Retro

[telophase]

We went down to Round Rock weekend before last to attend the wedding reception of friends. We crashed in the spare bedroom of another friend's house, and I found his subdivision rather interesting. It's fairly new, and the houses are designed to evoke styles of the postwar housing boom in the States and Small Town America^TM. Here's a couple of pics so you can see what I mean.



This is our friend's house. It, like all of them, has wood (-looking) siding, a white picket fence, and a front porch that, theoretically, everyone should be sitting on in the evening to enhance neighborhood community. This being Texas, everyone stays inside where the air conditioner's on. But the fantasy is there.


Here's some of the larger houses. Their yards are larger also: I don't know if they actually own the full yards there or if those are vacant lots waiting for building. Most of the houses are placed on small lots, and fill most of the lots.


And another couple of houses.


I didn't get a good picture of one, but all the garages are detached, and located behind the house, accessed by a system of alleyways.

Comments

[solarbird]

The funny part is all the styles in these photographs are pre-war. The modernist look, ranch style, and colonial revival (the three biggest postwar styles - tho' really colonial revival came later) are completely absent. Modernism had no time for this texture - the "flat" look was everything - or these sorts of porches, in no small part due to the noise of cars (which pushed people inside and back) or air conditioning (meant people didn't have to go out on the porch in the evening to cool off while the house cooled down). But it does absolutely show the reduced-porches of the pre-war Craftsman/Arts and Crafts era.

That's not a criticism of the result, by the way. I like it. The bungalows seem pretty well executed, in particular, other than the shallow eaves. But everything here is pre-war, not post-war.

[telophase]

Well, the postwar thing was my interpretation, which I obviously got wrong. :D It's definitely meant to be Small Town America, though!

[solarbird]

Seattle is made of bungalows and other craftsman/arts-and-crafts neighbourhoods. Like, huge swaths of it. WE'RE NOT THAT SMALL A TOWN BUT IT'S ALL WE KNOW HOW TO DO XD