Sprawl builders and developers call them ‘product’. They are the typical houses of suburbia. Such ‘product’ is ostensibly the result of marketing research - what the people want. In fact, sprawl houses are planned and built by a cartel that is dedicated to design in a single urban mode and house pattern. As a result, the middle class in this country is increasingly being denied a choice of habitat.

Arranged in tracts, with garages in the front, tract houses destroy the streetscapes that they define. Without a place for neighbors to assemble and interact, community bonds are frustrated. Excessively interiorized and poorly landscaped, they are disconnected from the larger landscape and are environmentally unfit. Poorly proportioned and detailed and hurriedly built, they are designed to impress and induce a rapid first sale. Minimum price and maximum size, floor area and volume, is how they are marketed.

Evidence is mounting that tracts of such houses are not increasing in value over time. Dealing with their deteriorating carcasses in second and third generation suburbs is increasingly becoming an acute crisis that many American cities have to increasingly deal with.

Yet, it was not too long ago that we knew of a production house that served the needs of successive generations of its users admirably. The California Bungalow was designed in Chicago and St. Louis and was used as the typical house for the formation of Neighborhoods and towns in the United States from 1900 to 1920.

It was light in material, modest in form, unadorned and thoroughly simple in its design, almost modern in its construction. A wooden house, the bungalow was often precut and shipped by rail to the West. It is perhaps the most successful prefabricated house in a century obsessed with prefabrication, despite the chronic failure of the idea.

Its plan was general and designed for repetition. Large rooms were dedicated to public uses, small rooms to private ones. Tall ceilings and large windows brought ample light to its interiors. Bathrooms and sometimes kitchens were up to date. The house and its garden were often connected into a single Architecture through the use of porches. Functionally, the fluidity and generality of the bungalow plan allowed its use by millions of families over time to very diverse living ends. In this, the century that most revolutionized domestic technology and living patterns, the bungalow has been the ultimate flexible dwelling.

Bungalows were of an identifiable house form. Even as duplexes, triplexes or quadruplexes, they stressed their single house precedence. Refined by traditional architectural elements, doors, windows, chimneys, porches, etc they spoke to both a house that nurtured families and to a street that gathered them into a Neighborhood. They symbolized a home setting and civic culture that were true to the core of this republic.

Beauty is the recognition of utility well served, design well composed and construction well executed. The beauty of the bungalows is recognized by millions today and exists both for their sheer living pleasure, and for their long-term financial gain. In Pasadena, California where I live and work, there are many bungalows in Neighborhood configurations that were designed for $200 one hundred years ago and are now worth over $400,000.

It is high time to pause and consider the mass housing options available to us today: We must turn ‘product’ into houses, tracts into Neighborhoods and sprawl into towns and cities. The failures and successes of the last century are staring us in the face: Enough is enough.