Customer Reviews

Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life

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This is the best book about architecture that I ever read. Although I am not a feminist, it revealed to me the relationship between a building and the society that produced it -- a revelation that seven years at architecture schools (Yale and Princeton) did not provide. Any designer who want to design for another person needs to understand the hidden cultural codes that influence their creation of a built environment. Reading this book was the best way for me to understand what impact social biases can have in design.

This is a fantastic book. Her historical research and insight are excellent. It is a bit dated, given that the text is from 1984 and the bulk of the sources were from the 1970's and previous, but that is the benefit of good scholarship, a text can remain relevant even with the passage of time. I actually think the format of the book and the ideas in the book are superior and better developed than in her more recent book "Building Suburbia", which at times feels like a conglomeration of economic data for a statistics conference. Both books, though, are wonderful. I highly suggest this book to get an excellent historical view of housing and urbanism.

One of my favorite book, very thought provoking introduction to the intersection of gender space and power.

I re-read some of the chapters of this book, hoping to be able let her argument convince me that the way our homes are currently designed and geographically situated are founded on a sexist world view, creating significant detriment to society. I am not certain she was much help though. This is a pretty serious flaw since I am sympathetic to her thesis. Her arguments in support of her thesis are disjointed and use out of date information.

One interesting feature of the book is that, where other authors would at most provide a couple alternatives or one encompassing school of thought as a solution, she briefly traces scores of possible alternatives. Most are only briefly mentioned, enough maybe to urge the reader to search out more information elsewhere.

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This book touches on a recognized problem, but is just a bunch of complaining and finger pointing without offering up real solutions. instead of pleading with men to change or architects to change, or city planner to change. Why not as the women to change? Marry a man that helps out with the kids and house, have too much to do? Don't have kids. Don't like the way cities / houses are designed? Design them differently. Want to change gender rolls? Raise your son in a way that will effect a change. Of course women are discriminated against, not the first or last group to have this problem, a group never got pulled out of it by someone else, the only way to do it is by yourself. This book should have been 50 pages long.

This book reads like a few (mostly mediocre) magazine articles pasted together- one chapter talks about the history of homes (and how every conceivable domestic arrangement ever invented turned out badly for women), another criticizes suburbia for isolating women (not really true now, since suburban women generally have cars), another talks about experiments in infill housing, another criticizes cities for being hostile to women - but I could never figure out exactly what this book was about, or what Hayden liked other than a few small-scale housing experiments here and there.