Spaciousness, History of a Visual Effect

One of the enduring beliefs of America is that it is a spacious nation, a land big to start and made bigger still by bottomless natural resources and energetic citizens, a place that easily accommodates a future without limits. The country’s physical scope has been, throughout its history, the basis for such beliefs: endless vistas unrolling mile after mile as settlers moved westward were planted deeply in collective memory and reappear often in its culture. From the pioneer’s clearing in the woods to the unpopulated horizon of so many westerns, from the frontier historiography of Frederick Jackson Turner to advertisements showing automobiles on mesa tops, Americans just do not like to feel fenced in. Perhaps for this reason, they place a high premium on big homes built on spreading lots that recall this national mythology, and they support energy and transportation policies that subsidize vast tracts of low-density housing to ensure that whoever can pay the price can live in a spacious place. But big costs money, more money than most people have to spend. Often, then, they make do, envying the dimensions of wealth, but content to have a clean and comfortable home of their own. Early in the nineteenth century, when social reformers extolled the virtues of a small house, they emphasized the strength of the family living therein. Smallness was not a liability. The homestead, humble but independent, was a popular housing ideal in a mostly agrarian nation. In a country newly founded, the size of the house seemed less significant than the sense of autonomy, which was literally built into the very typology of the