and start thinking X/Y. People grew tired of moving up; they wanted to move out. But rather than going back to groups of huts, we put up a new kind of environment, reeking of artifice, unsophisticated in ideology.
   And yet for decades, city-beaten workers would rush toward these enclaves like lemmings piling over a cliff, all in search of the good life.
   The idea of Suburbia was noble enough, and seems like logical civic development, squarely based on American values. "America had always had the idea of westward expansion," says Fred Blumlein, a Long island-based environments designer. "Once you filled your tank, there was always a place to go. And 'going west' gave you that American sense of freedom, of fresh space. A fresh start in a fresh space, in a big house with a yard, sounded great. But somewhere along the line, we took a left turn (see chart to the right).

What we wanted	What we got
Our own houses	Rows of houses so similar to each other that it might one day drive the mailman crazy (Hmmm….)
Our own yards, our own land	A place where you could buy, and carry home in the back of your El Camino, six-foot rolls of grass (the lawn kind; the other kind came in more manageable portions).
A home close to nature	An environment where Department of Transportation manuals refer to trees as "FHOs" (Fixed and Hazardous Objects) and stress their removal in the name of automotive safety. I know this because I had an FHO-house I used to play in as a child.
Rustic, winding country roads	Arbitrarily meandering streets whose contours, rather than follow natural topography, seemed to correlate more with whatever French curve was lying on top of the pile in the planner's office.
Freedom from the grid-locked traffic of the city	Dead-end streets terminating in cul-de-sacs, with limited through traffic to a few overburdened expressways and "main artery" b….
Beautiful homes crafted with modern materials	A place where the ghosts of Italian craftsmen would be horrified to see what we had done with their stucco technology.
Neighborhoods for human living	Neighborhoods for automotive driving.
A solution to the sidewalk fear of being mugged	A sidewalk fear of being mowed down be an itinerant Chevrolet whipping along an excessively wide road designed to accommodate fire trucks in a nuclear emergency while walking down the sidewalk.

MY MOTHER, THE CAR >>