Cheap and Tasteful Dwellings: Design Competitions and the Convenient Interior, 1879-1909

Cheap and Tasteful Dwellings: Design Competitions and the Convenient Interior, 1879-1909. By Jan Jennings. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005. Pp. xxxv + 313, acknowledgments, prologue, introduction, photographs, illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $48.00 cloth) While Cheap and Tasteful Dwellings is ostensibly a book about design contests for inexpensive residential structures run between 1879 and 1909 by the magazine Carpentry and Building, the author, a professor of design and environmental analysis at Cornell, uses these events as an entry point to discuss a variety of topics of interest to folklorists concerned with material culture and vernacular architecture. These topics include the role of pattern books in shaping nineteenth-century building; the concept of "practical architecture" and the spread of architect-designed homes for ordinary people; the development of the architectural profession toward the end of the nineteenth century; and the evolution of the idea of convenient room arrangement in residences. The text is divided into two main sections of several chapters each. In the first section, the author focuses on what seems to her to be a representative group of late nineteenth-century practical architects: the 86 winners and 63 other competitors in Carpentry and Building's contests over a thirty-year period. Drawing on intensive research in a wide variety of sources, she examines the training, methods, and business practices of the contestants. A central theme of this section is how young people could become architects. About a third of the competition winners were carpenters or builders who "passed into professional ranks"; another third had apprenticed as draftsmen in architects' offices; and the final third had either taken correspondence courses in architecture or attended a university school of architecture. Because Jennings argues that learning to draft and to make architectural drawings was what elevated carpenters into architects, she goes into considerable detail about the processes of architectural drawing. In the second section, Jennings analyzes the drawings submitted by the winning architects and uses these to chart the emergence of "convenient arrangement"-asymmetric floor plans that gained ascendancy in the late nineteenth century over the more formal arrangements dictated by Georgian and Greek Revival styles and were the forerunners of "ranch style" floor plans of the 1940s and 1950s. …