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Architecture of care: building for aging in mid-century America (1945-1968)
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Architecture of care: building for aging in mid-century America (1945-1968)
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Content
Architecture of Care:
Building for Aging in Mid-century America (1945-1968)
by
Dora Vanette
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfilment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)
August 2024
Copyright 2024 Dora Vanette
ii
Table of Contents
List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………………iii
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………….viii
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1
Aging in the Post-World War II Era……………………………………………………………..27
Architecture for Aging …………………………………………………………………………..42
CHAPTER 1
Homelikeness and Dignity: The Architecture of Homes for the Aged…………………………..48
CHAPTER 2:
Aging in Public: The Architecture of Senior Housing …………………………………………..96
CHAPTER 3:
Adventures in Group Living: Grey Gables, Sun City, and the Architecture of Retirement……145
EPILOGUE:
The Architecture of Care……………………………………………………………………….199
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………225
APENDIX:
Illustrations……………………………………………………………………………………..241
iii
List of Figures
Figure 1.1 Life magazine illustration of growth in the over-65 population………………..241
Figure 1.2 “In a Dutiful Family, Trials with Mother,” Life, July 13, 1959………………...241
Figure 1.3 Life magazine feature on multigenerational living, July 13, 1959……………...242
Figure 1.4 Life magazine feature on multigenerational living, July 13, 1959……………...242
Figure 1.5 Life magazine feature on multigenerational living, July 13, 1959……………...243
Figure 1.6 John Stees, cartoon on the three-generation house……………………………..243
Figure 1.7 Percentage of children living in multigenerational households over time……...244
Figure 2.1 Shady Lawn Nursing Home postcard, Walnut Creek, Ohio, 1971……………..245
Figure 2.2 “Fact Versus Fiction,” Aging, October 1962. ………………………………….245
Figure 2.3 Amedeo Leone, Lutheran Home, 1961…………………………………………246
Figure 2.4 Amedeo Leone, Lutheran Home, cottage apartments, 1961……………………246
Figure 2.5 Amedeo Leone, Lutheran Home, community residences, 1961………………..247
Figure 2.6 Advertisement in Nursing Home Administrator buying guide, 1966…………..247
Figure 2.7 Advertisement in Nursing Home Administrator buying guide, 1966. …………248
Figure 2.8 Bedside Table-Wardrobe-Dresser by American Sterilizer Company, 1966……248
Figure 2.9 Nursing Home Management illustration on self-help hygiene aids, 1959……...249
Figure 2.10 Vifolka Home for the Aged, Bo Boustedt, 1958……………………………….249
Figure 2.11 Vifolka Home for the Aged, living room within a corridor…………………….250
Figure 2.12 Examples of Boustedt’s informal living rooms………………………………...250
Figure 2.13 A hallway connects a dining room and living room……………………………251
Figure 2.14 Community room……………………………………………………………….251
iv
Figure 2.15 Dining nook…………………………………………………………………….252
Figure 2.16 Living room. …………………………………………………………………...252
Figure 2.17 The Sequoias community room, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, 1961………...253
Figure 2.18 Sunset Home, Windom, Minnesota, Thorshov & Cerny, 1956………………...253
Figure 2.19 Home for the Jewish Aged, Kansas City Missouri, 1950………………………254
Figure 2.20 St Vincent’s Retreat for the Aged, Archdiocese of Omaha, 1954……………...254
Figure 3.1 Guild House community room and Moosehaven postcard……………………..255
Figure 3.2 Sketches by Robert Venturi and photographs of Guild House murals…………255
Figure 3.3 Advertisement for Libbey Owens Ford, Life, November 3, 1961, 136………...256
Figure 2.4 Nursing home typologies……………………………………………………….256
Figure 3.5 The Guild House, Venturi and Rauch and Cope and Lippincott, 1962-1966…..257
Figure 3.6 Guild House community room. ………………………………………………...257
Figure 3.7 Opening ceremony at the Guild House, 1966…………………………………..258
Figure 3.8 Guild House outdoor space, plan. ……………………………………………...258
Figure 3.9 Guild House outdoor spaces……………………………………………………259
Figure 3.10 Gaylord White, Mayer, Whittlesey & Glass architects, 1958-1964……………259
Figure 3.11 Gaylord White and Union Settlement building………………………………...260
Figure 3.12 Map of East Harlem c. 1965……………………………………………………260
Figure 3.13 DeWitt Clinton Houses plans, Perkins & Will, 1958…………………………..261
Figure 3.14 Benjamin Franklin Co-op Plaza………………………………………………...261
Figure 3.15 Benjamin Franklin Co-op Plaza…………………………………………...……261
Figure 3.16 Gaylord White House, one-bedroom and efficiency units……………………...262
Figure 3.17 Gaylord White House recreation garden………………………………………..262
v
Figure 3.18 Gaylord White House entrance plazas………………………………………….263
Figure 3.19 The communal backyard and terrace on the roof of the lower building………..263
Figure 3.20 Gaylord White programming, photograph by Paul Parker (mid 1960s)………..264
Figure 3.21 Settlement Home Care, photograph by David Lee, 1994………………………264
Figure 3.22 CHA truck advertising Raymond Hilliard Homes, ca. 1963…………………...265
Figure 3.23 Early rendering of Hilliard senior housing, 1963………………………………265
Figure 3.24 Updated Hilliard site plan, 1963…………………………………………..……266
Figure 3.25 Raymond Hilliard Homes senior housing apartment layout……………...…….266
Figure 3. 26 Raymond Hilliard Homes floor plan……………………………………...…….267
Figure 3.27 Raymond Hilliard Homes…………………………………..…………………..267
Figure 3.28 Raymond Hilliard Homes…………………………………………..…………..267
Figure 3.29 View from the Raymond Hilliard Homes senior housing rooftop……..……….268
Figure 3.30 View from senior housing. Photograph by Orlando R. Cabanban, 1966………268
Figure 3.31 Unnamed boy. Photograph by Orlando R. Cabanban, 1966……….…………...269
Figure 4.1 Ethel Percy Andrus and Ruth Lana at the 1964 New York World’s Fair………270
Figure 4.2 Grey Gables, NRTA Journal, December 1953, page 19………………………..270
Figure 4.3 Conneaut Hall (North Hall), built in 1948, photograph from 1953…………….271
Figure 4.4 South Hall and North Hall, NRTA Journal, September 1957, 10………………271
Figure 4.5 New construction at Grey Gables, NRTA Journal, December 1956, 20-21……272
Figure 4.6 Floor plan of Meadow View, NRTA Journal, December 1956, 20-21…….…...272
Figure 4.7 Sycamore Lodge, NRTA Journal, December 1957, 23…………………………273
Figure 4.8 Gateway Lodge, Hillside, NRTA Journal, September 1957, 11………..………273
Figure 4.9 Grey Gables, NRTA Journal, December 1957, 24-25……….…........................274
vi
Figure 4.10 Grey Gables grounds………………………………………………..…………..274
Figure 4.11 Grey Gables model shown at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.........................275
Figure 4.12 Cover of NRTA Journal, June 1959. …………………………………...………275
Figure 4.13 Grey Gables promotional spread, NRTA Journal, March 1958……...…………276
Figure 4.14 Grey Gables, NRTA Journal, June 1958, 24-25………………..……………….276
Figure 4.15 Ethel Percy Andrus and Faustine Donnell, NRTA Journal, March 1955, 10…..277
Figure 4.16 “A Pre-view of Grey Gables,” NRTA Journal, March 1957, 18-21……..……..277
Figure 4.17 “A Pre-view of Grey Gables,” NRTA Journal, March 1957, 18-21…..………..278
Figure 4.18 Photographs of Grey Gables interiors, NRTA Journal, March 1957, 18-21…....278
Figure 4.19 Aldersly Danish Home, San Rafael, California……………………….………..279
Figure 4.20 The Acacias, NRTA Journal, June 1959, 22. ………………………..…………279
Figure 4.21 Acacias interiors, NRTA Journal, June 1959, 22……………………………….280
Figure 4.22 Modern Maturity, February-March 1959, 46………………..………………….280
Figure 4.23 1960s Sun City Ad. Courtesy of Del Webb Sun Cities Museum……...……….281
Figure 4.24 1960s Sun City advertisements…………………………………………………282
Figure 4.25 1960s Sun City advertisements…………………………………………………282
Figure 4.26 1960s Sun City advertisements. ………………………………………………..282
Figure 4.27 Sun City, 1960s advertising postcard. ……………………………………….…282
Figure 4.28 Sun City, 1960s advertising postcard. ………………………………………….283
Figure 4.29 “Time Cannot be Stored, it Must be Spent,” 1960s Sun City advertisement…..283
Figure 5.1 Illustration from Handle Yourself with Care, 1969…………………………….284
Figure 5.2 Illustration from Handle Yourself with Care, 1969…………………………….284
Figure 5.3 Housing for the Elderly: Standards of Design, 4……………………………….285
vii
Figure 5.4 Housing for the Elderly: Standards of Design, windows, 15……………….….285
Figure 5.5 House of Freedom, Robert B. Waring, 1961………………………...…………286
Figure 5.6 House of Freedom, Robert B. Waring. 1961………………………...…………286
Figure 5.7 House of Freedom, Robert B. Waring, 1961………………………...…………287
Figure 5.8 President Eisenhower views a scale model of the House of Freedom, 1961…...287
viii
Abstract
In the mid-1940s, the number of people over age 65 began accelerating dramatically. The rise of
this demographic was overwhelmingly framed as a problem. As families relocated from cities to
suburbia and house sizes diminished, it became more difficult for younger generations to provide
consistent care to aging relatives. At the same time, the media presented multigenerational living
as an unnatural arrangement and steered the nuclear family’s attention towards childcare.
Policymakers worried over the impact an aging society would have on the country’s old-age
support systems and overall economic health.
Architecture emerged as a promising solution to the problem of old age and new building
types emerged to cater to new needs. This dissertation locates a tipping point in the rerouting of
eldercare from family to the built environment in the post-World War II United States as
architecture became a key site in the maintenance, protection, and support of the older
population. I argue that the problem of aging in the mid-century period was not a problem of
housing, as was so often claimed, but an issue of caring.
A series of case studies, each representing a particular eldercare architectural typology,
structures my argument. The first chapter examines how the fragmentation of the aging process
materialized in new architectural typologies such as assisted living and continuing care
communities. It traces the origins of institutional preoccupation with smallness as a mark of
homelikeness to the development of disengagement theory, social gerontology’s first
overarching theory, which argued that a person’s world contracted with age. The chapter also
draws attention to the different conceptualizations of the value of old age in the Swedish and
American context and the contrasting ways architecture was tasked with conferring dignity to
ix
residents of nursing homes and homes for the aged. Chapter two explores the government’s entry
into the field of eldercare by establishing senior housing as a new architectural type. It addresses
the role senior housing played in tempering political and racial tensions in public housing.
Through three urban case studies, Albert Mayer’s Gaylord White House in New York City, NY
(1958-1964), Robert Venturi’s the Guild House in Philadelphia, PA (1962-1966), and Bertrand
Goldberg’s Raymond Hilliard Homes in Chicago, IL (1963-1966), the chapter illustrates how the
spatial organization of senior housing reveals different perspectives on the position the aging
body was meant to occupy at all scales—from the apartment to the city. The third chapter
spotlights how two prominent retirement communities, Ethel Percy Andrus’s Grey Gables (1954)
and Del E. Webb’s Sun City (1960) developed the concept of the “third age” and the architecture
of retirement. Yet, instead of amplifying the value assigned to older people in a postwar
capitalist consumer society, these projects deposited all the negative associations of aging into
another, less physically and cognitively able notion of old age, “the fourth age.” Finally, the
epilogue delves into the ways that architecture took on the role of caring for the elderly by
reducing the friction between the body and the built environment through a series of design
interventions that claimed to maintain health and delay decline.
The mid-twentieth century was a formative period in the elaboration of the cultural
imaginary of old age and the development of architecture for aging in the United States. This
dissertation takes a broad view of the period’s architectural typologies to show how old age was
defined in the postwar period and how this newly refined identity contributed to the larger notion
of what it means to be American. It addresses how these spaces functioned as a repository of
mid-century society’s anxieties: the push for a more inclusive future ran concurrent with a desire
to remove from view social groups such as the elderly and the disabled. The dissertation also
x
demonstrates how the nuclear family and the mid-century conceptualization of domesticity were
shaped not only by what they included but also by what they excluded. By examining the
spatialities and materialities of care, the dissertation brings to light the transformation of caring
practices and relations in the second half of the twentieth century and provides an answer to a
critical question that echoed through the postwar period — in a society that centers individual
freedoms and responsibility, who provides care when one is no longer able to take care of
oneself?
1
Introduction
In 1959, Life magazine embarked on a four-part series on old age. In the first issue, it announced
(in a refrain that would soon become common across media), that “the problem of old age is one
of the most urgent and heart-rending of our time.”1 In a series of evocative figures [Figure 1.1],
Life illustrated the explosive growth of populations over 65, whose problems were framed as no
longer a matter of individual concern but a national crisis with clear economic and social
implications. Life opened its exploration of housing, work, and lifestyle in old age with a sliceof-life dispatch that outlined some of the aspects of this “problem.” The article followed
octogenarian Annie Mahaffey, a wise but querulous widow living in a Philadelphia rowhouse
with her 42-year-old son, his pregnant wife Mary, and their seven children [Figure 1.2]. Life
presented the three-generational living arrangement as familiar but chaotic, crowded, and
fundamentally unsustainable. The intergenerational conflicts that this kind of co-habitation
engendered, the article argued, could not be overcome. Put forward as representative of the
larger dilemma faced by the elderly in the United States, the Mahaffey story lent gravity and
urgency to the quest for solutions that followed in later issues of the magazine.
The conflict was framed as gendered, the mother and wife competing for the
son/husband’s affection. “George, he’s the best of them, but he’s between two women,” an
unattributed quotation asserted.2 Photographs by Cornell Capa underlined this clash. Annie is an
unavoidable specter in the household, sometimes looming in the background and other times a
larger-than-life presence taking up much of the limited space. In one photograph [Figure 1.3], the
solid and unmoving Annie serves as the counterpoint to the blurry, dynamic forms of the
1 “Old Age: Personal,” Life, July 13, 1959, 14.
2 “In a Dutiful Family Trials with Mother,” Life, July 13, 1959, 16.
2
daughter-in-law and her friend who are conversing around the dining room table. In another,
Annie sits in her easy chair, taking up close to two-thirds of the photograph [Figure 1.4]. Mary
and her two children, shown eating breakfast in the dining room, are crowded into the final
third—a blunt statement on the domestic congestion brought on by Annie’s presence. The easy
chair is an extension of Annie, encroaching on the space of others. Placed strategically at the end
of a partition dividing the area into a parlor, dining alcove, and kitchen, the chair’s central
location made it impossible for Annie to be “left out or ignored.”3
By contrast, Annie’s room is her sanctuary. Here, memory reigns in the form of “prized
furniture from her old home” and the “keepsakes of a lifetime.”4 While her presence is
overbearing in the family scenes, depicted in her room Annie is slight and frail, pushed to the
image’s margins and dwarfed by the sizeable, formal furniture [Figure 1.5]. Just as she appears
to encroach upon her son’s life, so too does she struggle to maintain the boundary between the
family’s space and her own room. Even though her room is on a different floor and a staircase
(which she struggles to climb) separates her from the family’s space, Annie must often barricade
the door against her grandchildren. The article made clear that intergenerational conflict
extended to the couple’s offspring, with Annie feeling that the couple’s seven children compete
with her for attention. They also “refuse her the peace she feels she needs”—they “swarm,”
“bounce,” both “deviling and ignoring” Annie.
The article not only presented Annie’s physical presence as a weight on the youthful
family, but it also underscored the contrast between her values and theirs. Her methods of
discipline were “outdated and cruel.” Her very presence denied her son and daughter-in-law any
3 “In a Dutiful Family Trials with Mother,” 16.
4 In one image, Annie shows off her heart medication under the gaze of her late son Willie. Willie is
shown wearing his fireman’s uniform in a photograph set atop her bureau.
3
privacy. Between them “lies an unbridged gulf,” with Annie representing a “bygone, rigid” way
of life. However, more than anything else, the problem at the root of the article was space, or
lack thereof. There is no room for old age in the family home, it argued. Yet, existing eldercare
solutions were far from acceptable. As the daughter-in-law concluded, her eyes glistening with
tears: “there is no thought of sending Annie to a home for the aged. George would not do it and I
would not want him to. It would break his heart.”5
For the Mahaffeys, like for many other families in post-World War II United States, the
nursing home was a last resort that needed to be avoided at all costs. Media, however,
increasingly presented multigenerational cohabitation, which had been the prevailing eldercare
option, as unnatural and fraught.6 “The three-generation household is obsolete,” proclaimed a
cartoon by John Stees in a Federal Housing Administration publication [Figure 1.6]. The struggle
of multigenerational living was not new, but discussion of its pitfalls gained renewed interest in
the mid-century period. In an opinion piece responding to the Life article, columnist Sidney
Baldwin framed the generational power struggle as a direct result of changes to the economy.
Previously, “houses were bigger and there was more work.”7 However, in the transition from
rural farms to urban apartments, the elderly lost their purpose. Baldwin urged them to accept
their position and refrain from encroaching on the lives of their offspring. Instead, she suggested
they make every effort to be as unobtrusive to the new generation by keeping their thoughts,
5 “In a Dutiful Family Trials with Mother,” 24.
6 When Life introduced another grandmother, this time presented as an example of successful aging, she
emphasized: “I don’t think old people should live with the young. My family says my ideas are modern
enough but there are bound to be differences.” Instead, her solution was to live in a small hotel room
while visiting her children often. “Grandmother’s Fond Family Duties,” Life, July 27, 1959, 82.
7 Sidney Baldwin, “In My Opinion,” The Peoria Star, July 1959.
4
opinions, and pains to themselves, all the while maintaining a sunny disposition, as a “sour old
woman is one of the crowning works of the devil.”8
The “tragic decline of the elderly,” the following Life issue proposed, could be prevented
by fulfilling two basic human needs— something to do and a pleasant place to live.9 This
dissertation focuses on the second point and traces how architecture emerged as a promising
solution to the problem of old age. It investigates how new building types came into being to
cater to new needs. Above all, it explores how architecture was tasked with taking on the
responsibility of care that had previously been the purview of families.
In this dissertation I assert that old age is a useful category of historical analysis and that
attending to the spaces designed for the aging process can help us understand how old age was
conceptualized in the postwar United States. In the mid-century period, old age became a subject
of concern for numerous stakeholders. Governments, developers, non-profits, and activist groups
all attempted to delineate the boundaries of this stage of life and determine the needs of the
demographic in an effort to organize and manage this population and consolidate its role in
contemporary society. In this project, I trace the different interpretations of old age, all of which
were competing in the public imaginary of the era, to understand how the postwar United States
conceptualized and managed bodies that no longer produce or reproduce.
In studies of aging, the question of terminology is a fraught one. To this day, there is no
consensus regarding the preferred language of aging. While some marginalized groups have
positively appropriated slurs such as “queer” or “crip,” there has been no similar reevaluation of
terms related to old age. Throughout this project, I primarily use “older people” and “elderly” to
refer to the social group of people over 65. I use older people or older adults, which are
8 Baldwin, “In My Opinion.”
9 “New Ways to Full Lives,” Life, July 20, 1959, 87.
5
established as the standard within age studies, to refer to a broad category mediated by social and
biological factors, but even more so, as simply a temporal fact of being older than someone else.
As such, these terms are much more spacious and imprecise than the term “elderly,” which I
argue is a distinct social, political, and economic construct that was newly elaborated on in the
mid-century period.10
I suggest that attending to old age can illuminate larger conversations regarding postwar
American identity formation. While mid-century culture exalted the family as the country’s
primary social group, the meaning of family contracted to refer primarily to married parents with
children. This definition increasingly excluded extended family members such as aunts, uncles,
and cousins, and, crucially, grandparents. Not only were the elderly increasingly cast out from
the construct of the family, but the aging body was structured as an other to the larger youthful
identity of postwar US culture. “We Americans are dedicated to youth,” wrote physician Michael
D. Lasco in a 1959 Life magazine article.
11 America had long embraced its identity as a youthful
nation. And the postwar period saw an increased elaboration of a uniquely American youth
culture, which was equally a source of censure and fascination.12 Attending to the other of old
age illuminates not only how this stage of life was defined in the postwar period, but even more
so how this identity helped the country understand itself.
This dissertation investigates developments in the architecture for aging in the period
between 1945 and 1968. The decision to restrict the project to this timeframe is informed not
only by the widely recognized boundaries of the postwar period, but to underscore a distinct era
10 Gerlinde Mautner dates the beginning of the contestation of the term elderly to 1984. Mautner, Gerlinde,
“Mining Large Corpora for Social Information the Case of Elderly,” Language in Society 36, no. 1 (2007): 51-72.)
11 “Practical Ways to be Old and Happy,” Life, July 27, 1959, 76.
12 Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2005); James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the
1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 1988).
6
in eldercare architecture. Interest in housing the elderly began in the immediate aftermath of
World War II and peaked in the mid-1960s. Towards the end of the 1960s, the discourse
surrounding eldercare architecture changed dramatically as the nursing home sector experienced
a downturn, activist groups shifted their focus, and government support diminished. While this
dissertation spans the two decades from 1945 to 1968, with occasional forays into discussions of
earlier and later projects, the majority of relevant case studies date to the period between 1955
and 1965, a time charactered by heightened investment into eldercare architecture.
It is irrefutable that the problem of old age took on a spatial dimension in the post-World
War II era. As a result of unprecedented public discussion regarding the correct way to house the
elderly, the mid-century period was also formative period for the development of architecture for
aging. While earlier options for the spatial embrace of the aging process were rather limited,
centered around the family home and the almshouse/nursing home, the mid-century
reconceptualization of old age inspired a host of new spaces, especially new forms of housing,
catering to this population.13 Experts in the field continually stressed that the elderly spend more
time inside the home than any other group.14 In addition, they were “more emotionally attached
to their homes than the rest of us.”15 The decision of where to spend one’s later years was
regarded as “the last important decision of your life.”16 Architects saw aging as a design
opportunity, arguing that “proper housing” would serve as the “revitalizing catalyst for many of
the nation’s elderly.”17 The new building types that proliferated in the period facilitated identity
formation around this stage of life, making architecture and the larger designed environment a
13 “Review of Housing the Aged in Western Countries,” Architectural Record (February 1967), 250.
14 Glenn H. Beyer, Housing Requirements of the Aged: A Study of Design Criteria (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University, 1958), 34.
15 Albert M. Cole, “What the Aged Need in Their Home,” The New York Times, August 4, 1957, 11.
16 Wesley Gardens: A Modern Retirement Home brochure.
17 Beyer, Housing Requirements of the Aged: A Study of Design Criteria, 9.
7
full partner in the process of aging. Senior housing offered shelter to independent elderly people
of limited financial means. Active adult communities saw aging as a new lifestyle, and provided
numerous activities intended to help fill time in retirement. Assisted living combined housing
with services for everyday activities such as cleaning and meals. Continuing care retirement
communities incorporated the different strands of the fragmented care process within one
community. And, at the end of the 1960s, the hospice gave a form and space to the process of
dying.18 Some of these definitions of aging and their associated spaces proved more successful
than others. To this day, they shape how we conceive of old age and the spaces and objects that
we design to accommodate this stage of human life.
I argue that this “problem” of aging in the mid-century period was not a problem of
housing, as was so often claimed, it was an issue of caring, which, nonetheless, maintained heavy
architectural implications. Architecture became a key site in the maintenance, protection, and
support of the elderly. This dissertation looks at different attempts at enacting care, whether it is
performed by the family, the community, the government, a paid caregiver, or the domestic
space itself. Even more importantly, it examines how these acts of caring are manifested
materially through designs that cater to the elderly population. It considers the sites of care in the
process of aging and how architecture either makes visible or conceals this care. I examine the
18 Very rarely does an architectural type have a specific date to which its origins can be traced back. The
hospice, as a space dedicated solely to improving the dying process, is quite unique in this regard. It is
widely accepted that the modern hospice movement began in 1967, with the founding of St Christopher’s
Hospice in Sydenham, South London, by Dame Cicely Saunders. From the outset, the hospice concerned
itself with architectural form. Its goal, the relief from pain, was addressed not only through medical
intervention but spatial design. The first hospice in the United States opened in Connecticut in 1974.
While palliative care is not restricted to older adults, those making use of hospice services are
overwhelmingly over 65, with only 5.2% of hospice residents under that age. The hospice has also
become increasingly connected to nursing homes, with about 83% of nursing homes offering hospice
services. Manisha Sengupta et al., Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Providers and Services Users in the
United States, 2017–2018, vol. 47, 3 (National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Health Statistics, 2022),
83.
8
multiplicity of options, considering the spatialities and materialities of care and how these
intersect with caring practices and relations. Practices include both the decisions that various
stakeholders—including architects, developers, and administrators—make regarding who will
inhabit the space and how, as well as the formal and informal everyday routines that happen
within that space and between the givers and receivers of care. This dissertation is a concerted
effort to address what is gained and lost when care is transferred from human agents to objects
and spaces, when the social and relational dimensions of care are replaced by material care, and
what this material culture reveals about societies that claim to have no capacity for personal
engagement with old age.
Defining Care
In recent years, care, a seemingly unremarkable and commonplace term, has been
extracted from associations with the private and domestic realm and taken up as both an ethic
and practice of great potential in numerous disciplines, including design, architecture, and
science and technology studies.19 Definitions of care vary. Christine Milligan defines it as “the
provision of practical or emotional support.”20 Others frame care as a “way of understanding and
relating to others.”21 A multidimensional and dynamic cluster of values and practices, care can
19 In 2018, Shannon Mattern posited care and maintenance as a “framework, an ethos, a methodology, and
a political cause.” See Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care: A Working Guide to the Repair of Rust,
Dust, Cracks, and Corrupted Code in our Cities, our Homes, and our Social Relations,” Places, November
2018. Other recent examples include “Creative Exchange 2021: Landscapes of Care” event; the virtual
symposium “CARE-WORK: Space, Bodies, and the Politics of Care” held at Rice University in March
2021; Ezio Manzini, Livable Proximity: Ideas for the City that Cares (Milan, Italy: Egea, 2022); STS:
Lisa Lindén and Doris Lydahl, “Editorial: Care in STS,” Nordic Journal of Science and Technology
Studies 9, no. 1 (2021): 3–12.
20 Christine Milligan and Janine Wiles, “Landscapes of Care,” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 6
(2010): 737.
21 Care is occasionally used interchangeably with relating, or being in-relation to, as part of which “one
accepts responsibility and responds effectively without requiring reciprocity. María Puig de la Bellacasa,
“‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care,” The Sociological review (Keele) 60, no. 2
9
be both fraught and empowering as it encompasses a consideration for both interpersonal
relationships and their functioning on a systemic scale.22 Perhaps the most widely applied
definition of care comes from Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto who define it as ‘‘a species
activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that
we can live in it as well as possible.”23
The development of a dedicated theory and method of care is often credited to Carol
Gilligan and Nel Noddings.24 From the outset, Gilligan positioned care as a capacity that finds its
truest expression in action. Care is also more than an individual affective response but a value
with systemic implications. As Gilligan posited, “the ideal of care is an activity of relationships,
of seeing and responding to need, taking care of the world by sustaining the web of connections
so that no one is left alone,” a framing of care that bears a similarity to the notion of “care webs”
as put forward by disability justice activist and artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.25
While its emergence is often dated to the 1980s and attributed to white feminist authors, a
concerted engagement with the ethics of care can be traced to a radical black and Latinx
tradition.26
(2012): 198, Richard P. Keeling, “An Ethic of Care in Higher Education: Well-Being and
Learning,” Journal of College and Character 15, no. 3 (2014): 143.
22 Sara C. Motta and Anna Bennett, “Pedagogies of Care, Care-Full Epistemological Practice and ‘Other’
Caring Subjectivities in Enabling Education,” Teaching in Higher Education 23, no 5. (2018): 640.
23 Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York, NY:
Routledge, 1993), 103.
24 Other early works that explore the political implications of care in housework and childrearing include
Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press,
1975); Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1993); Sara Ruddick, Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1989).
25 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 73; Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming
Disability Justice (Vancouver, BC, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018).
26 Vanessa Siddle Walker and John R. Snarey, Race-Ing Moral Formation: African American
Perspectives on Care and Justice (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004); Tamara Beauboeuf-
10
Historically, care has been classed, gendered, and raced. It has commonly been identified
with feminized subjectivities and conceptualized in maternal terms. As a result, it has been
largely undervalued. As a quality traditionally assigned as innate to women, it has been relegated
to the familial and social context, one that is positioned as being on the outside of a professional
setting. This posits any implication of its involvement with the economic sphere through paid
employment as marring its purity. In their work on aging and care, Beth Soldo and Douglas Wolf
distinguish between informal care—unpaid care that is provided by one’s immediate family or
social group, and formal care, which usually takes the form of paid services provided by
individuals or agencies.27 These two approaches reveal fundamentally diverging
conceptualizations of care. In one, care exists in the private realm. It is a part of a series of
cyclical processes that are preoccupied with maintaining, enhancing, and reproducing life.28
Care, framed in this way, is meant to be noble and self-sacrificing. In the other, care is extracted
from the affective realm of one’s immediate circle and appropriated into the paid service
sector.29 Care is transformed into a product for sale in the market. There is some disagreement
whether care loses its radical quality during this process or whether there is potential for
subversion in its participation in a capitalist economy. Importantly, even within this shift, care
has maintained its devalued position.30
lafontant, “A Womanist Experience of Caring: Understanding the Pedagogy of Exemplary Black Women
Teachers,” The Urban Review 34, no. 1 (2002): 71–86.
27 Beth Soldo, Douglas Wolf, and Emily Agree, “The Balance Between Formal and Informal Care.” In
Aging and Health Care: Social Science and Policy Perspectives, edited by Marcia Ory and Kathleen
Bond (New York: Routledge, 1989), 193.
28 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
29 Ezio Manzini applies this argument to his analysis of urban environments, noting that cities capable of
care have been replaced by cities of services. Manzini, Livable Proximity, 68.
30 While providing the services of care can be highly lucrative, the actual work of caregiving is commonly
relegated to a precarious workforce primarily drawn from marginalized communities.
11
Care also appears to exist in a different realm than technology. It is understood to be
sensorial, affective, warm, and distinctly human. Technology, by contrast, is cold and rational. It
performs its work with detachment. Yet, caring practices have always involved objects and
technologies. At the same time, technologies rest on human activation and interaction to perform
the work of care. This intersection between human and material care has been explored by Maria
Puig de Bellacasa, who argued that while “care is a human trouble, this does not make of care a
human-only matter.”31
Architecture and Care
Architecture is a particularly useful lens for the analysis of the construction of aging.
Historians have long held that architects are deeply involved in the process of imagining the
body.32 They use a host of imaginative strategies to anticipate who will inhabit the spaces they
design and how these spaces will be used and experienced. Exceptions such as the hospital and
asylum notwithstanding, architects largely design with a youthful, healthy body in mind. This
bias is even more predominant in the design of domestic spaces. Because they often anticipate
their buildings will be populated by a generic type of person, in the case of the elderly, the
architect’s understanding of this category relies on prevailing ideologies and is often anchored in
established visual and discursive stereotypes of aging such as loneliness, frailty, and impairment.
Because it is based on a set of assumptions about the identities and practices of those inhabiting
31 María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 2.
32In the context of aging see: Christina Buse et al., “Imagined Bodies: Architects and Their Constructions
of Later Life,” Ageing and Society 37, no. 7 (2017): 1435–57; Sarah Nettleton, Christina Buse, and Daryl
Martin, “Envisioning Bodies and Architectures of Care: Reflections on Competition Designs for Older
People,” Journal of Aging Studies 45 (2018): 54–62; Bernhard Weicht, “The Making of ‘the Elderly’:
Constructing the Subject of Care,” Journal of Aging Studies 27, no. 2 (2013): 188–97.
12
the spaces, architecture often ends up reproducing existing ideologies and further participates in
the construction of a dominant model of aging. This dissertation tackles how architects inscribed
their ideas about old age into their projects; it examines the rift between the symbolic, imagined
bodies that the architects, administrators, and governments envisioned and the physical bodies
that inhabited, negotiated, and adapted these spaces and meanings.
Buildings for aging do more than visualize the values of an era, they also exert their own
power, giving and restricting access, guiding movement, directing inhabitants’ actions, and
producing affective responses. Historians have addressed the myriad ways that architecture does
the work of surveilling, disciplining, and managing populations and the ways that the built
environment produces subjects by circumscribing the possibilities of doing and being within a
space.
33 They have also addressed how governments, particularly in the context of empire,
employed healthcare architecture and urbanism in an effort to produce healthy subjects.
34 Others
have considered the ways that buildings actively make their inhabitants sicker.35
33 This dissertation builds on a canonical body of literature that considers architecture as a tool of power
and control. According to this theory, the post-Enlightenment state restructured how power was wielded
around new methods and technologies of population management. Institutions that developed in this
period not only represented state control but engendered power in the way they structured everyday life.
For Foucault, through the instrumentalization of “environments of enclosure,” such as prisons, schools,
and hospitals (and therefore nursing homes as well) and their associated techniques of spatial segregation
and surveillance, docile bodies could be (and were) produced. Similarly, I reflect on Erving Goffman’s
concept of “total institutions” and Nikolas Rose’s work elaborating Foucault’s notions of
governmentality. See: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:
Vintage Books, 1979); Erving Goffman, Asylums (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1961); Nikolas
Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990).
34 Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870-1940
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American
Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Jim
Downs, Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2021).
35 Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006).
13
If architecture can coerce and control, can it care as well? Elke Krasny has attributed the
reluctance to consider architecture as a vehicle or agent of care to the traditional gendering of the
architect as male. This resulted in the distancing of the practice of architecture from the
traditionally female domain of caring. In recent years, efforts have been made to introduce the
lens of caring in an effort to enrich our understanding of architecture. In September 2021, the
Society of Architectural Historians hosted a three-part panel on caregiving as method, looking at
how research is entangled with and enriched through care.36 Two recent edited volumes, one a
product of a symposium at Rice University and the other of a 2019 exhibition at
Architekturzentrum Wien, examined the points of contact between care, understood as a
“practice of solidarity, mutualism, and shared power” and architecture.37
While more architects and architectural historians are probing the connection between
care and architecture, there has been little effort to historicize this topic. Too little attention has
been given to vital questions regarding agency. Can architecture do the work of care? If so, is all
architecture caring architecture? Krasny, for instance, has argued that since “architecture in its
broadest sense provides shelter indispensable to the continuation of human life and survival,” all
architecture is indeed a form of care.38 Joan Tronto, on the other hand, holds that “buildings
protect people from the elements. But by themselves, they do not provide care.”39 There is also
little consensus regarding what care means in the context of architecture. Authors often use other
words interchangeably with care. Does care mean the same thing as protect, heal, support, or
36 Caregiving as Method, Society of Architectural Historians, September 10, 2021,
https://www.sah.org/conferences-and-programs/sah-connects/2021/caregiving-as-method.
37 Brittany Utting, Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common (London: Routledge, 2024),
2. Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny, Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019).
38 Fitz and Krasny, Critical Care, 33.
39 Fitz and Krasny, 27.
14
assist? How does it relate to maintenance? How do we account for the emotional dimension of
care when discussing care work enacted by architecture?40 And crucially, if architecture
influences an inhabitant’s experience of the world by regulating their environment, is it not
coercive even when it purports to care?
In giving her definition of caring architecture, Tronto stresses she is not referring to the
design of care institutions such as homes for the aged.41 For the authors of Critical Care, too,
Care (capital c) is a critical concept that engenders a reorientation of the disciplines of
architecture and urban planning, whereas eldercare architecture, much like hospitals and other
healthcare spaces, is a less compelling form of the term. I propose that addressing the questions
of care in architecture through the lens of eldercare architecture is uniquely fruitful. This
dissertation investigates how mid-century architects reframed care as a material product, thereby
emptying the term of its affective, dynamic, and improvisational qualities. To begin, architects
envisioned an aging body and made inferences regarding what this body needed. Once the design
was finalized, their caring act was completed. It was then up to the structure and the attendant
objects within the space to perform the repetitive work of care in the form of physical support
and spatial and material allowances. The shower bar lent support to the body when it lost
balance, the carpeted floor cushioned a fall at the same time as it reduced the chances of one, the
lowered window made pleasing views within reach of a wheelchair user, thereby offering
psychological benefits. In contrast to healthcare architecture that strives to restore wellbeing, the
overall goal of this kind of eldercare architecture was stasis, an attempt to preserve the
40 For discussions on the affective aspect of care see Milligan and Wiles, “Landscapes of Care”; Virginia
Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
41 Fitz and Krasny, Critical Care, 26.
15
inhabitant’s physical and mental faculties for as long as possible.42 This type of caring
architecture organized and disciplined the body, propped up by an underlying belief that the
inhabiting body could not perform certain activities or keep itself adequately safe and therefore
required this intervention. But by restricting the range of possibilities, this caring architecture
risked becoming “so caring that it becomes an escape-proof prison.”43
Other mid-century architects took a different approach. They challenged the older body
by refusing to ease navigation of the built environment. They believed that, in old age, stasis
equaled death. The role of the built environment was to initiate change. Uneven ground,
circuitous routes, and moments of friction between what a resident expected and what the space
offered forced the older person to constantly recalibrate, adapt, and adjust.44 The architecture
prodded the individual to constantly reevaluate their surroundings with the goal of keeping their
physical and mental acuities sharp. This architecture, too, was entrusted with performing the
work of care.
This question of agency is central to discussions of care, as it is argued that the cared-for
rarely get a say in becoming the object of care.45 Indeed, care can be patronizing and
paternalistic, offered by those wielding power to those perceived as needy. This hierarchy of
power allows for the arbitrary questioning of who is worthy of care and a doling out of aid
dependent on the whims of the caregiver. In the context of eldercare there is an expectation of
42 The design of hospitals also takes into consideration the needs of doctors and nurses and the pursuit of
efficiency and profit may sometimes run counter to the need to care for patients.
43 Catharina Nord and Ebba Högström, Caring Architecture: Institutions and Relational Practices
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 5.
44 The Reversible Destiny Lofts by Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins (2005) are likely the most
famous, albeit much later, example of this approach. The project suggests that enriched environments that
pose physical and mental challenges promote not only new ways of seeing and feeling but have a direct
effect on health and longevity. Jondi Keane, “Initiating Change: Architecturing the Body-Environment
with Arakawa and Gins,” Architectural Design 83, no. 1 (2013): 76–83.
45 Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds.
16
passivity. The good nursing home patient is a docile one, one who endures gracefully and
submits easily to care. Eldercare architecture, predominantly the work of men designing for
women, puts this power dynamic in stark relief. For many architects, the imagined resident of a
home for the aged was female, oftentimes imagined as a family member. For this reason, the
language used in describing the projects is rife with familial intimations and sentimental
pronouncements. As Seattle architect Edward Mahlum indicated in an interview about his design
for Norse Home in Seattle, Washington (1957): “I had one real hope in this design… to create a
building where your mother and mine, could be most happy.”46 For architects of these homes,
designing the space effectively took on the caring role. They entrusted the building with
providing the emotional and physical support assumed to be needed by the women. Instead of
considering architecture a participant in a network of caring relations, the space was instead
devised as a solution to a caring need.
Undergirding this transition is the undeniable fact that the work of care is emotionally
and physically taxing, and that it has been historically relegated to exploited subjects, women of
the family or low-paid immigrant labor. Given this reality, architectural design and technological
advances have been welcomed as the more ethical and sustainable solutions to the question of
eldercare. This transference of care that began in the mid-century period is still gaining traction
as ever more objects and technologies are devised to replace human care. Elizabeth Ellcessor, for
instance, delineated the growth of personal emergency response systems (PERS are devices that,
at the push of a button, dial one or more emergency telephone numbers) in the 1980s and 1990s,
arguing that their primary audiences were not older people who were going to use the products,
but their grown children for whom PERS would “ease feelings of worry or unease
46 Noverre Musson and Helen Heusinkveld, Buildings for the Elderly (New York: Reinhold Pub. Corp,
1963), 106.
17
technologically.”47 The device took on the responsibility of surveillance, allowing older people
to continue living independently, with independence framed as the primary value that one should
strive toward. The same promises are made today by even more advanced technologies. From AI
that performs medical assistance to robots which are designed to offer companionship for the
elderly, tactility and human-to-human interaction are replaced with the economy of technology.48
Methodology
At the root of my investigation are considerations of how bodies meet the designed world
and what barriers exist between bodies and the built environment. I uncover how architects
imagined a body identified as aging, how they designed for a body marked by both disability and
age, and the ways that material culture mediated the experiences of impairment. To untangle the
thread that connects old age and disability, I draw from disability studies, particularly the work
of Bess Williamson, Elizabeth Guffey, Aimi Hamraie, David Gissen, and Sara Hendren.49 In
considering the socially constructed meanings of old age, the dissertation has benefited from
insights into how aging has been represented in literature and visual culture.50 In an effort to
47 LifeCall entered popular culture as a pithy catchphrase that found dark humor in patent helplessness. Its
1989 advertisement features an older women woman who, after tripping in the bathroom, presses the
mobile radio panic button and cries, “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!” Elizabeth Ellcessor, “Designing
Emergency Access: Lifeline & LifeCall,” in Making Disability Modern, ed. Elizabeth Guffey and Bess
Williamson, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 200.
48 Examples include the Riken Institute Robear, Chukyo University’s Smiby and Babyloid, Softbank’s
Pepper, Raytron’s Chapit, and Fuji Soft’s Parlo.
49 Elizabeth Guffey, Designing Disability: Symbols, Space, and Society, 1st ed. (London: Bloomsbury
Publishing Plc, 2017), https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350004245; Guffey; Sara Hendren, What Can a Body
Do? How We Meet the Built World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020); Aimi Hamraie, Building
Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2017); David Gissen, The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
50 Literature: Kathleen M. Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions, Theories of
Contemporary Culture ; v. [13] (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Kathleen M. Woodward,
Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Lois W.
Banner, In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality (New York: Knopf, 1992); Barbara Frey
18
approach aging as both an embodied experience and an “element of cultural ideology with acute
social ramifications,” I also make use of theoretical insights from age studies, a humanities-based
field that explores the intersections between cultural and biologically constructed age.51
While I draw insights from these diverse fields, this dissertation is emphatically a work of
design and architectural history. It offers a close reading of a series of objects and spaces to
demonstrate how they took on the work of caring and how older people used it to both assimilate
into dominant social standards and subvert expectations of normalcy. An analysis of the role of
products and furniture such as beds, armchairs, and mirrors in the context of eldercare offers an
opportunity to develop and unsettle established theories about the meanings attached to
consumer products. In The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir argued that for the old person
doing is no longer the reason to exist. They need to have in order to be.
52 She posited that things,
Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen, Aging and Gender in
Literature: Studies in Creativity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). Visual Culture:
Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life
(London: Routledge, 1995); Anca Cristofovici, Touching Surfaces: Photographic Aesthetics,
Temporality, Aging (Boston: Brill, 2009); Amir Cohen-Shalev, Visions of Aging: Images of the Elderly in
Film (Liverpool University Press, 2008); Aagje Swinnen and John Stotesbury, Aging, Performance, and
Stardom: Doing Age on the Stage of Consumerist Culture, Aging Studies in Europe (Berlin: Lit, 2012);
Josephine Mary Dolan and Estella Tincknell, Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations (Newcastle
upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).
51 Age studies arose in response to the repeated sidelining of issues of age in fields that would benefit
from this line of inquiry. Many age studies scholars came out of gender studies and established the new
field in frustration that intersections between these two closely aligned identities have gone unexplored
and that many feminists have lagged in attending to the issue of aging. NWSA Journal dedicated an issue
to the topic of old age only in 2006. See Leni Marshall, “Aging: A Feminist Issue,” NWSA Journal 18,
no. 1 (2006): vii–xiii. Barbara MacDonald, "Outside the Sisterhood: Ageism in Women's Studies,"
in Women and Aging: An Anthology by Women, ed. Jo Alexander (Corvallis, OR: Calyx Books, 1986)
52 Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age (New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1973), 470. Simone
de Beauvoir's 1970 La Vieillesse (translated in the United Kingdom as Old Age and in the United States
as The Coming of Age) is perhaps the most influential twentieth century work in the study of old age. De
Beauvoir’s book crosses multiple domains, including philosophy, anthropology, biology, and cultural
history to investigate how a visceral aversion to aging is produced by society and culture (from without)
and how this alienation is experienced by the individual (from within). For de Beauvoir, there is an
inherent otherness to age, comprised of being othered by society and becoming other to oneself. Old age,
de Beauvoir claims, can only ever be understood as an object position. Her Marxist analysis locates the
source of this degradation in capitalism, writing that “it is the exploitation of the workers, the
19
as solidified habits, guarantee ontological security for their owners. For this reason, older people
become decidedly attached to their possessions. In the face of change, things serve to ground
their identity, to keep the past alive, and to retain their position in society. The value of things is
no longer tethered to their position in the market. Symbolic value overtakes monetary value. As
Judy Attfield has proposed, people use material objects “as vehicles of meaning through which
[they] negotiate their relations with each other and the world at large.”53 The object is an
expression of the self and a physical manifestation of culture. Attending to the object, therefore,
illuminates how social relations are made concrete in objects and spaces. But artifacts are not
mere passive receptacles of meaning. They possess agency and are able to bring about certain
effects. They can be perceived as what Daniel Miller calls a “framing mechanism for everyday
life,” or as “actants” within the larger framework of actor-network theory, as proposed by Bruno
Latour, or as James Gibson’s “affordances.”54
I explore the architecture for aging as everyday spaces that are often sidelined by the
more visually remarkable public and private works by big name architects. As Attfield has noted,
focusing on everyday architecture allows for an “exploration of that unconscious domain much
less amenable to matching the grand theories of conventional history.”55 In analyzing
architectural typologies such as nursing homes, senior housing, and retirement communities, I
pulverization of society, and the utter poverty of a culture confined to the privileged, educated few that
leads to this kind of dehumanized old age.” (7) “Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization,”
(543) she argued. While La Vieillesse never attained the popularity and wide reach of her better-known
The Second Sex, it was nevertheless a deeply influential work to scholars of aging. Published in 1970, La
Vieillesse is also valuable to this dissertation as a primary text, summarizing many of the period’s
unspoken beliefs and attitudes towards old age.
53 Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 58.
54 Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An
Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: University Press, 2005); James J. Gibson, The Ecological
Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986).
55 Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life, 41.
20
have greatly benefited from insights of vernacular architecture studies, including Abigail Van
Slyck’s work on summer camps, Dell Upton’s studies of plantations and churches, and Carla
Yanni’s work on asylums and college campuses. I rely on the useful term “cultural landscape,”
as a way to attend to the intersection between natural landscape, built forms, and social life, and
what Elizabeth Cromley calls the “activity arenas” as a way to define space, not through material
forms such as walls and roofs but human action that takes place within.56 Similarly, Bernard
Herman's concept of "embedded landscapes," which invokes Ian Hodder’s work in contextual
archeology along with Upton’s interest in the experiential dimension of buildings and objects,
shows how movement within a space, in addition to material form, affirms and contests social
relationships.57
This project is grounded in archival research spanning institutional archives (Grey
Gables, Sun City, Gaylord White House, Guild House), architects’ archives (Venturi and Scott
Brown archives at the University of Pennsylvania, Albert Mayer archives at Columbia
University), and organizational archives (Ford Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archives). The
research process necessitated reading against the grain of archives to unearth gaps and omissions.
Archives of communities that housed wealthy white residents such as AARP’s Grey Gables and
Webb’s Sun City offered direct records of the experiences of their residents as part of oral
histories, diaries, and snapshot photographs. Other archives, in particular those of senior housing
56 Elizabeth Cromley, Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments (Ithaca, NY Cornell
University Press, 1998).
57 Bernard L. Herman, "The Embedded Landscapes of the Charleston Single House, 1780-1820," Exploring
Everyday Landscapes: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 7, ed. Annmarie Adams and Sally
McMurry, 41-57 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997); Dell Upton, "White and Black
Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia," Places 2, no. 2 (1984): 59-72; Dell Upton, Holy Things and
Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (New York: Architectural History Foundation,
1986), 205 19; Ian Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 118-46.
21
projects and nursing homes, left little record of their early residents. Even in cases where
administrative materials of these communities were preserved, the information was restricted to
fragments of demographic and medical data. Resident materials such as photographs, diaries,
letters, and current resident interviews also informed my research, as did the abundance of
professional materials produced for national conferences and committees on aging and period
publications, including popular magazines for a mass audience, professional design magazines,
and specialized nursing home and medical supply publications. I also visited the extant sites,
paying particular attention to their physical presence, spatial organization, and circulation. My
analysis takes into account the visual representation and the material form of these spaces
alongside the theoretical models noted above.
In recent years, several books and articles have tackled the topic of architecture for
aging.58 In her 2021 dissertation, Willa Granger traced the history of the American nursing
home.59 Anna Vemer Andrzejewski explored the work of the Florida-based company, Mackle
Brothers, the largest builder in United States in the late 1950s, and their shift from the veteran
and luxury market towards housing catering to retirees.60 Matthew Lasner published an article on
CW Callister and his work on the active-retirement community Rossmoor in Walnut Creek,
58 Recent articles in sociology have also shed light on some key issues relating to material culture and
architecture for old age. These include: Melanie Lovatt, “Becoming at Home in Residential Care for
Older People: A Material Culture Perspective,” Sociology of Health & Illness 40, no. 2 (2018): 366–78;
Christina Buse and Julia Twigg, “Women with Dementia and Their Handbags: Negotiating Identity,
Privacy and ‘Home’ through Material Culture,” Journal of Aging Studies 30 (2014): 14–22; Julia Twigg,
“The Spatial Ordering of Care: Public and Private in Bathing Support at Home,” Sociology of Health &
Illness 21, no. 4 (1999): 381–400; Jonas E. Andersson, “Architecture and the Swedish Welfare State:
Three Architectural Competitions That Innovated Space for Dependent and Frail Older People,” Ageing
and Society 35, no. 4 (2015): 837–64; Patrice Anderberg et al., “Preserving Dignity in Caring for Older
Adults: A Concept Analysis,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 59, no. 6 (2007): 635–43.. 59 Willa Granger, “Constructing Old Age: Race, Ethnicity, Religion and the Architecture of Homes for the
Aged, 1870–1970” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 2021).
60 Anna Vemer Andrzejewski, “‘Selling Sunshine’: The Mackle Company’s Marketing Campaign to
Build Retirement and Vacation Communities in South Florida, 1945–1975,” Buildings & Landscapes 27,
no. 2 (2020): 59–82.
22
California, designed for developer Ross Cortese.
61 In this project, Lasner drew attention to
Rossmoor’s emphasis on elegant architectural form, as a way to distinguish itself from other
similar communities that were critiqued for their focus on profit at the expense of resident
experience. Yet, architectural history’s engagement with architecture for aging has been largely
piecemeal. There has been no effort to systematically analyze the varied architectural types that
arose in the mid-century period. This dissertation takes a broader view of these new typologies to
illustrate how old age was conceptualized in the postwar period and how this newly elaborated
identity intersected with the larger construction of what it meant to be American. In particular, I
address how these spaces functioned as a repository of mid-century society’s anxieties, as a push
for a more inclusive future ran concurrent with a desire to remove from view social groups that
hampered progress.62
This dissertation also contributes to a large body of research on the role of architecture in
the shaping of postwar American identity. Architectural history has long been preoccupied with
domestic architecture of the nuclear family, particularly the single-family suburban house.63
Postwar nursing homes, homes for the aged, and retirement communities all responded to this
61 Matthew Gordon Lasner, “Retirement Planning: Charles Warren Callister, the Neighborhood Unit, and
the Architecture of Community at Rossmoor and Heritage Village,” Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 80, no. 4 (2021): 436–59.
62 A similar tension can be seen in the period’s approach to the disabled population, particularly disabled
children. See Dora Vanette, “Happy Schools: The Sven Lokrantz School and the Architecture of Special
Education,” in Architectures of Hiding, eds. Pallavi Swaranjali and Federica Goffi (London: Routledge,
2023), Marilyn Irvin Holt, Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945-1960
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014).
63 Sandy Isenstadt, The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006); Alice T. Friedman, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern
Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Robin Schuldenfrei, Margaret Maile Petty, and
Fredie Floré, Atomic Dwelling (Routledge, 2012), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203142721; Monica
Penick, Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2017); Andrea Vesentini, Indoor America: The Interior Landscape of Postwar
Suburbia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018); Sarah Archer, The Midcentury Kitchen:
America’s Favorite Room: From Workspace to Dreamscape, 1940s-1970s (New York, NY: The
Countryman Press, 2019).
23
architectural model. Much like the bachelor pad, another alternative mid-century domestic space,
which both challenged and affirmed the ideologies underpinning the nuclear family, architecture
for aging can be a useful lens for probing the meaning of domesticity in this period.64 Attending
to architecture for aging brings to light the implicit assumptions about the nuclear family and
demonstrates how the nuclear family construct was shaped not only by what it included but also
by what it excluded.
And finally, this dissertation contributes to a growing body of literature that does not
posit care and material objects as contrasting terms, but rather prods at the points of contact and
tension between the two.65 I explore the intersections between the rigid built environment and the
“soft” cultures of care that were imagined and planned in the postwar United States as the
country grappled with the prospect of housing an aging population. Much of the existing
research on architecture and care has been uncritical. There has been little exploration of how
architecture itself takes on the work of care. Architects continue to use the terminology of care
indiscriminately, lending gravity to interventions in the form of light, air, and spaciousness. This
dissertation provides a more tempered analysis of the potential and reality of care in architecture.
It expands discussions of the ways architecture organizes and manages the body by considering
how architecture performs the work of care.
64 George Wagner, “The Lair of the Bachelor,” in Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol
Henderson, eds. ,Architecture and Feminism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); Steven
Cohan, “So Functional for Its Purposes: The Bachelor Apartment in Pillow Talk,” in Joel
Sanders, ed., Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996);
Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
65 Ingunn Moser Annemarie Mol, Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, ed.
Ingunn Moser, Annemarie Mol, and Jeannette Pols (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015). Twigg, “The
Spatial Ordering of Care.”
24
This dissertation is structured as a series of case studies, each representing a particular
eldercare architecture typology. Over the course of three chapters, I trace the ideals and models
that animated real spaces and shaped the lives of real people. I demonstrate how architecture
delivered care and how acts of caring were enacted within space. Chapter One, “Homelikeness
and Dignity: The Architecture of Homes for the Aged,” examines how the fragmentation of the
experience of aging materialized in new architectural typologies. These typologies were
organized around care needs. One passed through stages of aging and their attendant spaces as
bodily and mental faculties declined and as care needs increased. Architecturally, this meant a
progression from independent living, through sheltered living (where care centered on essential
services, safety, and medical care), to protected living (for those who required around the clock
care and supervision).66 In these architectural types, the domestic interior loomed large as a
model. This chapter investigates the strategies that nursing homes and homes for the aged
employed to provide the illusion of domesticity to its residents. The quality of homelikeness was
achieved through smallness, texture, material choices, and color. I trace the origin of these ideas
to the development of disengagement theory, social gerontology’s first overarching theory,
which argued that a person’s world contracted with age. I also draw attention to the different
conceptualizations of the value of old age in the Swedish and American context and the disparate
ways architecture was tasked with conferring dignity to residents of nursing homes and homes
for the aged.
66 Broadly, old age housing can be divided into independent and group living. Independent living can be
dispersed or proximate. Dispersed arrangements scatter housing for older persons among young
households, whereas in proximate developments housing is restricted to the elderly. Group housing too,
can be divided into the institutional and non-institutional. The first type encompasses nursing homes,
hospitals, asylums, and housing for the aged, whereas non-institutional includes a whole range of
arrangements such as hotels, dormitories, assisted living facilities which often included some sharing of
bath or kitchen facilities.
25
Chapter Two “Aging in Public: The Architecture of Senior Housing,” explores the
government’s entry into the field of eldercare through the elaboration of senior housing as a new
architectural type. In a country resistant to most forms of social programs, those that catered to
the elderly were, while themselves often insufficient, more prominent than those targeting other
groups. Soon after subsidized housing restricted to people over age 65 was introduced in the
United States in 1956, it overtook other forms of public housing. When public housing faltered
as a solution for many, it remained a popular solution for the elderly.
Senior housing materialized political tensions around public housing. In the urban
environment, these projects were used to break up concentrations of populations, not only in
terms of age, but race as well. In response to concerns about the changing demographics of
housing projects, housing authorities used senior housing, oftentimes the one building with
majority white populations in large projects, to provide the illusion of demographic diversity in
areas of urban renewal. The spatial organization of senior housing and its relationship to the city
reveal the period’s perspectives on how the elderly were expected to participate in society and
the role they were assigned in the urban environment. Three case studies structure this chapter,
illustrating the different approaches in the design of senior housing. Albert Mayer’s Gaylord
White House in New York City, NY (1958-1964), Robert Venturi’s the Guild House in
Philadelphia, PA (1962-1966), and Bertrand Goldberg’s Raymond Hilliard Homes in Chicago,
IL (1963-1966), all offered radically different visions of how the aging process could unfold and
the position the aging body was meant to occupy at all scales—from the apartment to the city.
Each project represented an attempt to envision and formalize the contact between senior citizens
and public space and provided insight into whether and how elderly were valorized.
26
My third chapter, “Adventures in Gracious Living: The Architecture of Retirement,”
spotlights two prominent retirement communities, Ethel Percy Andrus’s Grey Gables (1954) and
Del E. Webb’s Sun City (1960). Sun City offered an alternative to a medical model of aging and
what Lewis Mumford described as “the push-button existence of nursing homes.”67 The social
construction of active aging, which the ads for Sun City helped shape, attached a stigma to rest,
associating the residential home with isolation and idleness, and ultimately, death. Sun City
offered the fantasy of a utopian space of aging, one divorced from physical and mental disability
and separated from a world that continually devalued the existence of retirees.
Grey Gables, AARP founder Ethel Percy Andrus’s model retirement community, also
turned away from considerations of disability. Contrarian and intentionally unsympathetic to the
ailments of old age, Grey Gables featured multiple floors, uneven paths, and dim lighting,
minimizing the ability of the designed environment to offer physical assistance to a disabled
body. Predominantly occupied by unmarried older women, Grey Gables was also a space of
feminine intimacy and care, a found family that ran counter to expectations of a normative
nuclear family. The porous access to Grey Gables from the surrounding town and the widely
disseminated photographic records of life in the retirement community rebuffed the expectations
that these women were meant to retreat from the public realm and recede into the background.
Grey Gables was designed as a stage for the performance of bodies that were heretofore expected
to retreat away from the public eye.
Both communities proposed that to be meaningful, old age needed to be active. They
elaborated the concept of the “third age” and its attendant architecture. Yet, instead of reframing
how value was assigned to individuals in a postwar capitalist consumer society, they instead
67 Lewis Mumford, “For Older People—Not Segregation but Integration,” Architectural Record, May 1956,
191.
27
deposited all negative associations of aging into another, less physically and cognitively able
notion of old age—the “fourth age.”
The epilogue, “The Architecture of Care,” delves into the ways that care of the elderly
was rerouted towards architecture. The chapter reflects on the dissertation’s prior case studies to
consider how space and objects were imbued with the responsibility of care. It analyzes a series
of period manuals and standards books that framed existing architecture as hazardous to the older
body and set out to reduce the friction between the body and the built environment through a
series of design interventions.
Aging in the Post-World War II Era
The concept of the life course proposes that every person, barring untimely death, moves
through a sequence of stages, each characterized by unique developmental properties and
bookended by transitional events. The form and number of these stages is culturally
determined.68 Division into four stages—childhood, youth, maturity, and old age—predominated
in some contexts as it lent itself easily to metaphor by conflating the human life cycle with that
of nature, particularly the change between spring, summer, fall, and winter. In other instances, a
68 In The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America Thomas Cole argues that
“quintessentially modern ideas and images of human lifetime were born” during the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. At this time, “the endless circle or cycle of human life [was] broken and
replaced by a life course modelled on a rising and descending staircase.” Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of
Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4. Martin
Kohli views life course as an “articulated institutional complex with its own overarching logic.” Life
course, as a social institution central to industrial societies, sets out to achieve “social order by processing
people through the social structure and articulating their actions, in other words, by providing the rules by
which individuals unfold and conduct their lives.” Over time, these rules become self-evident as they turn
into second nature. Martin Kohli, “The Institutionalization of the Life Course: Looking Back to Look
Ahead,” Research in Human Development 4, no. 3–4 (2007): 254.
28
more fragmented cycle was favored, with up to ten cycles being defined.69 The concept of the
life course was present in mid-century discourse, in part due to the influence of Erik Erikson’s
schematization of the eight stages of life, as put forward in his 1950 book Childhood and
Society.
70 While Erikson was predominantly concerned with childhood, with five of his eight
stages taking place before age 12, he nevertheless included considerations of the crises and
strengths of the over-65 stage as well.71 Erikson was not unique in his interest in refining the
taxonomy of life cycles. As Winthrop Jordan has argued, the “general tendency in various
schools of psychology in the early twentieth century was to segment the life cycle into
increasingly discrete and well-defined units.”72 Unlike prior presentations of the life cycle as
allegorical and symbolic, twentieth century scholars saw it as both descriptive and prescriptive of
one’s internal and external identity.73
As a life course stage, old age is formulated at the intersection of several biological
features and sociocultural narratives. One is made old chronologically, biologically,
psychologically, socially, and culturally. Despite a general understanding that aging is a gradual
process, old age is often framed as a distinct period in life, clearly demarcated from previous
stages. Just like childhood, youth, and middle age, the concept of old age is historically
contingent. Until the twentieth century, it was more likely to be associated with physical qualities
69 For a breakdown of how the life cycle was conceptualized in the United States from the colonial period
to the twentieth century see: Michael Kammen, “Changing Perceptions of the Life Cycle in American
Thought and Culture,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 91 (1979): 35–66.
70 Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950).
71 At age 93, Joan Erikson added a ninth stage to The Life Cycle Completed: Extended Version, arguing
that there are unique demands and difficulties in the period of life that comes after eighty. Erikson argued
that all the previous stages become relevant once more in the ninth stage as one faces all of the crises of
the previous stages but in reverse.
72 Winthrop D. Jordan, “Searching for Adulthood in America,” Daedalus (Cambridge, Mass.) 105, no. 4
(1976): 8.
73 Kammen, “Changing Perceptions of the Life Cycle in American Thought and Culture,” 53.
29
such as loss of teeth or eyesight than chronological age. At different points in American history,
aging was associated with social categories such as widowhood or biological processes such as
menopause.74 Over the course of the twentieth century, the distinction between middle and old
age became more commonly based on employment status rather than physical ability—as most
period writing emphasized the continuity of physical and mental wellbeing between those two
stages of life. The shift is usually credited to the implementation of the Social Security Act of
1935, which set the age of 65 as its benchmark, classifying people as old or elderly after they had
crossed that threshold. This milestone was then solidified through the founding of American
Association of Retired Persons (AARP) in 1958 and the introduction of Medicare in 1965. The
bureaucratic definition of old age made no distinctions between healthy or disabled older people;
distinctions of race, gender, or class paled in the face of a clear and categorical distinction of 65
as the demarcating line between work and retirement. At the same time, it denied entry into this
role of retiree to those who did not have a conventional work trajectory—routinely women,
disabled people, immigrants, and minorities. For women, the transition to old age remained
tethered to biological processes of reproduction, with menopause being the unspeakable but
potent boundary between the before and after. Yet, because menopause served no role in the
economy, it was also “deemed irrelevant for gaining access to the social entitlements and
responsibilities of senior citizenship.”75 For disabled people too, aging was overshadowed by this
preceding identity tethered to the abilities of their body. As Jacob S. Hacker and Michael Byrd
and Linda Clayton have showed, African Americans too were consistently excluded from both
74 Aimee E. Newell, Stitch in Time: The Needlework of Aging Women in Antebellum America (Athens,
OH: Ohio University Press, 2014).
75 Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs, Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment, 1st ed., Key Issues in Modern
Sociology (London: NBN International, 2013), viii.
30
corporate and state welfare structures in old age.76 Given these exclusions, Chris Gilleard and
Paul Higgs argue that the chronology of aging is “organized around the rational ‘disciplined,
compliant adult male” and a “working life that was embedded within the needs of the productive
economy.”77
Once the chronological boundaries of old age were set, the period following World War
II saw an increased desire to distinguish the characteristics that older individuals shared, as well
as the traits that set them apart from other age groups. Older people were living increasingly
healthier and more active lives and many enjoyed the abundance of postwar consumer culture.78
In part because of this, their numbers were rising dramatically: the number of people aged 65
increased by more than fifty percent in the period between 1945 and 1960 (climbing to 16.6
million from 10.4 million).79 The number of men and women sixty-five and over increased at a
rate of about 1,000 a day, constituting nine percent of the total population.
80 If the baby boom,
the rise in live births between 1946 and 1964, preoccupied media attention, the retirement age
population was also receiving new coverage because of their growing numbers. As in the Life
example, the demographic increase of those aged sixty and above was overwhelmingly framed as
a problem.
76 Jacob S. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Michael
W. Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, An American Health Dilemma: Race, Medicine and Healthcare in the
United States, 1900–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2002).
77 Gilleard and Higgs, Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment, viii.
78 While populations 65 and over did increase in the postwar era, this was not due to a marked spike in
longevity. While the length of life from birth had increased by more than twenty years since the turn of
the twentieth century, this was largely due to the public health and medical advances that decreased infant
mortality.Changes in longevity in old age were less dramatic. In 1900, a sixty-year-old could expect to
live fourteen more years. By 1957, this number was fifteen. Earl Ubell, “A New Outlook on Old Age,”
New York Herald Tribune, February 24, 1957.
79 Glenn H. Beyer, Economic Aspects of Housing for the Aged. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Center for Housing and
Environmental Studies, Cornell University, 1961), iii.George Cline Smith, “Buildings for the Elderly,”
Architectural Record, July 1954, 136.
80 Nursing Homes and Related Facilities: Fact Book (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,
1963), xii.
31
If retirement marked the transition into old age, then the life stage after 65 was
overwhelmingly viewed as one of financial struggle. In 1956, 76 percent of people over 65 had
no income or received less than $1,000 a year.81 Most relied on pensions or outside assistance as
their only source of livelihood. As the US government was increasingly cognizant, these
amounts were not enough to cover life’s essentials, leaving most older people in abject poverty.
Yet, given “the growing population of aged people and the accelerating numbers of sick
aged people in need of continuing medical institutional care,” the government questioned the
solvency of existing and planned social security systems.82 The underlying assumption was that
the increase in retired populations would place an undue burden on laboring adults. The increase
in the so-called dependency ratio, where dependent populations outnumber productive ones,
would deplete “finite resources” and put “strain on the fabric of our social and economic life.”83
The conclusion was that “from a standpoint of human capital” investing in aging populations was
“not a good investment.”84
At the same time, the public increasingly pushed governments to provide for the elderly,
not only materially but spatially as well.85 As the expectation of the provision of care shifted
81 Equivalent to $11,500 today. Thomas H. Carroll, “The Aging as a Field for Foundation Interest: A
Background Paper,” August 24, 1956, 1.
82Nursing Homes: Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Aging, Part 4
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), 494.
83 An alarmist tone is present in both professional organizations (first quote) American Association of
Homes for the Aging, ed., The Social Components of Care (New York, 1966). and government materials
(second quote) Developments in Aging: 1959 to 1963, A Report of the Special Committee on Aging, 88th
Congress, 1st Session, Senate: No. 8 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Print, 1963).
84 American Association of Homes for the Aging, The Social Components of Care, 66.
85 This was not a discussion unique to the United States. In postwar Germany, as James Chappel has
convincingly argued, determining the role of the elderly was part of a larger effort at legitimizing new
social orders and identifying a normative life course. East and West Germany differed greatly in how they
both posed and answered the question of old age. In West Germany, retirement was presumed to be a
necessary, clearly demarcated stage of the lifecycle. Yet, its advent made the retiree a problem of the
state, whose needs could only be solved by expanded pensions. While providing a strong safety net for
retirees, pensions nevertheless solidified their position as a beast of burden. On the other hand, in East
Germany, where participation in citizenship largely revolved around labor, policy focused on expanding
32
away from the nuclear family towards governments and professional caregivers, the spaces of
eldercare changed dramatically. Indeed, the changes to eldercare architecture in this period
cannot be extracted from other changes to the institution of family. This shift is summarized by a
1957 government publication, which suggested that at the turn of the twentieth century the
majority of the population lived in smaller communities “where homes were roomy and grandma
and grandpa could fit easily into the family life of a married child.”86 By contrast, the postwar
period found more people in large cities or sprawling suburbs, their homes and apartments small.
Moving became a much more frequent practice. Labor-saving devices in the home performed
tasks that otherwise would have been taken up by older people.87 All of these changes strained
family relations and made multigenerational living more difficult.
In addition to geographic and economic changes, the shifts in the structure of the family
had significant repercussions on eldercare options. While the nuclear family was not invented in
the twentieth century, the concept gained increased traction in the postwar period. Historians
credit the postwar revitalization of the nuclear family to the baby boom, which reversed the
declining birth rates characteristic of the previous decades.
88 But at the same time as birth rates
rose, household size decreased.
89 The family increasingly became defined as a social group
composed of married parents with children. Extended family members, in particular
work opportunities for the elderly, rather than pensions. While economic struggles for the elderly were
common, they were no different to those of other age groups. Chappel argues that it was precisely this
participation in both the joys of work and the collective financial struggles that bolstered the social
integration of the elderly. See: James Chappel, “Old Volk: Aging in 1950s Germany, East and West,” The
Journal of Modern History 90, no. 4 (2018): 801.
86 The Older Person in the Home (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,
1957), 1.
87 The Older Person in the Home, 2.
88 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992).
89 Barbara Miller Lane, Housing and Dwelling: Perspectives on Modern Domestic Architecture (London:
Routledge, 2007), 3.
33
grandparents, were excluded both from this formulation. The exclusion had a spatial dimension.
“The once familiar guest room has all but disappeared from the American scene,” wrote Glenn
Beyer in a Cornell University study, indicating that the reality of the typical prefabricated
suburban tract home prevented multi-generational living.90 The reduced nuclear family became
imbued with great responsibility. Its main function was the raising of able and independent
offspring, as evidence of the country’s broader democratic and individualist ethos.91
Parenting as an activity became reframed as an absorbing pursuit, akin to a profession.
And while literature highlighted the importance of encouraging independent, child-directed play,
parenting itself became more and more absorbing. Childrearing became an increasingly
expensive, time-consuming endeavor, comprised of constant self-improvement through the study
of advice literature and the provision of support through the purchase of the correct toys and the
orchestration of stimulation.92 The media intimated that a child’s emotional, social, physical, and
cognitive development was largely dependent on the involvement of parents.
The emphasis on child-rearing meant other forms of caregiving paled in comparison.
Above all, this impacted the caregiving of older family members. Already in 1949, sociologists
observed that care of the elderly was becoming a much less prominent function of the family.93
“How is it,” an older woman was quoted as saying in a New York Herald Tribune article, “that I
took care of ten children and now ten children cannot take care of one mother.”94 Period data
90 Beyer, Housing Requirements of the Aged: A Study of Design Criteria, 7.
91 Marilyn Irvin Holt, Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945–1960
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 131.
92 Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
93 B.B. Bears, “Are the Aged Ex-Family?,” Social Forces XXVII (March 1949): 274-279.
94 The article framed this as an economic and social issue, but used architecture as evidence of both. The
author implied that the woman he spoke to had lived in an apartment that was cold both because there was
no hot water, but also because she lived alone with no family. Earl Ubell, “A New Outlook on Old Age:
The Economic Prospect,” New York Herald Tribune, February 28, 1957, 9.
34
supports this claim, indicating that regular financial assistance from relatives was a negligible
source of income for older people.95 Housing was the next frontier. In the final years of the
1950s, according to an estimate by the Census Bureau, about three million older people lived
with children or close relatives, although the care of the older generation was increasingly being
outsourced.96
As evidenced by the Life article on Annie Mahaffey’s family situation, media
consistently inveighed against multi-generational living. But the postwar era did not discover
intergenerational conflict. Indeed, many of the conflicts and emotional beats present in the Life
article bear a marked resemblance to Leo McCarey’s 1937 film Make Way for Tomorrow.97
Bankrupted in the wake of the Great Depression, the melodrama follows Barkley “Pa” Cooper
(Victor Moore) and Lucy “Ma” Cooper (Beulah Bondi) as the bank forecloses on their house and
the septuagenarian couple is forced to move in with their children. When not one of their five
children is willing or able to take both in, the couple is forced to separate. What follows are a
series of misunderstandings and mounting resentments between the children and their parents
that ends with the father moving in with their estranged daughter in California while the mother
resolves to go to an old age home, the two resigned to the fact that they are unlikely to see each
other again.
Make Way for Tomorrow presents the incompatibility between the generations as deeprooted and unsurmountable.98 Lucy’s attempts at helping out with household responsibilities are
95 For Census Bureau findings see Ubell, 9.
96 The Older Person in the Home, 2.
97 The film itself is based on Josephine Lawrence's 1934 book, Years Are So Long. 98 The film opens with the Biblical commandment to honor one’s father and mother, while the rest of the
film proceeds to undermine the feasibility of this maxim under the conditions of individualism and
capitalism with their attendant demands of selfishness, social climbing, and the pressures of keeping up
with others. For an exploration of the disjunction between the film’s progressive message and McCarey’s
personal biography as a staunch Irish Catholic conservative who willingly testified before the House
35
perceived as unneeded at best and harmful at worst. She, too, suffers indignities from her son’s
family. The portrait of her husband is ousted from their shared room by her granddaughter and
the mere creaking of her rocking chair is disruptive to her daughter-in-law’s bridge event; the
antique chair, layered with lace doilies, is the symbol of the grating presence of the older woman.
The home for the aged plays its established role of a shameful container where the elderly
are warehoused out of sight—emphasized by the fact that, while often discussed, Idylwild Home
for Aged Women is never shown on screen. “That home for the aged is so dreary and dismal,”
Lucy observes upon visiting a woman there, “It was all I could do not to ask Mrs. Timmons how
she stood it.” Yet, when she realizes her son plans to send her away, Lucy presents this move as
her own idea before he garners the courage to tell her himself. At the end, the much-maligned
rocking chair is highlighted as the only item of furniture that Lucy is allowed to bring with
herself to her new home.99
Film critic Robin Wood read Make Way for Tomorrow as a critique of the nuclear
family.100 The solution to concerns of old age, the film suggests, is in financial independence.101
Not surprisingly, many reviewers saw the film as little more than propaganda for the
implementation of Social Security.102 The safety net afforded by the state is presented as much
more reliable than that of family. When told that living with their children will work out, Bark
Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) see Robin Wood, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film:
Hollywood and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
99 This loss is already foreshadowed by the couple’s belongings being taken away as part of the
foreclosure. “They took the book, but they couldn’t take the poem from me,” Lucy remarks, implying that
she would be similarly resilient in the face of the dispossession likely to result from her upcoming move
into the nursing home.
100 Wood, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film, 158.
101 The humiliation the older couple experiences at the hands of their children is contrasted with the
unexpected generosity the two receive from outside, not only from the two other marginalized figures, the
Jewish shopkeeper and the black maid, but from numerous salespeople the couple encounter on their final
walk through New York.
102 Steve Iliffe, “Old Times,” Medical Humanities 37, no. 2 (December 1, 2011): 132; Christopher
Sharrett, “Review of Make Way for Tomorrow,” Cinéaste 35, no. 4 (2010): 50–52.
36
notes that “except it never has worked out for anybody else.”103 At a later point in the film, a
shopkeeper Bark spends time with presents an alternative, and a McCarey-approved version of a
successful parent-child relationship: “They leave me alone. They don’t need me and I don’t need
them.”104
Make Way for Tomorrow does not propose a solution to the problem of housing in old
age.105 On the contrary, its bleak ending is often declared as the reason for its lack of box office
success.
106 But it set the stage for a preoccupation with elaborating an architecture catering to
this demographic group. And while Make Way for Tomorrow dates to a period before the
beginning of this study, it nevertheless presaged the central position of this issue in the postWorld War II era. With the advent of the war, concerns for housing the elderly were suspended,
yet they were immediately picked up at the end of the war and amplified as a key postwar issue.
Soon after the end of the war, media began highlighting the social abrasion of the old
against the new, framing multigenerational living as an unnatural arrangement that breeds
resentment on both sides. A New York Herald Tribune article suggested that, while some older
people find ways to be useful by helping with childcare, housekeeping, or gardening, those
103 Make Way for Tomorrow, directed by Leo McCarey (Paramount Pictures, 1937), 10:30.
104 Make Way for Tomorrow, 1:02:30
105 I argue that Make Way for Tomorrow can also be framed as a search for a home by its elderly
protagonists. The establishing shot introduces the Cooper family home, a many-gabled rambler
surrounded by a picket fence “with all the reality of Christmas card illustration.” (Wood, Sexual Politics
and Narrative Film, 153.) There, in a prim Victorian interior, the son notes the familiar sight of his father
sitting in an overstuffed leather chair. We soon learn that this house is no longer available to its
inhabitants for several reasons. For one, it will soon be the property of the bank, but importantly it is also
no longer suitable for its elderly residents. “The house has been too big for mother to take care of
anyway,” Bark points out at the family gathering (Make Way for Tomorrow, 07:59). Emphatically, the
family is not the answer (“no roof is big enough for two families,” one of the sons-in-law pronounces) but
neither is a work situation that is offered as a potential solution (Make Way for Tomorrow, 14:28).105
Bark’s hesitance to take on a live-in job reveals his continued belief in single-family home ownership
model as the epitome of the American dream.
106 McCarey famously declined studio appeals, including one from Paramount chief Adolph Zukor, for a
happier ending.
37
appear to be in the minority. More commonly, the author asserted, they spend their days
criticizing how their children live their lives, eavesdrop, and watch television.107 Retired men
lash out at being replaced by the younger breadwinner as the head of the household. Interference
on the side of the older generation was almost uniformly seen as threatening to their children’s
marriages and home life. “Young couples face a lot of problems,” Rev. Dr. Henry J. Whitting
noted. “It is just not fair to say they must take grandma into the home.”108 Media, psychologists,
and religious figures all tried to absolve children from any feelings of guilt. Their solution was
an alternative space of eldercare that did not impose on the everyday life of the nuclear family.
Dissenting voices sounded the alarm on the repercussions of severing older people from
the younger generation. Perhaps the most notable proselytizer of intergenerational living was
Lewis Mumford. In an influential Architectural Record article, Mumford pondered “Who can
say how much delinquency and brutalized mischief in our American towns may not be due to the
very absence of a warm, loving, reciprocal intercourse between the three generations?”109 For
Mumford, the integration of the elderly into the community was a crucial element of his larger
argument regarding humanistic, organic cities. The government, too, tried to push back the clock
and promote multigenerational living. In 1957, the Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare published The Older Person at Home, a booklet offering “some suggestions for health
and happiness in the three-generation family.”110 The booklet acknowledged that it is difficult to
lose space and that it takes effort to adapt to patterns of living different to those one is
accustomed. It nevertheless proposed that investing in the older person’s independence in the
107 Earl Ubell, “A New Look on Old Age: Housing,” New York Herald Tribune, March 4, 1957.
108 Earl Ubell, “A New Look on Old Age: Religion,” New York Herald Tribune, March 6, 1957.
109 Lewis Mumford, “For Older People—Not Segregation but Integration,” Architectural Record, May
1956, 194.
110 The Older Person in the Home.
38
beginning of cohabitation would prevent, or more realistically shorten, their burden on family
members later in life.111 In an effort to ease worries regarding caregiving, it minimized the
responsibilities expected from family members. Instead, it focused on retrofitting spaces to do
some of the work of care and purchasing products that would act as a prosthesis, extending the
range and capacity of the elderly.
To address the problem of old age, many stakeholders set about working on solutions.
For one, aging was tackled as a scientific conundrum. Geriatrics, a field focused on studying and
treating the biological changes in old age, emerged in the early years of the twentieth century.112
In 1909, Ignatz Nascher published an article titled “Geriatrics” in the New York Medical Journal,
effectively instating a new medical subspeciality. Old Age, Nascher argued, was not a
pathological state but a normal stage of life. Nevertheless, its “peculiarities and infirmities”
necessitated a dedicated branch of medicine.113 Geriatrics utilized methodologies borrowed from
the biomedical sciences and focused on clinical studies of the aging body.
Soon, a new generation of researchers argued that the biomedical model of aging
geriatrics proposed offered a limited lens for the exploration of the aging process. Instead, they
championed a more dedicated exploration into how aging is affected by social factors. In the
wake of these discussions, social gerontology emerged as a field. Gerontology, as a scholarly
enterprise focused on the study of senescence as a social, cultural, as well as biological
phenomenon, strived to develop its own methodologies, instruments, and attendant theories to
adequately address its field of inquiry. Yet, as W. Andrew Achenbaum demonstrated in Crossing
Frontiers: Gerontology Emerges as a Science (1995), gerontology struggled in finding a shared
111 The Older Person in the Home, 99.
112 The term geriatrics was derived from the geronte, a group of men over 60 years who ran the legislative
council (gerousia) of Athens.
113 Ignatz Nascher, "The Neglect of the Aged," Medical Record, New York, vol. 86 (1914): 457.
39
language between the various fields it was aiming to bring together and revealed the uneasy fit
between medicine, social sciences, and humanities. This quest for a distinctive scientific identity
also led gerontology to give “major priority to research on what they call ‘normal,’ ‘successful,’
and ‘productive’ aging, and to leave it to geriatricians, pathologists, and other specialists to cure
and alleviate diseases prevalent in late life.”114 Geriatrics was a true product of the mid-century
interest in old age and its findings had a significant impact on the elaboration of period
architecture.
If interest in old age began in a medical setting, it soon spread to the country’s
universities, with numerous gerontology institutes and departments becoming established over
the course of the 1960s.115 To bring together and formalize the disjointed research into the topic,
several non-profit organizations entered the field. Most notably, in the second half of the 1950s,
the Ford Foundation turned its attention to the aging issue. The private, nonprofit corporation
founded in 1936 by Henry and Edsel Ford prided itself on being at the forefront of emerging
social issues. It set as its aim the identification of pressing problems at the national and
international level and underwriting efforts towards their solution. When it came to aging, the
Foundation singled out three areas of particular importance: health, housing, and meaningful
activity. Given the “many conflicting opinions and practices in the housing area,” architecture
became the Foundation’s primary concern, with a particular focus on how form intersects with
socio-economic aspects of housing.
The foundation largely operated by supporting university projects dedicated to
researching underlying issues relating to aging. In the first three years of the program, the
114 W. Andrew Achenbaum, Crossing Frontiers: Gerontology Emerges as a Science (Cambridge:
University Press, 1995), 2.
115 The University of Michigan, where research into old age began in the late 1940s, being the most
prominent gerontology hub.
40
Foundation approved over thirty-one grants and invested over four million dollars. Its largest
grant ($500,000) went to the National Committee on the Aging, a group under the larger body of
the National Social Welfare Assembly.116 The Committee, staffed by representatives from the
federal and state governments, community service organizations, business, labor, and medical
professionals, was designed to provide a central information, evaluation, and consultation service
at the national level.117 While the committee’s chairman was a banking professional, with little
expertise in the field of aging, the group was effectively run by Ollie A. Randall and Geneva
Mathiasen, two of the most prominent experts in the field of aging who were to have a
considerable impact on conversations regarding senior housing.
From the start, the committee was involved in architectural problems. A 1956 breakdown
of service inquiries received by the committee reveals that most requests for information or
guidance were from those seeking to build special housing for the elderly.118 To streamline its
response to these service requests, the Committee published a three-volume study on standards in
sheltered care and a film tackling similar issues. Finally, it launched an architectural competition
for the design of a home for the aged, in collaboration with the American Institute of Architects,
Architectural Record, Modern Hospital and financial support from the Schimper Foundation.
Through a $140,000 grant made in 1961, the Ford Foundation also helped the establishment of
the American Association of Homes for the Aging, under the aegis of NCOA, which brought
116 The committee was founded in 1950 and had a proven track record of work in the field.
117 Due to its extensive support by the Ford Foundation, professionals working on topics related to aging
were aware that this group would have unparalleled authority in dictating the direction of the field. This
caused substantial conflict with the highly influential gerontology department at the University of
Michigan, which saw itself as being the pre-eminent institution in the field. The head of the division of
gerontology, Dr. Wilma Donahue, and Clark Tibbits, a University of Michigan professor who had moved
on to become the head of the Committee on Aging in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,
felt particularly slighted by not being selected for NCOA leadership.
118 Carroll, “The Aging as a Field for Foundation Interest: A Background Paper,” 62.
41
together more than 500 hundred non-profit homes, including those managed by various
denominational groups, fraternal orders, and other public and voluntary agencies.
Interest in old age was not restricted to non-profits but increasingly entered into
government discussions. The question of housing for aging was framed as a national
responsibility, regardless of its financial implications. Most invoked a sense of indebtedness to
the preceding generations as the reason for continued investment in citizens whose productive
contributions decreased with age. In a Senate Subcommittee on Housing hearing, Philadelphia
Monsignor Thomas J. Riley summarized this perspective: “We have the highest standard of
living in the world, but the very people who worked for and suffered for us as modern
Americans, so that we could enjoy this better life, are forced into second-class citizenship status
when they retire.”119 Others framed the issue as a matter of national reputation: “Smaller and
poorer nations are doing better in providing housing for retired persons than this country,”
Clinton Cowgill noted in an influential AIA journal article.120 In an effort to address this issue,
the 1954 Governor’s Conference requested that state governments conduct a comprehensive
study on the topic of aging. The resulting report, which addressed issues such as housing, income
maintenance, medical home care, recreation centers, adult education opportunities, and
gerontological research, was submitted a year later.121 In 1958, President Eisenhower signed an
Act dedicated to developing and improving programs to assure older persons equal opportunity
in employment and adequate income in retirement, to provide housing suited to their needs and
119 United States Senate Special Committee on Aging, Subcommittee on Housing: Housing for the Elderly
Hearings (Washington, D.C., 1961), 87.
120 Clinton H. Cowgill, “Facilities for the Aging and Infirm,” AIA Building Type Reference Guide. 121 As a result, twenty states established dedicated committees on aging in the following year and, in
1956, President Eisenhower created the Federal Council of Aging, comprised of representatives from
twelve government departments, to ensure the full coordination of agencies dedicated to the topic of
aging.
42
financial means, to assist in developing skills and social networks and promote research
“designed to relieve old age of its burdens of sickness, mental breakdown, and social
ostracism.”122 The Act also supported the establishment of the Advisory Committee on Aging
and the White House Conference of Aging.
And finally, the most direct way the government involved itself with housing the elderly
was through direct housing and mortgage insurance programs. The Section 203 of the National
Housing Act signed by President Eisenhower in 1956 made home ownership available to the
elderly under the FHA mortgage insurance plan that freed applicants from required downpayment and closing cost requirements. Under Section 207, it expanded public housing
eligibility to single elderly persons and added special provisions that gave the elderly preferential
treatment in applying for public housing. It also facilitated the financing of rental projects and
provided funds for remodeling low-rent housing catering to this age group. The Housing Act of
1959 established an FHA mortgage insurance program for privately owned nursing homes as
well as the Section 202 program, a low interest rate direct Federal loan program for rental
housing for the elderly. Over the course of the 1950s and 60s, both Democratic and Republican
politicians made investing in housing for the elderly an important part of their platform, speaking
to the widespread popularity of policies aimed at assisting this demographic contingent.123
Architecture for Aging
Before 1948, there is virtually no mention of buildings designed around the aging process
in American architectural media. Architectural Record, for instance, only discussed old age in
122 Hazel Robinson, “The White House Conference on Aging,” Modern Maturity, November 1959.
123 “Where GOP, Democrats Stand on Housing,” House & Home, September 1960, 49.
43
the context of designing multi-generational or long-term single-family housing by reporting how
to provide accommodations for the aging process within existing structures.124 When aging
entered the architectural conversation in the later 1940s, it was largely in the context of senior
housing projects for the poor elderly.125 In 1944, Architectural Record deemed a Scottish
Housing Advisory Committee study advocating for dedicated senior housing as “having no
special appeal” in the United States, where “elevators and compact one-room apartments
abound.126
By the mid-1950s, this landscape changed dramatically. In July 1954, Architectural
Record featured the first article on “Buildings for the Old Folks.”127 Mostly providing statistics
on the demographics of those over 65, the article set the ground for the argument that old age is a
problem that could only be solved through dedicated architecture. Two issues later, the magazine
offered proposals for what those living arrangements could look like in its first “building types
study” on housing for the aged. Through a series of brief essays, a group of experts from the
medical and public health fields (although few of them specializing in old age) stressed the
importance of elaborating the types of architecture for the aging process beyond the existing
typologies of “old folks home” and “nursing home.”128 Given the diversity of needs and desires
of the elderly, they suggested that no single, all-purpose institution could meet these
124 Features that were highlighted include providing bathrooms and rooms on lower floors to obviate the
need for going up and down staircases and designing perches from which one could enjoy observing the
bustle of the street.
125 Articles on British senior borough council projects were the first examples of architecture for aging
that appeared in Architectural Record. “Homes for the Elderly,” Architectural Record, August 1948, 162.
126 “Planning Our New Homes,” Architectural Record, September 1944, 26.
127 Over the years, the publication covered many building types as part of its “building types study”
section, each issue highlighting a particular architecture including religious buildings, shopping centers,
apartments, colleges, restaurants, and motels. It only established “Buildings for the aged” as a separate
category in 1954. “Buildings for the Aged,” Architectural Record, September 1954, 185.
128 “Buildings for the Aged,” Architectural Record, September 1954, 185.
44
requirements. Instead, they urged designers to develop a range of new solutions beginning with
retrofitting homes for age-related disabilities, elaborating diagnostic, medical, and rehabilitation
facilities, and offering a wide variety of congregate housing options, from hotels to retirement
communities.129 The case studies featured in the publication, however, exhibited a much more
uniform appearance. All nursing homes, they contained ward-type rooms, communal dining,
dedicated hobby rooms, and some form of medical presence.
Over the next decade, there was hardly an issue of Architectural Record without a
mention of these architectural typologies. The magazine published international solutions to the
problem (Swedish examples proved particularly appealing), book reviews, dispatches from
conferences, and updates to federal and state guidelines. In 1956, it participated in devising an
architectural competition for a home for the aged, in collaboration with the National Committee
on the Aging and The Modern Hospital. Over time, the rather limited repertoire of building
typologies presented in Architectural Record evolved into a highly complex set of solutions
including active living retirement communities, continued care retirement communities, assisted
living, and hospice.
Architectural Record played an important role in defining and framing the question of
architecture for aging, in supporting research into its resolution, and in disseminating and
praising promising case studies. Other period publications told a similar story. Architectural
Forum discovered the “new market” of housing for the elderly several times over the course of
the 1950s and 60s. In 1958, it published the highly influential “Housing for the Independent
129 Other publications argued the same. AIA Journal, for instance, wrote that “there is no single building
type, no matter how clever the architectural solution, that will, in itself, solve all of the problems of the
aging.” George E. Kassabaum, “On the Design of New Housing for the Aging,” A.I.A. Journal, July
1961, 78.
45
Aged,” by Jane Jacobs.130 It followed it up in December 1960 with “A New Housing Market:
Older People,” urging the industry to tailor its production to the market’s “very special needs.”131
In 1961, it published a three-part series on housing for the elderly. AIA Journal published
dispatches from the 1961 White House Conference on Aging, adapting information from the
conference panels into a series of refence articles by George E. Kassabaum, Chairman of the
Committee on Housing for the Elderly. Progressive Architecture, too, published numerous case
studies on the topic in the early 1960s.132 Even House and Home and House Beautiful showed
interest in the various solutions for retirement housing.133 The impact of these articles went far
beyond the building industry, as virtually all government, non-profit, and industry publications
cited these articles as authoritative sources on the topic.
While most articles continued to remind readers of the financial limitations of the elderly
as a demographic contingent, the media increasingly framed the overall market for old age
housing as highly lucrative, predicting that architects and developers would soon switch from
their preoccupation with housing for young families to that of the elderly.134 They reasoned that
the increased availability of secure incomes such as pensions and life insurance endowments was
making older people more inclined to take on new financial commitments such as mortgages or
leases. In addition, the majority of older people kept their monthly expenses low. As a result, the
media anticipated that the elderly could leave more room in their budget for housing.135 Even
low-income elderly were becoming an attractive group to build for. The proliferation of federal
130 Jane Jacobs, “Housing for the Independent Aged,” Architectural Forum, August 1958, 86.
131 “A New Housing Market: Older People,” Architectural Forum, December 1960, 1.
132 The March 1961 issue on senior housing and April 1964 issue on the evolution of care architecture
from retirement village to sheltered living being of particular interest.
133 See, for instance, the July 1952 issue of House Beautiful and July 1961 issue of House and Home. 134 William C Loring, “A New Housing Market: The Old,” Architectural Forum, December 1960.
135 Loring, 111.
46
programs designed to stimulate construction for this demographic protected what might have
otherwise been risky investments and guaranteed profit. Indeed, architectural magazines turned
their attention to the topic of aging the same year that nursing homes became slated to receive
some of the $60 million dedicated to the construction and improvement of health facilities under
the Hill-Burton Act. Articles on senior housing, too, increased in number at the same time the
government injected funds into this housing type. As a result, experiments in architecture for
aging proliferated, becoming a formidable typology in their own right. And while media
somewhat inflated the promise of the market, it nevertheless proved to be compelling avenue for
many architects and developers. Already in 1962, a survey of one hundred of the largest
architecture firms in the United States revealed that housing for the aged constituted a major
portion of the firms’ output.136 Even in years when the overall housing market experienced a
downturn, the specialized market for nursing homes and housing for the elderly continued
booming.137
Using U.S. census data, a chart illustrates historical trends in multigenerational
households in the United States over the past century and a half. [Figure 1.7] The chart makes
clear the extent and swiftness of the shift in living arrangements in the mid-century period. In
1950, multigenerational living was at its peak, with ten percent of families living in this
arrangement. At this inflection point, the percentage began to decline. The drop slowed in the
1970s, at which point five percent of children lived with their grandparents. At this moment, the
number began steadily to rise once more. By 2018, the number had once again neared the 1950
peak, indicating another transition towards multigenerational living.
136 “News: 100 Largest Architectural Firms in the Country,” Architectural Forum, May 1962, 14.
137 “Roundup: Government Forecast: 10% Drop in New Housing this Year,” House & Home, September
1960, 41.
47
The chart illustrates how the mid-century period indeed marked a widespread rerouting of
eldercare away from the family. This dissertation is a concerted effort not only to highlight this
important tipping point in the shifting locus of eldercare in the post-World War II United States,
but to chronicle how these changes in caregiving came to be and to analyze the role architecture
played in this process.
48
Chapter 1 Homelikeness and Dignity: The Architecture of Homes for the
Aged
“My son, he can’t have me in his three-room apartment. I can’t afford a fancy place on my
widow’s pension. Go to an old folks home? Never. That’s like dying.”1
A 1971 postcard for Shady Lawn Nursing Home in Walnut Creek, Ohio, offers three
images of the eldercare institution [Figure 2.1].
2 Sprawling at the top is the ranch house exterior
with slight Colonial Revival detailing visible in the columned and pedimented porte-cochere and
multi-pane windows topped by a pitched roof. The overall effect is that of a single-family house
stretched horizontally. Underneath, equal space is given to two photographs of the interior. One
shows a large common space bookended by a semicircular grouping of plush couches and
armchairs, framed by heavy curtains. A chandelier lights the room, surrounded by imitation wood
ceiling beams that break up the uniformity of the utilitarian fiberboard drop-ceiling tiles. The other
photograph presents a semi-private room. Its corner is largely taken up a by a medical bed, the
steel bedframe enclosed in a dark wood veneer. A small painting, presumably of religious imagery,
hangs above the headboard, as the only wall decoration in the room. The sporadic texture and color
in the textiles and furniture injects visual interest into the otherwise austere space. Barely visible
in the right corner, a white and green curtain signals the ability to create some separation between
the two beds. The back of the postcard is largely blank, the top left corner discloses essential
1 Ubell, “A New Look on Old Age: Housing.”
2 The postcard is undated but an approximation of the publishing date has been made using the website
“Dating Dexter Press Postcards” (https://postcardhistory.net/2021/10/dating-dexter-press-postcards/) and
based on the rate of postage shown on the postcard https://siarchives.si.edu/history/featuredtopics/postcard/dating-postcards.
49
information such as the institution’s name, address, and tagline proclaiming that the facility offers
“skilled nursing care for men and women in a home-like atmosphere.”
Shady Lawn is hardly unique in emphasizing the “homelike” aspect of its offerings. In fact,
this sentiment is repeated in the advertising materials of many other nursing homes founded around
this time; Hassler Nursing Home in Shillington, Pennsylvania and The Aristocrat in Lakewood,
Ohio, to name but a few. In its appearance, Shady Lawn is also decidedly ordinary, employing a
range of strategies and design decisions that had become standard for this modern vernacular type.
Neither unique nor ahead of its time, Shady Lawn provides a synthesis of common concerns and
solutions and is therefore a useful starting point for an inquiry into mid-century nursing homes. Its
founders, too, are a familiar type in the story of this institution. Levi and Lillis Troyer, merged
their interests in real estate and business by venturing into “uncharted waters” of a promising new
industry by transforming an old hotel into a nursing home.3 While the Troyers continually
emphasized the role faith played in their work, the community was not overtly church-affiliated
and was instead run like a business.4 Over time, the Troyers added new structures such as assisted
living and independent living facilities and expanded the community until their institution offered
a “continuum of care” where residents could “move up” in the level of attention they receive.5
By the time Shady Lawn was founded in 1963, the visual repertoire of a mid-century
nursing home was already established. The community is representative of the fragmentation of
the aging process, where distinct architectural types were devised to attend to different stages of
3 Dave Mast, “Chamber Honors Levi and Lillis Troyer for a Lifetime of Commitment to Community,”
The Bargain Hunter, February 10, 2014.
4 Only in June of 2008, did Walnut Hills shift from being a privately-owned company to a churchaffiliated, non-profit 501 c (3) organization. Paula Miller, “Walnut Hill – 50 Years of Care and Service,”
Walnut Creek, https://cometowalnutcreekohio.com/walnut-hills-50-years/.
5 “Walnut Hills Nursing Home – Continuum of Care,” Amish Leben, June 22, 2013,
https://amishleben.com/2013/06/walnut-hills-nursing-home-continuum-of-care.
50
old age—framed around the loss of independence and physical decline. In composing these spaces,
architects set out to materialize abstract concepts such as homelikeness and dignity. However, in
contrast with single-family housing, which used design cues to signal spaciousness in what were
factually small houses to temper conflict between lifestyle aspiration and economic reality,
homelikeness in this context translated to coziness achieved through smallness, texture, material
choices, and color. Behind both the fragmentation and reduction in the space of old age lay the
belief that a person’s world contracted with age. Legitimized by disengagement theory, social
gerontology’s first overarching theory, nursing homes offered increasingly smaller spaces to its
residents to dovetail with the needs of progressing age.
As the expectation of the provision of care transferred away from families, the nursing
home emerged as the institution that offered professional labor as the replacement for familial
assistance. It is a potent symbol of the period’s concerns, looming large over discussions of
caregiving in old age. In a society where the nuclear single-family home had become a key part of
the nation’s identity, the nursing home rose up as a powerful other, reflecting to the nation its
limitations and weaknesses. The process of transitioning into a nursing home was marked by
reproach, older people interpreted it as their children “trying to get rid of them.”6 For the younger
generation, too, the nursing home was a site of guilt, a breakdown of their supposed duty and
selflessness. The nursing home established an alternative model of domesticity with distinct visual
and material properties. In this chapter I analyze the design strategies nursing homes employed to
cultivate this image of domesticity and explore how homelikeness, dignity, and intimacy were
made manifest in physical space. What does “home” mean in the context of the mid-century
nursing home, and, perhaps even more so, how does the suffix “-like” modify the meaning of the
6 Ubell, “A New Look on Old Age: Housing.”
51
word? I trace the decisions that architects and, even more prominently, nursing home directors and
personnel, made in order to recreate the feeling of home in the absence of what is commonly
perceived as one. I argue that these overlooked spaces yield productive insights into what
domesticity meant for Americans in the second half of the twentieth century. This imagined idea
of the home was cultivated as a response to the increasingly institutional character of nursing
homes, a result of federal legislation, and broader discussions on the role of modernism in domestic
architecture.
Nursing Homes and Rest Homes
Post-World War II institutional eldercare architecture was not a monolith. Instead,
sheltered living constituted a spectrum of institutions that varied greatly in terms of the type and
extent of care offered. A nursing or convalescent home was defined as an institution for “people
of advanced years who suffer from long-term or chronic illnesses.”7 As the name implies, a nursing
home was required to have a registered nurse present at all times for the supervision of patients. It
was different than a rest home, “which provided care to three or more persons over sixty years of
age, who are not acutely ill or in need of medical or nursing care,” another institution which had
to conform to state and federal regulations.8 Rest homes resembled nursing homes in all but the
medical attention to residents. They supervised health instead of treating chronic illness. Other
spaces of care, such as homes for the aged or boarding houses were less regulated. The services
these institutions offered ranged from professional medical care to assistance with routine
everyday tasks such as personal hygiene and getting dressed. Often, these institutions are difficult
7 Nursing Homes: Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Aging, 491.
8 Nursing Homes: Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Aging, 524.
52
to distinguish from today’s assisted living facilities, which offer individualized long-term care in
an environment that often mimics the domestic.9
While the government distinguished between these types of institutions, for much of the
public the nursing home often stood in for the lot, as shorthand for both their promises and
failures.10 As such, the nursing home became established as both a physical location and an imagespace, its meanings solid and vivid in the cultural imaginary. Above all, the nursing home became
a rich repository for all negative connotations associated with both the physical process of aging
and society’s treatment of its older citizens. In 1962, Charles E. Hayes, editor of Paddock
Newspapers, a weekly newspaper covering Chicago suburbs, along with photographer Larry
Cameron, spent nearly five months investigating Illinois nursing homes. In the resulting article
“These Lonely Rooms,” Hayes used old furniture as the most appropriate analogy for the status of
the aged in these homes. “They sit in lonely rooms, the aged, like broken furniture in an attic no
one visits.”11 For Hayes, the rocking chair had been moved away from the porch into the attic, in
much the same way the elderly person had been extracted from their role in society. Larry
Cameron’s photographs underlined Hayes’s observations, showing the rooms as alternatively too
crowded and too deserted. In one image, an elderly person sits among a forest of stark metal
headboards [Figure 2.2]. While the sheer number of beds packed into the room signals the crowded
9 In a 2007 article published in the Gerontologist, Keren Brown Wilson traced the beginnings of assisted
living to late 1970s and early 1980s. However, facilities that offered services characteristic of assisted
living appear much earlier than Wilson claims. Even the term “assisted living,” which Wilson argued first
appeared in 1985, had already been in use by the 1960s. For instance, it is listed as a distinct eldercare
type in Musson and Heusinkveld’s 1963 Buildings for the Elderly. See: Keren Brown Wilson, “Historical
Evolution of Assisted Living in the United States, 1979 to the Present,” The Gerontologist 47, no. 1
(December 2007): 8–22; Musson and Heusinkveld, Buildings for the Elderly, 211.
10 An early 1960s memo by the American Association of Homes for the Aging, for instance, sets as one of
its primary goals to dispel the misguided view that nursing homes are “the only and primacy source of
care” in old age. American Association of Homes for the Aging, “Request for Funds to Provide a
Program of Direct Services, Interpretation and Recruitment,” 7. Ford Foundation, project file E-222,
Rockefeller Archive Center, New York.
11 “Fact Versus Fiction,” Aging, October 1962, 3.
53
nature of the institution, itself an indictment, the resident is also patently isolated and alone. We
are prompted to ponder the aimless existence of the person, as they turn away from us and gaze
into the distance. This aimlessness is underscored in another photograph that crowds five women
into the frame. Although there are few clues as to their location, we can assume they are
photographed in a nursing home common area. With no activities or furniture to ground them, they
merely exist unmoored in the space. One woman has her eyes closed as she pinches the bridge of
her nose, a defensive gesture that can be interpreted as an attempt to block out the world and go
inward in the face of pain, discomfort, or disappointment. The photograph’s exposure and contrast
highlight the sunken eye sockets of the other women, giving them a spectral presence. The women
in the background, in particular, fade into the background while their eyes remain trained on the
photographer, haunting the photograph and its viewers. Hayes’s feature was one of the many
period exposés dedicated to showing the dismal conditions at the country’s nursing homes.12 They
reported that residents of nursing homes were at a much higher risk from malnutrition,
dehydration, infections, and overall neglect. Some believed that “nursing home” as a term had
been marred beyond repair and suggested that the negative associations could be dispelled by
substituting nursing home with a more acceptable name such as convalescent home, or even a
hospital for the chronically ill or dormitory.13
While the nursing home loomed large in the public imaginary, its perceived ubiquity was
not reflective of everyday reality. In truth, nursing homes housed a relatively small segment of the
aging population.14 In 1962, there were some 23,000 nonhospital facilities providing nursing or
12 “Dreary Reality in Nursing Homes—and Machines Cranking Up,” Life, September 3, 1965, 56.
13 Clinton H. Cowgill, “Facilities for the Aging and Infirm: Part II,” AIA Journal, July 1960, 73.
14 Even today, when populations over 80 have surpassed 12 million, some 1,321,200 people reside in
nursing homes and 918,700 in residential care communities. Sengupta et al., Post-Acute and Long-Term
Care Providers and Services Users in the United States, 2017–2018.
54
supporting services to chronically ill and aging people.15 Some 9,700 were skilled nursing care
facilities. While the nursing home housed a comparatively small proportion of the over-65
population, it was nevertheless becoming a more prominent player in the eldercare housing
industry. The percentage of elderly persons in nursing homes rose 58 percent in the decade between
1950 and 1960 and 107 percent between 1960 and 1970.16
The federal government first became involved in the nursing home industry with the
passage of the Social Security Act of 1935.17 The Act established Old Age Assistance (OAA), a
federal-state public assistance program which provided income support to the elderly poor. In
response to critiques of almshouse conditions, the act prohibited the use of OAA payments for
public institutions. OAA beneficiaries thus had to look elsewhere for care once they required
assistance and could no longer remain in their homes. Combined with the downturn of the Great
Depression, many almshouses could no longer sustain themselves through charitable donations
and closed their doors. The availability of funding, the increase in customer base, and the lack of
competition in turn stimulated the growth of proprietary nursing homes. Various stakeholders,
including “nurses, doctors, dentists, builders, speculators, landlords, accountants,” scrambled to
reap benefits and raced to open nursing homes in “converted hotels, mansions, town houses,
decrepit hospitals, and sprawling Victorians.”18
Two developments during the 1950s significantly impacted the structure of the industry,
attracting speculators to invest in nursing homes and shifting the pattern of ownership away from
mom-and-pop homes to multi-state, multi-facility chains. The first was the vendor payment
15 Nursing Homes and Related Facilities: Fact Book, xii.
16 Bradford H. Gray, ed., For-Profit Enterprise in Health Care (Washington D.C.: National Academies
Press, 1986), 497.
17 For a full history of federal nursing home regulation, see Gray, 492–542.
18 Julius Horwitz, “The Nursing Home Industry Tools Up,” New York Times, May 01, 1966, 303.
55
system, authorized under the 1950 amendments to the Social Security Act and expanded in 1956,
which created a federal matching program for medical services and enabled direct payments to
nursing home providers. The second was increased availability of government-backed loans,
through the Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Federal Housing Act (FHA), for nursing
home construction and conversion. The regular payments and low risk made nursing homes an
unexpectedly profitable investment. The passage of Medicare and Medicaid further sped up the
expansion of the nursing home industry. These bills attempted to change the status of nursing
homes from “point-of-no-return” facilities to rehabilitative institutions, as a “revolving door”
through which patients return to the community instead of staying until their passing.19
As the nursing industry flourished, licensing regulations tried to keep track, mandating a
standard of care and building requirements, but the pursuit of profit in the industry (with more than
ninety percent of nursing homes in private ownership) took precedence.20 The 1950 Social
Security Act did not specify minimum state licensure standards and there was little oversight
ensuring that states enforced compliance. Even when Medicaid and Medicare were enacted in
1965, nursing homes could receive funding if they were in substantial, as opposed to full,
compliance with the minimum health and safety standards. When found in violation of standards,
the institutions merely had to present a plan for their correction in order to be certified and receive
payments.
This period of intensive construction in the nursing home field was relatively short lived.
A 1985 report indicated that most of the country’s 19,000 extant nursing homes had been built
19 United States Senate Special Committee on Aging, Subcommittee on Housing: Housing for the Elderly
Hearings, 569.
20 Today, most nursing homes are for profit and chain-affiliated. Sengupta et al., Post-Acute and LongTerm Care Providers and Services Users in the United States, 2017–2018.
56
before 1969.21 By 1970, brought on by numerous scandals regarding patient abuse and fraud, the
nursing home stock bubble burst. Speculators bowed out as the industry grew increasingly
regulated and as they misjudged the impact the Medicare-supported extended-care market would
have on the industry. Instead of the well-funded temporary patient, the primary nursing home client
remained the long-term resident with chronic issues who was unable to pay for their own care.
What money was left to be made was found in quantity not quality, leading to an even more drastic
shift in nursing home ownership away from small owner-operators and charitable enterprises to
large chains.
Nursing Home Architecture
As an architectural type, the nursing home derives from two institutions that preceded it.
On the one hand, the nursing home is a continuation of the almshouse, an institution with medieval
roots designed to care for and warehouse society’s most vulnerable, which included the “deserving
poor,” the disabled, and the elderly who had no family to take them in. Initially, the majority of
nursing homes were housed in buildings constructed for other types of occupancy, including
residential dwellings, hospitals, and schoolhouses.22 This meant that the institution had to adapt to
the existing envelope, so it often lacked sufficient bathrooms, accessibility features, and largescale systems such as heating and electrical to adequately meet the needs of its residents.
The historical connection to the hospital is even more important in the later elaboration of
nursing homes. Until late in the nineteenth century, the hospital functioned as a shelter for chronic
patients, which almost overwhelmingly meant those who were older. When the role of hospitals
21 Lorraine G. Hiatt, Nursing Home Renovation Designed for Reform (Boston: Butterworth Architecture,
1991), xi.
22 Ralph C. Williams, Nursing Home Management, 230 p. (New York: F. W. Dodge Corp., 1959), 155.
57
shifted to prioritize acute care, nursing homes filled in this gap, but in the process, they took on
many of the features of the medical model of care and architecture. Whereas the almshouse focused
on the efficiencies of providing communal food and shelter, the nursing home derived its
efficiencies from the communal provision of medical and other professional services. From the
beginning, modern nursing homes were the economical answer to providing institutional bed care
by untethering it from general hospitals, with their costly diagnostic, surgical, and treatment
equipment and full, professional staff.23
The mid-century nursing home boom can also be traced back to an injection of funds from
the Hill-Burton Act, a 1946 federal legislation supporting hospital construction and modernization
through grants and loans.24 In 1954, HBA expanded to include nursing homes, turning them, by
definition, into medical institutions and irrevocably tethering the later portion of the aging and
dying process to an institutional setting. What had been primarily a board and care operation now
became burdened by the priorities of the professional health industry. Aging was now understood
as a medical problem. The medical model of aging had clear implications for its spatial expression,
fixing the appearance of nursing homes to a generic institutional type that the numerous and highly
specific codes and regulations guided, thus bringing on a proliferation of sterile, inflexible facilities
with limited privacy and autonomy.
The impact of hospitals on nursing home design went beyond large-scale decisions
regarding exterior appearance and layout and directly influenced interior design finishes, including
paint, textiles, and floor coverings. Starting in the late nineteenth century, the restorative goals of
hospitals were increasingly translated into a series of material and formal decisions within the
23 “President Would Extend Hospital Aid Program,” Architectural Record, March 1954, 294.
24 For more information on the impact HBA had on nursing homes see: Benyamin Schwarz, “Nursing
Home Design: A Misguided Architectural Model,” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 14,
no. 4 (1997): 346.
58
space.25 In concert with the period’s scientific theories and technological innovations, the modern
hospital featured hard surfaces devoid of projections and crevices, rounded corners to facilitate
cleaning, and stark, white walls.26 These physical qualities were later imported wholesale into the
nursing home context without a consideration for the differences between the two institutions that
made these design choices distinctly unsuited for the needs of nursing home residents.
The justification was that, while nursing homes were not envisioned as spaces of healing,
appropriate design choices could carry the therapeutic potential for lengthening a resident’s life.
In a good environment “even aged persons with severe impairments [could] function more
effectively,” and vice versa.27 At the same time, this was juxtaposed with the need for design to be
palliative and ease a resident’s remaining time in the institution. This tension is visible in the
physical appearance of the space. Antiseptic surfaces, light, and fresh air were the guiding
principles behind many of the design decisions, largely in an effort to stop the spread of possible
infection.28 On the other hand, design cues taken from residential architecture, including domestic
furniture and decorative details, served as a salve, soothing residents by reminding them of the
familiarity and comfort of the domestic. As architecture derived from medical institutions began
to dictate the overall appearance of nursing homes, designers sought to define the nursing home
space against the institutional model and to fabricate a space that was akin to the domestic sphere.
25 Annmarie Adams, Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893–1943 (Ann Arbor:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 13.
26 In Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing 1870-1940, Jeanne
Kisacky argues that hospitals were not passive receptacles of innovation in medicine and technology.
Instead, aesthetic choices within hospitals also guided the development of scientific theories such as germ
theory.
27 “Mental Health of Older People in Institutions,” Aging, May 1962 4.
28 While this strays far from the topic of the chapter, I would be remiss not to mention the evidence of the
glaring failures of this model that became acutely apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic, during which
the majority of deaths in the United States occurring in nursing homes. For more information see: “More
Than 40% of U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Are Linked to Nursing Homes,” New York Times, July 30, 2020,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html.
59
Home and Institution
Throughout this chapter, I employ terms such as home and institution. For the purposes of
this project, I define home as a cluster of social practices, a material artifact, and a discursive
construct. The concept follows from a popular (if inevitably limited) narrative that traces the
beginning of the modern conceptualization of home in Europe and the United States to the
eighteenth century, becoming fully developed as part of the nineteenth-century Victorian “cult of
domesticity.”29 In this period, the domestic sphere was posited as a bulwark to modernization and
industrialization, centered around an idealized image of family.30 As part of this shift, the home
was framed as a site of retreat from the sphere of work and public space. It was the “domain of
pure humanity,” a place where an individual could truly be one’s own.31 At the same time, the
home is understood to be a site of interaction with others, and more specifically, a site of intimacy.
It is the place where one chooses to establish and maintain relationships with other people—
primarily those with whom one shares sentimental relationships. The home is meant to provide the
opportunity for both privacy and belonging, and thus offers a place for individual expression as
well as social contact.
Material decisions in and around the home are suspended between two common
interpretations, both of which imbue domestic objects with great consequence. On the one hand,
domestic artifacts are understood to possess the agency to shape character and thereby acquire
moral valence. Alternatively, consumer choices in the home are understood to be reflective of the
29 For a summary see: Alison Blunt, Home (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2022).
30 See Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1930
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1988), 12 and Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London:
Reaktion, 2008), 20.
31 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 30.
60
individual. The interior is analogized as a stage for self-presentation through objects, wherein the
resident cobbles together a visually discernable identity that can be meaningfully interpreted by
visitors. As such, the home is often read as an ensemble of consumption activities.32 Overall, the
home and the individual are often perceived to be mutually transformative: the domestic
environment is both determined by its residents and able to influence their character, in turn.
The home, a circumscribed site of family founded on patriarchal authority and resting on
the ideology of private property, is also an instrument of the modern state, one which relies on the
reproductive capacities of married individuals and their commitment to producing citizens and
workers. As such, the home can be understood as a site of inculcation into class, gender, and race
identities. This makes the question of what a home is in a political sense even more significant
when its role (as in the case of nursing homes) is no longer that of producing but rather
warehousing citizens.
Definitions of institutions are perhaps even more varied than those of the home and can be
extended to include schools, post offices, and factories.33 Broadly, the institution is a space that
mediates between the person and the society at large. While institutions do share certain intentions,
in particular “containing and managing ‘problem people’ of one sort or another,” there are also
significant differences in their praxis: some are designed for self-improvement and others for
punishment, some are entered into voluntarily while in others individuals are interned against their
will.34 In 1961, Erving Goffman’s characterized total institutions as “a place of residence or work
32 Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009), 23. Daniel Miller, Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors (New York:
Routledge, 2001), 6.
33 For Goffman, the shared features of all of these spaces are their “encompassing tendencies,” as they
capture the time and interest of their members. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation
of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 3.
34 Jane Hamlett, Lesley Hoskins, and Rebecca Preston, Residential Institutions in Britain, 1725-1970:
Inmates and Environments (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 6.
61
where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable
period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered life.”35 While prisons and mental
health hospitals are often singled out as paradigmatic institutions of this kind, the definition is
equally applicable to nursing homes. Indeed, Goffman himself included nursing homes in the first
category of total institutions, among other spaces established for the “care of those persons felt to
be both incapable and harmless.”36 While Goffman’s work is a useful starting point for an analysis
of institutions, it bears underscoring that the boundary between many institutions and the outside
world was more permeable than he accounted for. This is especially true for nursing homes, which
in period discourse were already being reframed as recovery rather than custodial spaces.
The rise of institutions is often traced to the shifts in forms and manifestations of power,
as the state increasingly concerned itself with the qualities of populations and governing through
environment. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault proposed that, in the late eighteenth
century, new techniques of power were developed in an effort to administer large populations.37
This process included technologies of classification, such as statistics and taxonomy, which
labeled the body, and the institutions that then isolated, surveilled, and disciplined it. While
Foucault focused on the prison, he argued that these methods extended to the operations of other
institutions and to society in general. In his writing, Foucault did not explicitly mention nursing
homes or other architecture for the aging process, likely due to their later expansion. However, it
is not difficult to extend his argument to the functioning of these institutions.
The change in the processes of power, a shift from a public and ceremonial wielding of
power to one that is covert and rational, is visible in the outward expression of institutions as their
35 Goffman, Asylums, xiii
36 Goffman, Asylums, 4.
37 Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
62
architecture moves away from buildings that maintain a strong civic presence (in an effort to
convey the state’s magnanimity) to buildings that are utilitarian and unassuming—as a way to
stress the economy of the state.38 It is not surprising that the history of several institutions,
particularly ones dealing with medical concerns, has long been tethered to the history of
modernism in architecture, as historical grandeur gave way to an interest in efficiency. In X-Ray
Architecture, Beatriz Colomina argues that medical concerns present in turn-of-the-twentieth
century Europe shaped modernist architecture, as architects sought to manipulate the built
environment to protect and strengthen the body and the mind.39 For Colomina, modernism’s
recognizable forms—smooth, white planes, expanses of glass, and lack of ornament—were visible
manifestations of this idea and soon made their way from the institution into the home itself.
Yet, in the postwar period, and particularly in the American context, there was also a
counterargument. Popular media played an important role in seeking to define the domestic against
the mandates of modernism. Through this, it aimed to untangle the home from associations of
modernist, and therefore institutional, harshness.40 Modernism was perceived as too austere and
deemed entirely inappropriate for domestic architecture. Many publications of the time set out to
promote a more approachable version of the modern style—a “good modernism” that was
convenient, comfortable, informal, and home-grown.41 These principles crystallized in specific
design decisions, discernible in the preference for low, horizontal rooflines, open layouts, exposed
38 The relationship between institutions and the domestic environment cannot be reduced to a simple
dichotomy. Even in early institutions, while the exteriors were imposing, the rooms often drew from the
domestic. Carla, Yanni, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Ann Arbor:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 6.
39 Beatriz Colomina, X-ray Architecture (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2019), 34.
40 Elizabeth Penick, Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), xi.
41 While not the sole reason, this insistence on national roots rather than “imported” and “foreign” forms
likely explains the preference for colonial revival in designing nursing homes.
63
rafters, soft and colorful furniture, and honest and natural materials. This purposeful blending of
modernist tenets such as efficiency and rationality with the familiarity and coziness of traditional
design generated what was deployed as a truly American “melting pot” style that arose out of
consumer tastes and served individual lifestyles, ones that nonetheless revolved around a broader
ideology of the “good life.”
In many ways, nursing homes sought to mimic these contemporary trends in domestic
design as presented in popular media. Designers of nursing homes, too, wanted to distinguish their
structures from associations of institutionality, if for different reasons than domestic spaces.42 Yet,
nursing homes were decidedly a simulation of the domestic ideal, a veneer placed over an
institutional base. The “honesty” of wood, brick, and stone of domestic spaces were replaced by
imitation materials; intimacy, smallness, and privacy were suggested rather than organically
cultivated and the individual consumer choices regarding interior design were superseded by topdown decision-making.
Homelikeness and Smallness
Institutions have long mined the residential for visual and material sources, hoping that
intimations of the domestic would impart physical and moral benefits to their residents. Eli
Osterweil Anders has explored how “homelike surroundings” were not only essential to patient
recovery but were believed to exert a lasting influence beyond convalescence itself. The material
culture and practices of domesticity deployed in convalescent homes “encouraged reflection, selfimprovement, and self-control—qualities essential to the cultivation of respectable self-governing,
42 “Toronto Moves to Solve Its Problems of Homes for Aged,” Architectural Record, June 1952, 28.
64
liberal citizens,” Anders proposed.43 Mary Guyatt made a similar argument, showing how the
interiors of nineteenth-century asylums were deliberately decorated to resemble domestic
environments, as a part of “moral therapy” for the patients.44 Guyatt’s work is part of a substantial
body of work tackling the relationship between the institutional and the domestic in asylums.45
Considerations of the relationship between the domestic and the institutional have entirely skipped
over nursing homes, despite their relevance to this discussion. In nursing homes, homelikeness
was not used to produce better citizens but to offer a domestic simulacrum as a salve for the home
that had been lost.
Perhaps the most influential instructional work on nursing home architecture of the midcentury period was Geneva Mathiasen and Edward H. Noakes’s 1959 Planning Homes for the
Aged. Published in conjunction with a nursing home design competition co-sponsored by the
National Committee on the Aging of the National Social Welfare Assembly and the magazines
Architectural Record and The Modern Hospital, the book was the result of collaboration between
architects, policymakers, and the media, speaking to the number of invested parties when it came
to questions of design and aging.
In Planning Homes for the Aged, Noakes and Mathiasen, an architect and the executive
secretary for the National Committee on Aging, respectively, covered both the “philosophical base
43 Eli Osterweil Anders, “‘So Delightful a Temporary Home’: The Material Culture of Domesticity in
Late Nineteenth-Century English Convalescent Institutions,” Journal of the History of Medicine and
Allied Sciences 76, no. 3 (2021): 8, 1.
44 Mary Guyatt, “A Semblance of Home: Mental Asylum Interiors, 1880-1914,” in S. McKellar and P.
Sparke (eds), Interior Design and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 48-71.
45 Other works include Jane Hamlett, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging
Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015),
Stephen Soanes, “‘The Place Was a Home from Home’: Identity and Belonging in the English Cottage
Home for Convalescent Psychiatric Patients, 1910-1939,” in Residential Institutions in Britain, 1725-
1970: Inmates and Environments, ed. Jane Hamlett, Lesley Hoskins, Rebecca Preston (London: Pickering
& Chatto, 2013), 109–123; Claudia Soares, “A ‘Permanent Environment of Brightness, Warmth, and
“Homeliness”’: Domesticity and Authority in a Victorian Children’s Institution,” Journal of Victorian
Culture 23 (2018): 1–24.
65
and the practical criteria” of nursing home design. They dedicated a substantial portion of the book
to determining a definition of home and explored different ways that design could be utilized to
replicate the feeling of home in a nursing home setting. For Mathiasen and Noakes, a home was a
place where “one knows he belongs, and in which he has meaning to himself and to others who
live under the same roof with him.”46 While the authors maintained that design can aid in creating
a “home-like atmosphere,” they admitted that homelikeness was an ineffable quality, social rather
than material.47 Although they recognized that life in a nursing home is, at best, a substitute for the
kind of life one hopes to have in the intimacy of a family circle, they argued that thoughtful
planning could make it a rewarding substitute.
Homelikeness coalesced around the idea of smallness. A 1962 article in Southern Architect
complimented a Danish old age home for its small apartments, which in its “photographs,
paintings, bric-a-brac, furniture from a whole lifetime,” “reflect whole lives in miniature.”48 The
pursuit of smallness marked every aspect of nursing home architecture. Mathiasen and Noakes
urged architects to keep the scale of the building small. They also recommended the design of
“small living rooms,” with “small adjacent pantries,” “small chapels,” “small landscaped courts,”
“small laundry rooms,” and finally “small private rooms.”49 All bigger rooms needed to be
“capable of division into smaller areas.”50 Developers of nursing homes undoubtedly seized on the
mandate of fragmentation and smallness for their economic implications. The compactness of the
nursing home spaces made care easier. But this practical reasoning was entangled with beliefs that
this quality was uniquely suited for its audience. It also corresponded to claims proposed by the
46 Geneva Mathiasen and Edward H. Noakes, Planning Homes for the Aged (New York: F. W. Dodge Corp.,
1959), 4.
47 Mathiasen, Noakes, Planning Homes for the Aged, 6.
48 “Housing the Aged in Denmark,” Southern Architect, March 1962, 8.
49 See pages 22, 24, 30, 52, 41.
50 Mathiasen and Noakes, Planning Homes for the Aged, 74.
66
period’s predominant theory of aging, which argued that, as they aged, older people’s world
naturally contracted.
In The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity, Sandy Isenstadt
argued that the ideology of the appearance of spaciousness in small houses was employed to
bridge upper-class aspirations with middle-class economic reality.51 As Isenstadt explained it, size
was signaled through explicit compensatory strategies such as picture windows and landscape
vistas. Spaciousness transcended mere perceptual expectation and become a commodity. Like
Isenstadt, I am interested in the discourse of homelikeness in addition to the form itself. I posit that
the nursing home distinctly stressed smallness as the essential feature in establishing the feeling
of homelikeness. Smallness was equated with intimacy, and what is often seen as a social feature
was attempted to be replicated in formal terms. And while other institutions also aspired to
moderate their scale in order to resemble domestic environments, many operators of nursing homes
and homes for the aged believed smallness was uniquely and innately appropriate for the
demographic they were housing and a natural consequence of the progression of old age.
The fragmentation of the aging process and its attendant shrinking of space is often actively
built into the architecture and interiors of nursing homes and continuing care communities. The
plan of the Lutheran Home in Westlake, Ohio (1961) designed by Italian-born architect Amedeo
Leone, shows how the bodily progression of disability was reflected in the physical layout of the
community [Figure 2.3]. As they required more care, residents would transition from the clustered
cottage units [Figure 2.4] through the community residences [Figure 2.5] towards mental and
medical care units. In a pattern of segmenting care that was quickly becoming customary, the
cottages were designed for those who desired to be in the proximity of care but could perform
51 Sandy Isenstadt, The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 10.
67
everyday tasks such as housekeeping.52 The community residences offered care in the form of
apartment cleaning and personal hygiene. And finally, the medical care units offered
comprehensive medical care for the oldest and frailest residents. A road curved around the different
sections, creating physical separation between the architectural types and inflecting the plan with
an almost board game-like appearance that shuttled residents through the various levels of care
and their attendant architecture. At the western edge of the plan, an extended forested area with a
stream passing could be read as a metaphorical suggestion of a transition beyond life.
In this community, the private space allotted to the residents continually contracted, while
the size of the building housing the units grew. Designed for the most independent residents, the
cottage apartments contained a kitchen and a laundry and could be merged with adjoining
apartments to add an office or a guest room. The community residences featured clusters of 16
units grouped around a central courtyard. Here, dining and living room facilities became
communal, while the bedrooms maintained their privacy. Personal space contracted even further
in the medical and nursing home center and finally, the facility for the “study and care of the
mentally confused and senile” took away any semblance of domestic privacy in the pursuit of
scientific inquiry. While the Lutheran Home project was not built entirely according to Leone’s
design, these plans provide a glimpse into how an ideal continuing care community was
envisioned. It makes clear that what was dubbed the continuum of care was in effect a
fragmentation of care; a belief that care could be broken down into constituent parts based on
degrees of dependency.
Generally, nursing home exteriors exhibit more variety in appearance than their interiors.
The buildings run the gamut between stately residential buildings with historical ornament
52 Commonly, residents of cottages would get first pick of rooms in the later stages of the aging process.
Administrators framed these early moves into the community as an investment in the future.
68
spanning across multiple floors, rustic wood buildings derived from hunting lodges, and sleek
modernist, single-story buildings. In response to the lack of regulation of the first period of nursing
home construction, in the 1960s some states instituted regulations stipulating that all new nursing
home facilities must be of original construction rather than a result of the conversion of old
residential buildings.53 They also instructed that only the first floors could be used for patient
rooms and any additional floors could only be used to house staff.54 Even in states where this was
not an official mandate, most developers elected for low, rambling structures instead of high-rises.
The ranch house, which had already established itself as a preferred architectural solution
to suburban domestic housing, presented itself as the most suitable solution to many of these
concerns. A distinctly American pastiche, ranch houses were loosely based on Spanish Colonial
precedents from the American Southwest, modified through influences borrowed from American
Craftsman houses and Prairie Modernism as well as sleek forms of European pre-war
Modernism.55 Ranch houses softened the harsh geometry of the International Style through a
variety of pseudo-revival design cues including decorative shutters, scrolling iron columns, and
bracketed gables. The simple silhouettes and low horizontal rooflines of American ranches
projected an appearance of modesty at the same time as their expansive façades and the rambling
nature of their L or U-shaped plans outwardly communicated the sizeable square footage. Ranch
houses were also singularly receptive to market impulses, the cheapness of material and repetitive
forms sold to the consumer under the guise of unpretentiousness and efficiency. And finally, the
lack of steps in these single-story buildings made maneuvering in old age easier, without loudly
pronouncing how this feature catered to accessibility needs.
53 Nursing Homes: Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Aging, 495.
54 Nursing Homes: Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Aging, 504.
55 Barbara L. Allen, “The Ranch-Style House in America: A Cultural and Environmental Discourse,”
Journal of Architectural Education 49, no. 3 (February 1996): 156.
69
Adapting the form of the ranch house for nursing homes tapped into the associated
meanings of romantic expansiveness and nostalgia married to a modern suburban type. Nursing
homes thus concealed institutional layouts of long double-loaded hallways, narrow rooms, and
large social areas by draping the buildings in what would be instantly recognizable to visitors and
residents as a domestic façade. Vaguely colonial detailing was often deployed to tame the scale
and make the building appear smaller and more intimate. These strategies were part of the goal to
make the institution appear both reliable and approachable, a feature that has historically been
singled out as crucial in nursing home design.56
Disengagement and the Private Room
Discussions of homelikeness came to a head in the design of resident rooms. Mathiasen
and Noakes urged architects to imbue rooms with this quality, as the presence of homelikeness in
this space “would largely determine the degree to which one felt at home in a congregate living
situation.”57 Yet, the desire for homelikeness found itself at odds with the economy of institutional
design wherein room layouts and appearance needed to be almost identical, and space was at a
premium. In a summary of nursing home design mandates, the U.S. Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare (HEW) deemed two-bed rooms an “adequate” arrangement for most
people.58 The only exception, the authors noted, were cases where “medical and personality
problems,” necessitated isolation.59 The preoccupation with economy extended to decisions made
within the room. A Massachusetts nursing home licensing document, which was considered
56 Victor Regnier, Design for Assisted Living: Guidelines for Housing the Physically and Mentally Frail
(New York: Wiley, 2002), 67.
57 Mathiasen, Noakes, Planning Homes for the Aged, 30.
58 “Planning the Nursing Home,” Architectural Record, May 1956, 224.
59 “Planning the Nursing Home,” 224.
70
unusually resident-centric, required only four furniture items for each resident—a bed, bedside
cabinet, storage cabinet for patient clothing, and a comfortable chair.60
Indeed, economy is the thread tying together most of the 1,200 products promoted in a
1966 buying guide published by Nursing Home Administrator. As the industry’s principal
publication, the magazine connected nursing home professionals with manufacturers. This list of
products ranged from standardized record forms, incontinence garments, medical supplies,
background music, and orthopedic equipment. The large scale of nursing home operations is
evident in the presence of commercial grade washing machines, food service solutions, and
administrative systems. The catalog also featured majority hospital suppliers, exposing to view
that the primary model nursing homes were copying was the medical industry rather than
hospitality or residential sources. Throughout, nursing home residents are referred to as patients
and the people depicted in the advertisements are exclusively younger models.61
Between medical equipment and institutional supplies, there are glimpses of the search for
an aesthetic of domesticity as a series of manufacturers attempted to marry institutional mandates
with a homelike appearance [Figure 2.6 and 2.7]. American Sterilizer Company (AMSCO) from
Erie, Pennsylvania, self-proclaimed as the world’s largest designer and manufacturer of sterilizers,
operating tables, lights and related equipment for hospitals and clinics, attempted to make inroads
into the increasingly lucrative nursing home industry. Among its product offerings, the “bedside
table-wardrobe-dresser” is particularly compelling [Figure 2.8]. Taking up only 24 by 30-inches
of floor space (36 and 48-inches with drawer and door clearance), this hybrid furniture form
60 Nursing Homes: Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Aging, 511.
61 Not only a mark of a larger visual culture that associated consumption with youthful bodies, this
disjunction can likely be explained by the sheer difference in scale between the two markets. Hospitals
were a much larger, and therefore more lucrative market, so many of the advertisements present in the
buying guide were merely copied from medical catalogs.
71
merged a two-drawer nightstand with a thin wardrobe with room for little more than a hanger and
a narrow hat shelf. The product also integrated a small coaster for a pitcher and glass, built into
the top of the nightstand, a shelf punctured with slots for items such as toothbrushes or flowers,
and a rectangular mirror with a fluorescent lamp integrated above it.
Since the catalog targeted professionals in the nursing home industry, their needs were
centered in the copy. The advertisement promised easy cleaning due to the clearance afforded by
the six-inch legs. The copy also called attention to the materials, the easy-to-wipe laminated plastic
top and enamel exterior. The spatial economy of the furniture hybrid was an even more central
concern. A small drawing to the right of the product photograph illustrated the benefit of this
arrangement as three pieces of furniture, a nightstand, a dresser with mirror and wardrobe, were
condensed into one multipurpose object. The reduction in the number of furniture items allowed
for the addition of a second bed and “table-wardrobe-dresser.” The copy attempted to quell any
misgivings about curtailing an older person’s living space by claiming that this arrangement turned
an “old single room” into a “modern and functional two-bed room.” And indeed, the second
illustration presents a more orderly room, compressing all the presumed needs of the elderly
patient/resident into one sleek product. The illustration was offered to administrators as evidence,
legitimizing the decision to constrict the world of the older person into an ever-smaller space.
In nursing home design, second to considerations of economy was the support of resident
safety, maintenance of life being the principal measure of success in the industry. To preserve the
frail body of the nursing home resident, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,
recommended the implementation of numerous safety features including night lights and
emergency call buttons and the elimination of sharp corners and exposed piping. It also advised
the installation of detention screens on room windows. Given the limited mobility of many
72
residents, which hampered evacuation, fire prevention and protection were built into the design of
the space.62 Nursing Home Management, hailed by Architectural Record as the first handbook on
nursing home planning and operation, prioritized the implementation of safety features over all
other design decisions. Through a series of images, the book presented various assistive devices
and technologies designed to prevent and minimize injuries [Figure 2.9]. One figure shows
bathroom aids such as a shower chair and a toilet with built-up seat and grab-bar. Presented in the
manner of an instruction manual, the model takes on poses that showcase how the products are
meant to be used. And while the images resemble those published in government pamphlets for
the rehabilitation of disabled veterans, their goal is different.63 Prosthetics and other accessibility
tools are used in this context to maintain stasis and prevent injury, as opposed to rehabilitating and
easing a return to everyday life. Advertised as “self-help” aids, the images also obfuscate the
dependance on the care of others by eliding key steps in the process of getting into the shower or
onto the toilet.
Indeed, the prioritization of economy and security made the pursuit of homelikeness in
resident rooms an uphill climb. But this did not prevent architects from undertaking the challenge.
In practice this meant that, while room layout was replicated across dozens of semi-private rooms,
homelikeness was conjured through smaller formal features such as “furniture selection and
placement, wall covering and color, upholstery, drapes, bedspreads, and the like.”64 In contrast
with hospitals, nursing home managers outfitted rooms with furniture that evoked the domestic
environment to counter the rigidity and repetitiveness of layouts. They tapped into history,
favoring historical styles before the advent of the International Style. No single style predominated.
62 Julian Smariga, “Five Steps to Fire Safety,” Modern Hospital, May 1955.
63 Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (NYU Press, 2019),
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvwrm3zv.
64 Mathiasen, Noakes, Planning Homes for the Aged, 30.
73
Instead, once again, a pastiche of pieces with vaguely colonial features, derived from Queen Anne
and Chippendale periods, was common. Curving cabriole legs elaborated the chairs and dressers
in contrast with the clean lines of the room, while colorful and patterned curtains and rugs tempered
the otherwise austere appearance of beige and white walls, as experts deemed that “no longer were
drab browns and tans vital to proper maintenance.”65 Plush wingback armchairs upholstered in
vibrant colors were often placed in corners.66
Often, manufacturers attempted to disguise the economy and functionality of nursing home
furniture behind veneers applied to the surface of industrial materials such as steel and aluminum.
Before the industrial revolution, veneers—thinly sliced pieces of wood glued on top of a
substrate—were not a strategy of economy and expedience to be concealed but an advanced
technique of elite cabinetmaking. Highly skilled professional craftsmen created impressive
patterns of color and grain on top of other materials as an expression of interest in the visual
qualities and meanings of wood.67 With the advent of steam machinery in the early nineteenth
century, veneers became coopted by the marketplace. In part due to the increasing scarcity of
valuable woods such as mahogany, ever thinner machine cut pieces of wood masked subpar work
and cheap materials underneath.68 Concurrent with an interest in “truth to materials,” which
stipulated that a maker was required to affirm a material’s qualities and accept its limitations to
65 Mathiasen, Noakes, Planning Homes for the Aged, 21.
66 The arrangement of furniture encouraged specific embodied actions and structured social interaction.
The armchair was placed near the bed, positioning the visitor within reach of the elderly person. Despite
the comfortable nature of the chair, it nevertheless indicated that the interaction would be relatively brief
and take the form of the visitor offering comfort and cheer to the passive recipient of care. The furniture
arrangement also implied a directionality of interaction, placing the elderly person in a still, passive
position. In doing so, it unveiled assumptions about the care expected to unfold in the space.
67 Jennifer Y. Chuong, “The Nature of American Veneer Furniture, circa 1790-1810,” Journal18 Issue
9 Field Notes (Spring 2020), https://www.journal18.org/4733. 68 For a history of the shift in meanings of wood veneers see: Peter Betjemann, “Craft and the Limits of
Skill: Handicrafts Revivalism and the Problem of Technique,” Journal of Design History 21, no. 2 (July
1, 2008): 189.
74
create a work of art that was “honest,” for many designers and critics veneers and the simulation
of solid wood came to signify deception.69 On the other hand, manufacturers and promoters of
veneers heralded them for their democratizing nature. Consumers, too, often found these imitative
materials appealing.70
These discussions of truthfulness and material agency did not reach mid-century nursing
homes. Here, wood veneer was framed as a solely positive factor, a best-of-both-worlds solution
to the practical needs of durability and ease of cleaning with affective responses and social
meanings of furniture. The manipulation of these objects tapped into the associations of the natural
world, the innate warmth commonly attached to wood as a material, and a deference to historical
craft traditions, despite clearly exhibiting evidence of its role as a mere veneer.71 The use of veneers
was often restricted to headboards and footboards. These were offered in a wide range of styles
and finishes, with names running the gamut from vaguely historical “Coronet” and “Regency” to
more nondescript “#700” and “#600.” In contrast, the sides of the bed drew attention to the object’s
practical features. Here, the folding side rails and the adjustable crank posture spring signaled
safety and functionality. The two aspects of the product worked as individual utterances within a
larger phrase, indicating a merging of the institutional and domestic into a hybrid form. In a paper
presented at the 1961 White House Conference on Aging, architect George E. Kassabaum argued
that while built-ins were safer and more sanitary and multipurpose furniture enabled architects to
plan more cheaply and efficiently, the overarching problem with nursing home furniture was that
69 Elizabeth Rankin and Robert Hodgins, “The Concept of Truth to Material,” De Arte 14, no. 23 (April 1,
1979): 3–11.
70 For an analysis of the role class distinctions played in this debate see Pamela H. Simpson, Cheap,
Quick, and Easy: Imitative Architectural Materials, 1870-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1999).
71 These hybrid furniture forms were purchased from manufactures and retailers who specialized in nursing
home supplies.
75
it was “new and held no memories.”72 Veneered furniture not only evoked higher quality materials,
but also the associations of domesticity. Through a vaguely familiar form it deceived the resident,
supplying only a visual suggestion of a recognizable past.
Taken together, these design decisions may have indeed produced the appearance of home.
The comfortable chair, dark wood, varied textiles, and eclectic period furniture signaled features
that were deemed firmly domestic and actively anti-institutional. Yet, these artifacts were also
applied indiscriminately and in bulk with no consideration for the individuality of nursing home
residents. Unlike European nursing homes, which allowed residents to bring in their own furniture,
postwar American nursing homes prohibited this practice on account of regulation. In Northern
European homes, residents were commonly prompted to bring in their light fixtures, lighting being
perceived as the strongest evidence of the individual taking ownership of a space.73 In the United
States, this was discouraged, as it brought into the equation the unpredictability of individual
choice. Even when some amount of personal decision-making was allowed, architects cautioned
that residents may wish to bring in “heavy and clumsy” furniture that should be replaced with
“well-made and comfortable” pieces, stressing how efficiency was seen as trumping personal value
and how what was deemed “comfortable” by the institution took precedence over what the
residents might have labeled as such. If the ability to cobble together one’s own domestic
environment, to make consumer choices that are reflective of oneself, is a key factor in turning a
space into a home, nursing homes were destined to fail in their attempt to mimic domestic settings
without retaining its commonly associated features.
72 Kassabaum, “On the Design of New Housing for the Aging,” 80.
73 Victor Regnier, Design for Assisted Living: Guidelines for Housing the Physically and Mentally Frail
(New York: Wiley, 2002), 105.
76
Mirrors, in particular, were often excluded from nursing home bedrooms. The National
Committee on the Aging book of nursing home standards, for instance, did not list mirrors as
necessary objects in resident rooms. Instead, they could be found in bathrooms. Since those were
shared by several rooms, the added friction in the form of distance and required effort meant that
few residents used a mirror in their daily practice of dressing. In the likely case that help with
getting dressed was needed, the resident was forced to rely on staff even more—the professional
caregiver acting as both help and reflection. If in old age the body is the oppressor, in constant
opposition to the belief in the youthfulness of the self, the mirror becomes a symbol of one’s
alienation from the body.74 According to Kathleen Woodward, for the elderly person, the mirror
reflects back an uncanny image, the creeping horror of a body that is both familiar and strange.75
If, as de Beauvoir has argued, old age is the “other that has installed itself in the body” then the
mirror is the message bearer that alerts one to the presence of this other. This notion appears to
bear some truth. In his essay “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged”
(1963), gerontologist Robert Butler observed that “mirror gazing” was a common practice in old
age settings and recalled patients who were prompted to anger and despair by the sight of
themselves in the mirror, the object a source of both fascination and repulsion.
76
Growing Old
In the early 1960s, the budding discipline of social gerontology was only beginning to
come into its own. It lacked a theoretical and methodological framework that would solidify its
74 Kathleen Woodward, “Instant Repulsion: Decrepitude, the Mirror Stage, and the Literary Imagination,”
The Kenyon Review 5, no. 4 (1983): 43–66.
75 Woodward notes that Freud’s only experiences with the uncanny was failing to recognize his aging
body in a mirror. Even more tellingly, she observes, he relegated this event to a footnote.
76 Robert N. Butler, “The Life Cycle,” in Readings in Human Development, ed. Laurence D. Steinberg
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 353, https://doi.org/10.7312/stei93738-029.
77
academic status. Perhaps this fledgling nature explains the rapid rise of Elaine Cumming and
William Henry’s 1961 book, Growing Old, the discipline’s first attempt at formulating an
overarching theory of aging.77 The theory was bold. It proposed a comprehensive, crossdisciplinary interpretation of the aging process that accounted for the attendant physical,
psychological, and social changes. Starting from the “common-sense observation that the old
person is less involved in the life around them than when he was younger,” Cumming and Henry
argued that “aging is an inevitable, mutual withdrawal or disengagement, resulting in decreased
interaction between the aging person and others in the social system he belongs to.”78 The authors
drew from data provided by the Kansas City Study of Adult Life, a research project supported by
the National Institute of Mental Health, to conclude that as one ages they become increasingly
preoccupied with their inner self and voluntarily withdraw from society, reducing roles such as
working and childrearing, decreasing the number of people they interact with and changing the
types of interactions.79 Cumming and Henry saw their theory as a response to the period’s “ideal
of aging” that centered “constantly expanding life space” as the only suitable trajectory of the life
cycle.80 Instead, they postulated that disengagement was not a form of marginality, that “a man
who has negotiated a new contract with society such that he has fewer roles or less interaction” is
inevitably more content than one who feels compelled to measure their success in life by the
77 W. Andrew Achenbaum and Vern L. Bengtson, “Re-Engaging the Disengagement Theory of Aging:
On the History and Assessment of Theory Development in Gerontology,” The Gerontologist 34, no. 6
(December 1, 1994): 756.
78 Elaine Cumming, Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement (New York: Basic Books, 1961), 14.
79 For Cumming and Henry, this disconnect is matched by the simultaneous untethering of the older
person by the society at large.
80 Elaine Cumming, “Engagement with an Old Theory,” International Journal of Aging and Human
Development 6, no. 3 (1975): 190.
78
yardstick of middle-age.81 Rather than a problem that needed addressing, this shift was framed as
natural, and even biologically predestined.
Growing Old was immediately controversial. Prominent gerontologists disapproved of the
broad brush with which Cumming and Henry were painting a picture of old age. They called
attention to the diversity of older people, both as individuals and in their experiences of old age.
Reflecting on the theory some ten years later, Cumming, jaded by the criticism, nevertheless
acknowledged that the “empirical base of the theory was never strong” and that it remained “poorly
operationalized and largely untested.”82 Yet, while its authors increasingly distanced themselves
from the findings of Growing Old (and moved on to other topics, as in the case of Henry), the
theory had staying power. All later gerontological work felt compelled to respond to Growing Old,
whether to dismiss it or mine it for useful data. The theory also played a role in legitimizing
research findings in other disciplines.83 In The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self,
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton used the disengagement theory as
validation of their findings.84 In interviewing three generations of Chicago-area families about
their most cherished possessions, Csikszentmihalyi and Halton noticed that grandparents tended
to single out objects such as photographs, dinnerware, books, and art, all of which required
minimal physical interaction.85 From these findings, they drew the conclusion that people turned
81 Cumming, 190.
82 Cumming, 188.
83 It is applied indiscriminately in numerous disciplines, from sociology to literary studies (see: Sister
Rachel M. Ricciardelli, “King Lear and the Theory of Disengagement,” The Gerontologist 13, no. 2 (July
1, 1973): 148–52.)
84 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self
(Cambridge University Press, 2013).
85 In 1977 Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton interviewed 315 people from 82 families in their
homes in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois. The interviewees were black and white, upper middle class and
lower middle class. In all families, at least three generations were involved in the interview process.
79
from action toward reflection as they aged.86 This was not only a common sense observation, the
authors noted, but a theoretically sound and empirically proven fact, which Cumming and Henry’s
work supported. That this largely untested theory propped up one of the main arguments by the
two prominent sociologists speaks to how firmly the idea of disengagement had become embedded
in other disciplines.
In some cases, nursing home administrators remained blissfully unaware of academic
discussions regarding the merits of Growing Old. In others, they were willfully indifferent to them.
The success of Growing Old reveals that for many it was a sensible, anecdotally supported thesis.
The nursing home industry took the book’s arguments as a base and justification for their practices.
If older people inevitably restricted their own environment, the institution could certainly aid in
this process—and make a profit at the same time. The concepts of domesticity and homelikeness
were broken into their constituent parts, dissected into a conglomeration of furniture pieces that
were incorporated into the nursing home space. Rather than a series of practices and relationships,
the home was instead cobbled together from a smattering of symbolic products. What Growing
Old did was absolve nursing home professionals from investing social effort in those who were
biologically destined for disengagement.87
If we go back to the image of self-help tools from Nursing Home Management, the
inclusion of the carrying apron speaks to this institutional impulse to contract. This unassuming
object, a compartmentalized garment worn at the waist, was intended to help a resident carry their
toothbrush, toothpaste, and comb from their room to the bathroom. It embodies the challenges of
achieving homelikeness when pitted against a pursuit of profit that pressured the culling of private
86 Csikszentmihalyi and Halton, The Meaning of Things, 96.
87 In her response to the life the disengagement theory took on after its publication, Cumming explicitly
admonishes “administrators of facilities for the dependent old” for using this theory “to support laissezfaire policies and negligent practices. Cumming, “Engagement with an Old Theory,” 191.
80
bathrooms and the shrinking of personal space and possessions until only what is affixed to one’s
body remained available. After all, the same publication emphasized the importance of a resident’s
clothing and other personal items as “the only remaining possessions indicative of his personal
identity.”88 Goffman, too, argued that the dispossession of property was a crucial step in the
process of institutionalization. This included the stripping of one’s “identity kit,” the “cosmetic
and clothing supplies, tools for applying, arranging, and repairing them, and an accessible, secure
place to store these supplies and tools.”89
Overall, the meaning of possessions shifts in old age. Objects become extracted from the
usual currents of the market and become valued for their role as carriers of memory and identity.90
Aspirational consumption with the goal of constructing a new and better self takes a back seat to
what Russel Belk refers to as “self-restoration,” the cobbling together of the physical evidence of
a past self.91 This includes the “material records of past self-identity,” in the form of objects related
to one’s occupation and interests, as well as cues of gender, race, and class. Secondly, it comprises
memory objects, artifacts evoking people and events.92 As part of transferring their life into an
institution, residents must cull their belongings until only the most relevant remain. Through this
violent, potentially traumatic process, most residents seek to keep precisely those objects that assist
in the “maintenance of the self.”93
88 Williams, Nursing Home Management, 68.
89 Erving Goffman, Asylums, 20.
90 Fiona Cram and Helen Paton, “Personal Possessions and Self-Identity: The Experiences of Elderly
Women in Three Residential Settings,” Australian Journal on Ageing 12, no. 1 (1993): 23.
91 Russell W. Belk, “Possessions and the Extended Self,” The Journal of Consumer Research 15, no. 2
(1988): 143.
92 Juliet Ash observes that grieving objects are both reassuring and disquieting. They allow us to “feel a
past human presence” through looking at the object at the same time that they bring us closer to a feeling
of the sublime, understood here as our shared terror of death in life.Juliet Ash, “Memory and Objects,” in
The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 221.
93 Buse and Twigg, “Women with Dementia and Their Handbags.”
81
Since residents had limited personal possessions, homelikeness in the nursing home was
actually produced by the residents themselves, through the practice of hosting visitors. The extant
personal records of nursing home residents reveal the importance of hosting to the maintenance of
feelings of control and domesticity.94 The residents went to great lengths to welcome visitors
through a variety of compensatory strategies in reshaping their environment. The residents were
preoccupied with keeping their nightstands tidy. They added cushions to chairs. Another goal was
to make their room presentable by domesticating institutional equipment and the blank canvas of
the room by adding details such as antimacassars to chair backs. What these interventions
showcase is a desire to care for instead of being cared for, and the ramifications of the shifting
expectations regarding managing the appearance of the home, as women switched from being the
primary shapers of the domestic environment to passive inhabitants of a nursing home.95
Looking to Europe and the Quest for Dignity
As American architects attempted to reinvent the old age home as a building type, they
looked to other countries for inspiration. Publications published dispatches from around the world,
considering the various solutions offered by other countries. They covered De Gomles By, the
“Old People’s Town” in Copenhagen, Dutch experiments in assisted living, and new council
buildings in Great Britain.96 Experts disregarded insights from some countries, their conditions
deemed too different to be of relevance for the United States. For instance, Cornell University’s
94 Nursing Homes: Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Aging, 100.
95 When this caring impulse was considered within the nursing home industry it was often rerouted
towards the caring of plants. Many manuals on nursing home design urged the inclusion of small gardens
for residents to tend. This was rarely implemented. A significant example of an elaborate plant nursery
can be found at Rockwood Manor in Spokane, Washington by architect Culler, Gale, Martell, Norrie &
Davis (1961).
96 “Housing the Aged in Denmark,” Southern Architect, March 1962, 8. “Homes for the Elderly,”
Architectural Record August 1948, 162.
82
Housing the Aged in Western Countries excluded Italy from its study under the justification that
the country still maintained three-generation households and therefore had not faced the problems
of northern European countries, underlining the thesis that the question of housing was tethered to
the changes in the composition of the family.97
Among the many approaches to old age housing, Swedish precedents proved to be most
appealing.98 Nursing homes by architect Åke Lindquist were featured in several publications. In
designing the Actors’ Fund of America Retirement Home in Englewood N.J., for instance,
architects Sunao John Iwatsu and L. R. Moon noted how they “drew heavily on [designs] which
had been evolving in Sweden.”99 University of Illinois architecture students designed model
“residential centers for the elderly” based on the findings of a study group that toured Swedish
homes.100
Architect Bo Boustedt positioned himself as the foremost authority on the topic of old age
architecture. Invited to consult with the United States Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare in 1958, Boustedt then went on a highly publicized speaking tour of the United States to
97 Glenn H. Beyer, Housing the Aged in Western Countries; Programs, Dwellings, Homes, and Geriatric
Facilities (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1967), v.
98 Sweden offered an appealing model to follow as its trajectory of interest into old age architecture was
similar to that of the United States. The modernization of Swedish nursing home dates to 1947. At that
time, the reform of the public pension system resulted in a small monthly income for most older people.
As a result, the Social Allowance Committee (SAC) recommended divorcing old age housing from other
types of municipal aid and elaborating an architecture for the unfolding of the aging process. The
following year, the National Social Welfare Board, a part of the Ministry for Social Affairs, Labor, and
Housing, announced a competition for housing “for older people who experience normal aging and who,
in these buildings, will have a comfortable home without an institution-like character.” Six hundred and
fifty homes were built in the first five years after the new principles were accepted by the Parliament in
1947. In terms of resident numbers, Sweden increased its accommodations in homes for the aged by about
10,000, ringing in 1961 with about 50,000 accommodations in such homes. For an analysis of how this
and two other Swedish eldercare competitions reveal the socio-political shifts in the modern Swedish
welfare state see: Andersson, “Architecture and the Swedish Welfare State.”
99 Musson and Heusinkveld, Buildings for the Elderly, 76.
100 “UI Homes for Aged Project Judged in Showing Here,” Peoria Journal Star, June 1959. (L-24b)
83
give lectures on Swedish nursing home design.101 Boustedt, who had by that point designed forty
nursing homes, with 100 more on the drawing board, did not mince words when giving his opinion
on American designs: "Your [nursing] homes depress me, and they must depress the people who
live in them," Boustedt told a New York Times reporter.102 Boustedt became the proselytizer of
intimacy and homelikeness in nursing home design, contributing a chapter on the deinstitutionalization of nursing homes to Noverre Musson and Helen Heusinkveld’s 1963 Building
for the Elderly.
103 Boustedt’s efforts in the United States also materialized in the form of a widely
disseminated brochure Homes for the Aged in Sweden Offer Ideas for Americans, published by the
President’s Council on Aging that laid out the main tenets of his approach. The book was dedicated
to “all who are concerned about the care” of older Americans, once again framing architectural
solutions as the answer to the question of care.104
In his projects, Boustedt employed a series of design solutions aimed at decreasing the
appearance of institutionality.105 He contended that homes for the aged should have a limited
population, insisting that their size should not exceed fifty residents. He designed low, one or twostory structures, eliminated long corridors, incorporated residential furniture, used potted plants to
blur the transition between outside and in, and created an overall porousness of the space by
allowing hobby room access to the elderly who maintained their residences in the village. He
101 He also met with key figures in the aging field, including Ford Foundation’s Stacey Widdicombe in
1959.
102 Nan Robertson, “U.S. Gets Advice of Swedish Architect to Aid 14 Million,” The New York Times,
May 7, 1958.
103 Musson and Heusinkveld, Buildings for the Elderly, 63–73.
104 President’s Council on Aging, Homes for the Aged in Sweden Offer Ideas for Americans (U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1963).
105 Boustedt insisted that these buildings were not nursing homes. He referred to them as “boarding
houses.” They most closely resemble assisted living facilities, where residents receive help with everyday
household tasks such as cleaning and food preparation as well as simple personal care and medication
administration.
84
employed various design strategies to instill residents with feelings of ownership of the space,
while making the retreat into privacy easier by creating sequences of increasingly more secluded
spaces.
In Vifolka county Home for the Aged, a 42-bed one-story home, Boustedt designed a onestory building organized around a large central courtyard.106 [Figure 2.10] To temper the
appearance of institutionality, Boustedt played down the main entrance. Instead, visitors and
residents entered the premises via three smaller entrances. To reach their destination they passed
through hallways that were purposefully designed to encourage curiosity. Three of the four
hallways that encircled the open square court were half-solid walls with large continuous windows,
interrupted with doors leading to the sheltered outdoor space. These devices were envisioned both
as a safety measure for frail residents and a stimulating connection to the outdoors. These hallways
featured one of Boustedt’s preferred solutions for minimizing institutional austerity. At the
halfway point, the corridors opened to what Boustedt referred to interchangeably as a “livingroom-within-a-corridor” or a “furnished bay window.”107 This pause in the circulation space of the
hallway allowed room for an informal gathering place outfitted with a table and chairs [Figure
2.11]. The open-ended space offered views of the pool and sculpture outside and created sightlines
on the inside, which Boustedt believed would be particularly conducive to encouraging
socialization.
Boustedt carved out niches for these casual seating areas in many of his other projects
[Figure 2.12]. Scattered throughout the space, as an extension or protrusion into hallways, under
and next to staircases, these areas did not have a specific function. Demarcated by rugs, they were
106 In Sweden, nursing homes were built and run by the local governments, which received some support
from the national government for construction costs. The tenants also contributed to the costs of the
homes through their pensions.
107 Bo Boustedt and Heineman, “Housing for the Aged in Sweden,” Ekistics 7, no. 39 (1959): 26.
85
little more than groupings of chairs gathered around a table, allowing residents to use them for
various purposes. The spaces could be approached as merely a break in traversing the hallway, an
opportunity to establish a conversation with another resident, or a peaceful nook for contemplation
of the outside. Even when they were not turned into living areas themselves, the well-lit and wide
hallways consistently kept a seating area within view.
This fluidity of space extended to other areas. In Frändefors, a 36-bed home serving a
village of 3,100, Boustedt incorporated a folding wall between the living room and the dining room
that could be opened to form a larger gathering space. In another project, the living room was
connected to the entrance and a work center, and the dining room maintained visual contact with
the hallway through an expanse of glass walls, while the only element separating seating areas on
the opposite sides was a beige screen open at the bottom and top [Figure 2.13].
Boustedt instilled in the residents a feeling of ownership by making the boundaries between
spaces fluid so that the personal and domestic could spill into more public areas. At the same time,
he orchestrated a progression of increased seclusion as one neared the private rooms. In nearly all
of his buildings, a visitor had to pass a small private foyer or nook before entering a resident’s
room. This space had a practical purpose, giving visitors a place to leave their coats and shoes,
while also serving a more symbolic threshold role. “It is disturbing to burst suddenly into a
person’s inner sanctum,” Boustedt argued. To further emphasize this separation, Boustedt pushed
the bed to the utmost periphery of the space. This distinguished it from hospitals or hotels and
allowed for the inclusion of a chair group (as opposed to an individual chair, which was common
in the United States) and a desk. The rooms in Boustedt’s homes were almost exclusively single
rooms, with double rooms reserved for married couples.108 Instead of being organized around the
108 Overall, single rooms accounted for 72 percent of the accommodations in Swedish homes for the aged.
President’s Council on Aging, Homes for the Aged in Sweden Offer Ideas for Americans, 26.
86
central courtyard, most rooms were oriented towards outside of the community, providing views
into the life of the village. At Vifolka and Munkedal—another Boustedt home serving a village of
4,800—the staff were located in a separate wing, to reduce their intrusion into the everyday life of
residents.
The rooms varied by color, shape, and furniture. Aside from beds, which were provided,
residents were permitted, even encouraged, to bring in their own furniture. Groupings of rooms
also had a “coffee kitchen,” with storage for basic supplies, where residents could prepare midmeal snacks in keeping with the Nordic tradition of social coffee breaks. In clear contrast with
American nursing homes, which made the television the focal point of community rooms, Boustedt
arranged living rooms around an open fire [Figure 2.14].
While Boustedt talked about homelikeness, comfort, and safety—all common concerns in
nursing home design—for him the first principle in designing homes for the aged was “to preserve
human dignity.”109 Under the concept of dignity, stakeholders interested in eldercare folded in
many of their commonsense assumptions about the value and meaning of human life. While the
idea of dignity has been explored since antiquity, its meaning is far from universal and absolute.110
Dignity is both a social construct and an embodied experience, it comprises an internal, subjective
aspect and an external, relational one. It can be explored as a subjective perception of the self, a
behavior by others, and an abstract concept.111 As an attribute of the self, dignity is often associated
109 Musson and Heusinkveld, Buildings for the Elderly, 63.
110 The roots of the English term “dignity” are found in the Latin word dignus, dignitas, meaning worthy.
The most common definition of the word suggests a state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect.
For an in-depth exploration of dignity as a concept see: Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning
(Harvard University Press, 2012).
111 Nora Jacobson distinguishes between dignity-of-self: a sense of personal dignity (which is nevertheless
contingent on how other perceive us) and dignity-in-relation: how dignity is embedded in a time and
place, dignity as status. Nora Jacobson, “Dignity and Health: A Review,” Social Science & Medicine 64,
no. 2 (2007): 294.
87
with feelings of pride, self-worth, and self-respect. As a relational concept, it rests on treating other
people as worthy, with respect and attentiveness. Dignity is ascribed to certain individuals or
groups and not others, all by virtue of their position in society. It can be gained or granted,
promoted, threatened, and violated.
The conceptualization of dignity as an inherent and inalienable human right has its own
history. In the post-World War II world, dignity became a rallying cry. It stood for the intrinsic
value of human life and a condemnation of Nazi atrocities.112 And while dignity was
indiscriminately called upon, rarely was there an attempt to define it in period texts. The concept
was assumed to be intuitively understood, a foundational, universally accepted value. Some of the
first considerations of the relationship between architecture and dignity were conducted in
connection to architecture for old age.113 However, perhaps equally telling, the other context where
this word’s implications in the physical environment were explored were in institutions such as
hospitals, mental institutions, and prisons. After all, the pursuit of dignity is largely incompatible
with institutionalization, dignity being antithetical to the conditions of institutional living such as
regimentation, discipline, and the erosion of personal identity.
Period texts on eldercare architecture were intent on investing the physical space with
qualities that would promote the feeling of dignity. Occasionally, as in Buildings for the Elderly,
the quest for dignity was stated explicitly: “architecture can give the life lived in it a sense of
dignity.”114 The text reveals the underlying assumption that the feeling of dignity can be enhanced
112 Michael Rosen, Dignity. 113 For contemporary discussions on the connection between dignity and old age see: Anderberg et al.,
“Preserving Dignity in Caring for Older Adults”; Cynthia S. Jacelon et al., “A Concept Analysis of
Dignity for Older Adults,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 48, no. 1 (2004): 76–83,
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2004.03170.x; Lise-Lotte Franklin, Britt-Marie Ternestedt, and
Lennart Nordenfelt, “Views on Dignity of Elderly Nursing Home Residents,” Nursing Ethics 13, no. 2
(2006): 130–46.
114 Musson and Heusinkveld, Buildings for the Elderly, 20.
88
or diminished by environmental cues, that design decisions can provide the quality in lieu of its
social presence. Yet, making dignity concrete in an architectural space proved elusive as there was
a clear lack of census regarding its meaning.115
A comparison of the architecture and interior design in Swedish and American nursing
homes reveals two disparate interpretations of dignity. If we attend to the interactions between
objects within the space and the bodies that use them, these divergences become more intelligible.
This analysis frames furniture, and chairs in particular, not as passive objects that perform a
function designated by social actors, but rather as social actors that choreograph interactions.116 If
we understand “chairs and posture as two parts of the culturally constructed performance of
sitting,” as Kenneth Ames argues in Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian
Culture, observing how nursing home chairs allow or suppress postures can shed light on the ways
dignity was inscribed in eldercare spaces. 117
In a photograph taken in a Boustedt nursing home [Figure 2.15], three women sit around a
round wooden dining table. They take on three different postures. One, turned away from the
viewer, leans against the chair’s backrest, her legs crossed, and her hands folded in her lap. The
second woman leans on the chair’s armrest, her gaze directed forward. And the third leans against
the table, her arms resting on the tabletop and her gaze turned towards the camera, as if indicating
115 This ambiguity in discussing the translation of dignity into architecture continues to this day. For
instance, The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity, a recent
publication published in conjunction with the Cooper Hewitt exhibition Design and Healing: Creative
Responses to Epidemics, does not attempt to define dignity or offer a satisfactory explanation of how
design is meant to confer this quality. Instead, dignity is vaguely associated with other qualities such as
“giving the experience of hospitality and care,” and “serving the whole person.” Michael P. Murphy, The
Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity (New York, NY: Cooper Hewitt,
Smithsonian Design Museum, 2021).
116 Mimi Hellman, “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (1999): 415.
117 Kenneth L. Ames, Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1992).
89
that we have just interrupted their conversation. A kettle, prominently displayed in the kitchen,
suggests the women are sitting down for a cup of tea. Given that there are no cups in front of them,
the kettle likely serves as a cue of the domestic sociability the photograph seeks to project. The
informal residential atmosphere is further supported by the small bouquet of wildflowers in the
middle of the table, ample daylighting throughout the space, and the furniture choices. The dining
room pendant fixture, in particular, is a demonstration of Boustedt’s belief in the role of residential
lighting as a method of deinstitutionalization. In clear contrast to American homes for the aged,
which were preoccupied with addressing fall risks, a beige area rug is placed under the table.
Boustedt argued that “gay, patterned scatter rugs are more homier than large, plain carpeting,” and
that rubber pads were enough to ensure safety.118
The rug is not only a contributing factor to the warmth and texture of the space, but it serves
to demarcate the otherwise undefined area. While the dining table is placed in front of the kitchen,
the hallway to the right indicates its unusual position. Indeed, the dining area is not a dedicated
room but rather a liminal space between the kitchenette and the hallway. The demarcation between
the functions of various rooms is subordinated to a fluidity of space, as the kitchen and the dining
room expand towards the circulation space of the hallway. As in other Boustedt projects, the
hallway is short. Another seating area is visible in the upper right-hand corner. With this layout,
the signals of domesticity encroach on any features that might otherwise suggest institutionality.
Even more importantly, in assuming this position, the women stake a claim on the space. They
take ownership not only of the specific rooms to which they are assigned but the entirety of the
building. Institutionality, then, is tempered not by clear delineation between the medical and the
domestic, but by a softening of the boundaries until the two are intertwined. Indeed, there is no
118 Robertson, “U.S. Gets Advice of Swedish Architect to Aid 14 Million.”
90
medical presence in the photograph, the home is neither an institution nor a residential space, but
rather a separate third option. The photograph, intended to advertise the Swedish approach to
housing the aged, attempts to reenact the camaraderie the space supposedly engenders.
Another photograph validates these observations [Figure 2.16]. This time, two women
gather around a rectangular wooden table in a space that resembles a living room more than a
dining room. Here, the chairs are more comfortable, with additional padding in the seat and
backrest. Both the chairs and the table are quite high, as Boustedt wanted to ease the process of
getting up or sitting down without drawing attention to that aspect of the chair’s function.119 The
postures of the women respond to this prompt. Instead of sinking into the supple cushions of an
armchair, their movements are dynamic. One is leaning forward as if ready to rise at any point, a
motion that would be supported by the sturdy armrests. The other women is caught in movement,
her face blurry as she moves to sit (or stand). In large part, it is the furniture that encourages an
active interaction with the space. Swedish furniture of the period was famously practical, made of
a solid wooden frame with minimal seat padding. Sturdy and plain, the chairs provided momentary
support, an opportunity for a short rest and a brief conversation.
Dignity as interpreted in the Swedish context relates to autonomy. The space encouraged
the older person to take an active part in decisions concerning their own care.120 The visual
absenting of professional presence was meant to empower residents to make decisions for
themselves. Clear boundaries between outside and inside, in the form of anterooms protected the
privacy of individual rooms. This feeling of ownership radiated from the private room outwards
towards the public spaces, the lack of stark delineation between room functions eased maneuvering
119 Robertson.
120 This preoccupation with dignity is still visible in Swedish eldercare. Anderberg et al., “Preserving
Dignity in Caring for Older Adults.”
91
between them. The furniture prompted its users to have a dynamic relationship with the public
spaces, easing and supporting their movement. This understanding of dignity corresponds to what
Lennart Nordenfelt dubs the “dignity of personal identity.”121 This definition of dignity centers
“integrity, physical identity, autonomy, and inclusion” and is violated when a person is prevented
from doing what they want to do or are entitled to do.122 However, crucial to this construct of
dignity was the denial of dependance and the humiliation of physical impairment. The furniture
and architecture disavow struggle and the residents are meant to command respect by their selfsufficiency. The dignified subjects created through the space needed to exercise control over their
bodies. This dignity necessitated the hiding away of vulnerabilities. The vision of aging it implied
was one of gracefulness; spatial allowances disguised the betrayals of the body. Boustedt was firm
in his belief in the separation of care delivered in a home as opposed to that given a hospital. The
result of trying to offer both would “be a bad institution instead of a home and also a bad and
insufficiently equipped hospital.”123 However, the emphasis on able-bodiedness and the denial of
impairment, meant that, in Sweden, chronically ill and disabled older people spent their last days
and years in hospitals, in large geriatric wards that were far removed from even the intimations of
the domestic. Indeed, by being neither home nor institution, the Swedish home for the aged was
deemed a failure. Instead, the Swedish parliament began to prioritize home-based services.124
While praising Boustedt’s efforts, US media did not seem convinced that the Swedish
model could translate to the American context. Modern furniture, which had a longstanding
121 Lennart Nordenfelt, “Dignity of the Elderly: An Introduction,” Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy
6, no. 2 (2003): 4.
122 Nordenfelt, 4.
123 “Fresh Approaches to Problems of Aging Sought at Meeting,” Architectural Record, August 1959, 36.
124 A later competition criticized many of the spatial qualities previously recommended. Among other
things, it supported the idea of “being in the reach of,” which encouraged the closeness between patients
and care staff.
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tradition in Scandinavia, would not likely appeal to American seniors, they surmised. They also
worried about the use of soft materials, which, while homelike, presented serious problems with
maintenance and sanitation. Most prominently, they were skeptical about the lack of medical
facilities in Swedish nursing homes, arguing that “medical attention is a must in any organized
effort to care for the aging.”125 Yet, US nursing home administrators were equally concerned with
translating dignity into material form.
The Sequoias, a community for the aged in a secluded California valley approximately six
miles west of Palo Alto, is an illustrative example of these efforts. Built in 1961, the Sequoias was
operated by Northern California Presbyterian homes and designed by Skidmore Owings and
Merrill with landscape architecture by Sasaki Walker and Associates. The original community was
composed of one-story buildings, each clustered between two and a dozen apartments, connected
by covered walkways. A thirty-room nursing home was added to the plan in 1967 to accommodate
the needs of the community’s aging population. This structure, designed by Rex Whitaker Allen
& Associates in association with John S. Bolles, was a thirty-room facility, housing mostly twobed units, each equipped with a toilet and basin.126
Photographs of the interior spotlight the impressive architectural space the residents were
contained within [Figure 2.17]. The scale of the room distanced the space from connotations of
the domestic, its grandeur simulating a hotel lobby in a rural mountain locale. Rustic wooden
beams cut across the ceiling, accentuating the high pitch of the roof. Two round wrought iron
chandeliers plunged downwards, their four lights mimicking candles. Wall-to-wall carpeting was
125 “Housing the Aged in Sweden: Some Examples from the Office of Boustedt and Heineman,”
Architectural Record, October 1958.
126 Perhaps the period’s most prominent designer of nursing homes, Rex Whittaker Allen was often
featured in architectural publications. Some of his most notable nursing homes include Lawton House in
San Francisco, California and Mercy Nursing Home in Sacramento, California. Diverse Programs for
Three Nursing Homes,” Architectural Record, February 1965, 166-169.
93
used instead of area rugs, to prevent falls. Numerous lighting options addressed the oft-cited need
for additional lighting in old age spaces. Paneled walls surrounded a large hooded fireplace. The
hearth was encircled by three plush couches, a low coffee table settled in-between. In one image,
three people sit on one of the couches, leaning back against the backrest. Their posture is one of
repose, their gaze directed forward they indicate no desire to move. The couch invited this
immersive bodily experience. The sitter was given, at most, one armrest as support in negotiating
movement. The backrest was offset, urging sitters to take on a more reclined position. The
Sequoias is not unique in its depiction of residents lounging on comfortable seating. Depicting the
elderly in generously cushioned armchairs is a common motif in publicity materials of nursing
homes and homes for the aged. A rendering of a 1956 community space for Sunset Home,
Windom, Minnesota, by Thorshov & Cerny, shows a group of male figures inhabiting the
modernist space, the patterns of the lounging figures’ clothing harmonizing with those of the
interior, the furniture and the figures becoming nearly indistinguishable. [Figure 2.18].
The armchair, as the most conspicuous piece of furniture in community rooms, is a
particularly powerful statement on the prescribed and preferred movements within the space. It is
one of the rare items that repudiates the antiseptic mandate common in nursing homes.
Emphatically soft, its depth and low seat make getting up difficult. The armchair encourages sitters
to sink into it, enveloping their body fully. To rise, they need to work against the resistance of the
armchair. While Swedish and American chairs both accommodate the body, the Swedish chairs
are a supportive skeletal structure buttressing movement, while the American examples are
deferential, cocooning the body in comfort.
The imposing community space and the comfortable chairs of the Sequoias both seek to
confer status on the residents. Residents are valued for their age; the cumulative total of their years
94
assigning them a high rank and earning them esteem. This corresponds to Nordenfelt’s construct
of “dignity of moral stature,” a form of dignity acquired through achievement and social status,
resting on a public perception of value.127 In this context, dignity is most often interpreted as
solemnity, an outward display of status. It sets out to offer architecturally what is unavailable
socially. It rests on the assumption that one has already suffered the indignity of being forced to
give up their previous occupations and their childrearing work. The Sequoias living room
highlights the size of the space, the majority of the photograph dedicated to the expanse between
the floor and ceiling, implying that the residents are deserving of this impressive space, like
wealthy vacationers at an elegant hotel. Yet, this space and its fittings also make the body
increasingly dependent and reliant on outside care. One needed to submit to care, becoming an
object of care as opposed to an active participant in an exchange of caring practices. The resident’s
position as burden was thus solidified. The experience of a home was restricted to its destinations,
the room and the community areas, with spaces in-between meant solely for passing through. Since
less than half of nursing home residents could walk unaided, this meant that they relied on outside
help to get to the activity rooms and thus the journey from one place to the other was deemed
architecturally irrelevant. The cues of status were intermittently distributed throughout the space
to disguise the other ways in which dignity of personal identity was stripped away. In contrast to
the ordering of privacy within the Swedish institution, professional care work trespassed into the
private realm in American homes by making private acts increasingly public. The medical aspect
of the nursing home denied a key affordance of a true domestic space, the ability to restrict access
to the private sphere. Overwhelmingly, photographs of nursing home bedrooms show doors to
hallways open, refusing their residents the privacy a residential space could be expected to provide
127 Nordenfelt, “Dignity of the Elderly,” 3.
95
[Figure 2.19]. Not only that, but a photograph of the St Vincent’s Retreat for the Aged in North
Omaha, flips the compositional convention and offers a view into the rooms from the hallway
through the open doors [Figure 2.20]. The viewer is placed in the position of the visitor or nursing
home care worker and given the power of resident surveillance, although the residents are notably
absent from the photograph.128
In the wake of World War II, the space of aging became increasingly removed from a
familial and religious context and refashioned as a medical issue and a commercial product. As
government regulations and market demands increasingly dictated the appearance of nursing
homes, developers, architects, and employees deployed the trappings of domesticity as a palliative
measure, obscuring the reality of the nursing home’s institutional nature. Underlying these design
choices was the belief that a traditional home was no longer available to older individuals, the
domestic more emphatically defined as a site of productive citizenship. Instead, the family home
was replaced with a surrogate that was fabricated from material allusions. Much like the wood
veneer applied to steel bedframes, the veneer of domesticity was placed over the institutional base.
The nursing home thus became an uncanny space, suspended between the institution and the home
but truly belonging to neither.
128 Indeed, throughout this project I have not been able to find a single populated photograph of a nursing
home bedroom in architectural media. When residents were photographed, they were exclusively placed
in community spaces. It speaks to the incompatibility between the bedroom space as designed and the
promise of domesticity. The privacy the residents were afforded in not being photographed in these
spaces is the only way this quality made inroads into the nursing home bedroom.
96
Chapter 2 Aging in Public: The Architecture of Senior Housing
Among the publicity photographs for Venturi and Rauch and Cope and Lippincott’s
senior housing project the Guild House, built in Philadelphia between 1962 and 1966, there is a
rare image that features one of the building’s tenants. Seen from the back, a seated man gazes out
at the city, separated from the viewer by two tables. The community room he is in is otherwise
empty of people and the city he takes in is but a distant skyline. Six floors above street-level,
behind the room’s 30-foot arched window, the man is removed from the street and from public
life. The photograph itself evokes a common trope: of older people, in groups or alone, shown
watching television in communal rooms [Figure 3.1].
In designing the Guild House, Robert Venturi was famously preoccupied with the idea of
the television screen. There’s the gilded antenna on the building’s façade, “the symbol of the
elderly” as he had claimed.1 But Venturi also returned to the screen as a guiding motif in
numerous details on the interior, as evidenced by his many sketches [Figure 3.2]. The Guild
House, Venturi’s manifesto on the communicative power of architecture, loudly announced its
position on the elderly by making an existing stereotype of passive withdrawal concrete.
From its earliest sketches, the Guild House served as a lightning rod for criticism. The
client, Friends Neighborhood Guild, a Quaker-founded settlement house in North Philadelphia,
worried that some of Venturi’s design decisions were not made with the residents’ best interests
at heart.2 Critics were split on the building’s merit. In his lectures on modern architecture,
1 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1972), 92.
2 In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi preemptively guarded himself against criticism, claiming that he
did not “deny an interest in or the importance of process, program, and structure, of indeed social issues
in architecture in [this building].” On the contrary, he argued that he spent about 90 percent of design time
on those subjects and less than ten percent on questions of image. However, a look into the archive shows
97
Vincent Scully praised the Guild House as uniquely deserving of a place in the architectural
canon. What made the building so remarkable, in Scully’s view, was that Venturi “did not have a
revolutionary message” in designing it. Instead, “he just wanted people to look at the building
and be taken by it.”3 Other architectural historians countered that Venturi’s lack of program was
in itself a political statement. Dell Upton, for one, ended the section on “Money” in his
Architecture of the United States with a scathing critique of the Guild House. Upton was
appalled by what he saw as Venturi’s proclamation. To him, the building presented “aged tenants
as the detritus of consumer society, prey to the developer’s tardy deceptions and enslaved to
television.”4 Upton aside, most architectural historians have concerned themselves with the
Guild House’s form and its surface level symbolism. They debated the building’s place in the
canon and its position as a harbinger of postmodernism. However, as important as the Guild
House is to the trajectory of architectural history, it must also be reconsidered within the history
of its architectural type: the subsidized housing project for seniors.
By and large, architectural history has prioritized investigations into subsidized housing
catering to families. This emphasis is not surprising given that, historically, public housing was
primarily built for this demographic. However, the public housing landscape changed
dramatically in the postwar era. Indeed, soon after subsidized housing restricted to people over
65 was introduced in the United States in 1956, it overtook other forms of public housing. By
1963, over fifty percent of new units approved by the Public Housing Administration were
that the majority of Guild House correspondence and discussion revolved precisely around the nonfunctional elements such as the antenna and cyclone fence and that Venturi often disregarded concerns
from the Guild regarding the relevance of these design decisions for the satisfaction and use of their
residents. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, 90.
3 Vincent Scully Lectures, “Vincent Scully — International House II (Modern Architecture Course),”
YouTube, 6:17 to 6:29. https://youtu.be/7iRsIHEhjn4. 4 Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 245.
98
designed with older tenants in mind.5 That same year, a government committee estimated that
more than 116,000 elderly people lived in public housing.6 The sheer quantity of senior housing
built in this era speaks to its significance in the field of subsidized housing. I argue that
recentering senior housing offers a distinctive perspective on the tensions around public housing.
Crucially, senior housing was often used to break up concentrations of populations, not only in
terms of age, but race as well. In response to concerns about the changing demographics of
housing projects, housing authorities used senior housing, oftentimes the one building with
majority white populations in large projects, to answer demographic imbalances and to provide a
veneer of racial diversity. However, an analysis of senior housing not only enriches the literature
on public housing by subverting long-held beliefs about the aims and values of this architecture,
but it also helps us understand shifts in the meaning of old age in the post-World War II period
as the locus of eldercare was transferred from the family to the government. In this chapter, I
argue that public housing gave material form to discussions on the government’s responsibility
in caring for and managing older bodies. It reveals not only how the aging body was imagined
but how it was supposed to interact with surrounding communities and systems.
This chapter examines relationships between the body and the spatial envelope of the
public housing project. When, in 1957, a series of articles on the topic of old age published in the
New York Herald Tribune asked “where do old people fit in modern society?” as one of the most
important questions facing America, architects of senior housing gave the debate a physical
form. 7 In looking at different examples of these projects, I ask whether the older individual was
pushed towards the periphery of architectural form or whether they were ensconced in the
5 Developments in Aging: 1959 to 1963, A Report of the Special Committee on Aging, 100.
6 Developments in Aging: 1959 to 1963, A Report of the Special Committee on Aging. 7 Ubell, “A New Outlook on Old Age,” 22.
99
interior, whether they were expected to engage with the outside world or to passively observe it.
I analyze how residents’ views were directed, whether they were turned inwards toward
themselves, their televisions, or their co-inhabitants or whether their attention was directed
towards the outside.
8 I am interested in whether they observed from a static position or whether
viewing happened in motion. These spatial decisions reveal what position the elderly were
expected to occupy in mid-century United States. Architectural plans help uncover how these
spaces were meant to be occupied. Photographs and other media representations give insights
into how these buildings were inhabited in the period. And finally, extant spaces offer clues by
revealing how they are being inhabited and negotiated in the present.
Three case studies structure this chapter, illustrating the different approaches in the
design of senior housing. Albert Mayer’s Gaylord White House in New York City, NY (1958-
1964), Robert Venturi’s the Guild House in Philadelphia, PA (1962-1966), and Bertrand
Goldberg’s Raymond Hilliard Homes in Chicago, IL (1963-1966), all offered radically different
visions of the unfolding of the aging process and the position that the aging body was meant to
occupy at all scales—from the apartment to the city.
8 The nursing homes, solidified in the public imaginary as the foremost space of physical and visual
containment of the elderly body, served as an important foil in these discussions. An advertisement for
Libbey-Owens-Ford (LOF) glass [Figure 3.3] is illustrative. Seeking to capture the readers’ attention by
presenting them with an unexpected contrast, it introduces Mr. Pirazzi and Mr. Stafford, who, unusually
for nursing home residents, no longer “feel like shut-ins.” Their escape from nursing home confinement is
attributed to LOF sliding glass doors, which allow the sky, mountains, and the green trees to be brought
inside the room through the permeable sliding door membrane. Yet, the photograph makes clear that the
“open world” brought to the men is merely a stunning visual impression and not an opportunity for an
active, physical interaction. The glass doors only extend the men’s world onto a shallow balcony and the
magnificent nature in the background serves as a backdrop, hardly different than a television screen.
Unlike other LOF period advertisements, where models are all presented from the back, looking out
through the expanse of glass towards dynamic views of urban activity, the visual tension in this
photograph is concentrated on the dividing line between inside and out. The viewer’s gaze, which extends
outward through the open doors is immediately brought back inside by the man in the wheelchair who
looks towards us, restricting the field of activity to the glass-marked boundary of the sliding doors.
100
Housing the Elderly Poor
In devising systems of relief for those in need, policymakers have long attempted to
distinguish between those who were deserving of aid as opposed to those who were deemed
likely to exploit the system. Already in 1598, Elizabethan poor laws institutionalized the
distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. 9 The desire to categorize the poor
was undergirded by an anxiety that offering material aid to the underserving poor only
encouraged sloth and imprudent spending.
10 Therefore, aid needed to be doled out carefully and
sparingly. Even when offered, aid was to be coupled with a paternalistic demand to improve
oneself, to ensure handouts would not be expected a second time. On the other hand, the needs of
the poor elderly, orphaned children, and disabled people, were more socially acceptable. Deemed
unable to care for themselves, these social groups often fell under the responsibility of
philanthropists as well as local, state, and federal governments. While the elderly and the
disabled were not expected to better themselves as a precondition of outside aid, they were
nonetheless expected to showcase gratitude and contentment with whatever amount or form of
assistance was offered. Care often took the form of congregate housing, initially in the form of
almshouses. Yet, critics quickly noted this form of architectural and social segregation
effectively rendered these individuals ever more as surplus populations. Unable to contribute to
society through their labor, they were warehoused away from the public eye.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, specialized state institutions began to replace
almshouses, which often indiscriminately accepted these diverse groups. Since these new
9 The history of the moral distinction between those who are willfully idle and those who are justifiably
unable to work is harder to trace. For a history of Elizabethan poor laws see Paul Slack, Poverty and
Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988), 122–29.
10 Steve Hindle, “Civility, Honesty and the Identification of the Deserving Poor in Seventeenth-century
England,” in Identity and Agency in English Society, 1500–1800, eds. Henry French with Jonathan Barry
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 38-60.
101
institutions largely catered to disabled people, the destitute aged remained the primary residents
of almshouses. Closings and consolidations reduced the number of almshouses from 2,200 in
1923 to approximately 1,200 in 1950.11 The almshouse as an institution was on the wane,
replaced by denominational as well as commercial nursing homes.12 Yet, these were often
limited to members of a particular faith and, even more frequently, restricted admission based on
race. As I highlighted in Chapter One, they also carried with them a whole host of negative
associations. The broader public saw them as little more than warehouses, amplifying their
residents’ frailty, dependance, and isolation and contracting their field of interests until
“remaining alive” became the only occupation.13 The architecture of mid-century nursing homes
betrays these various priorities [Figure 3.4]. The 1963 Lutheran Senior City in Columbus, Ohio
placed a chapel at the center of the community’s design, a common decision meant to provide
solace to those whose lives were perceived to revolve around little more than the comfort of
religion.14 The circular form of the 1962 Harold S. Haaland Home revealed a panopticon-like
desire to “provide ease of control and administration” as a way to efficiently manage these
populations.15 And finally, after the 1954 expansion of the Hill-Burton Act, nursing homes began
to increasingly resemble hospitals, in their insistence on the preservation of physical health
through the tyranny of antiseptic orderliness.16
11 Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective
(Princeton University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv10crf5v.
12 When nursing homes were not available, psychiatric hospitals were often perceived as the only
remaining solution for housing in advanced old age.
13 Mumford, “For Older People—Not Segregation but Integration,” 192.
14 Musson and Heusinkveld, Buildings for the Elderly, 102.
15 Musson and Heusinkveld, 96.
16 The trajectory here follows that of the hospitals themselves. The initial implementation of Hill-Burton
in 1946, which subsidized hospital construction, resulted in a significant increase in available hospital
beds. However, these beds were becoming disproportionally filled by older individuals who required
long-term care. As the cost of maintaining a hospital bed was high, nursing homes stepped in to cover
patient overflow. However, as nursing homes began to mimic hospitals in their appearance and
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Critiques of nursing homes led to a push for de-institutionalization. And while most older
people did not need the extensive health support characteristic of nursing homes and homes for
the aged, they nevertheless needed some help with housing. For many older people, remaining in
their homes was not considered a viable option. Government surveys noted that an
overwhelming majority of older people lived in substandard housing, unable to easily maintain
or afford the upkeep of their houses.17 Government-subsidized housing was framed as a
preventative measure, one that would stave off costly institutional or rehabilitative care. This
redistribution of the burden of care from private families to the state set out to marry a “sense of
moral obligation” with “financial savings.”18
The History of Public Housing
The Great Depression marked the beginning of large-scale governmental involvement in
public housing through direct funding. The Federal Housing Authority (1934) and later the
Department of Housing and Development (HUD) were the agencies directly responsible for
translating governmental concern into housing for those deemed needy and deserving of aid.
Beginning with the Housing Act of 1937, federal aid could be used to provide “safe, decent, and
sanitary housing” for families as part of New Deal provisions to help middle class citizens who
had fallen on hard times.19 At the same time as it offered an unprecedented boost to public
administration, there was a push to find alternative options for the care of relatively independent older
people.
17 Developments in Aging: 1959 to 1963, A Report of the Special Committee on Aging, 35.
18 Developments in Aging: 1959 to 1963, A Report of the Special Committee on Aging, 109.
19 For an in-depth history of public housing programs see: Miles Glendinning, Mass Housing: Modern
Architecture and State Power – A Global History (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).; Nicholas
Dagen Bloom and Matthew Gordon Lasner, eds., Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places,
and Policies That Transformed a City (Princeton: University Press, 2019).; Samuel Zipp, Manhattan
Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010).; D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing
103
housing, the 1937 Housing Act relegated this form of housing to a second-tier status, lagging
behind private single-family housing. This inferior position was further cemented by the 1949
Taft–Ellender–Wagner (or T–E–W) Act, which set further restrictions on federal public housing.
This subservient status came as a result of efforts from several stakeholders. Real estate
speculators and building developers saw it as an encroachment on their turf, despite the fact that
public housing catered to a market that rarely intersected with the priorities of these industries.
Conservatives, too, protested government’s intrusion into the private market. The outcry was
even louder in rural areas, given the inference that the majority of these programs would serve
larger urban areas.
Perhaps most consequentially, public housing was also seen as antithetical to the
ideological fabric of the United States, as mass public housing was increasingly pitted against the
single-family home ideal. In a country that had long conflated housing with personal, as well as
national, character, the privately owned, suburban house loomed large as a symbol of the
country’s fundamental values of individualism, market capitalism, and the primacy of the nuclear
family. While homeownership was supported by increased government subsidies that included
tax relief and mortgage insurance, public housing struggled to retain its support on Capitol Hill.20
Public housing, with its roots in European pre-World War II experimentation and portending the
creation of a more collectivist public through shared spaces and amenities, was viewed with little
interest and much suspicion. The concern that public housing would subvert the American order
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian,
eds., From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century
America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Lawrence J. Vale, From the
Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2000); Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in the United States
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).
20 By 1965, home-ownership tax deductions were costing the US Treasury $7 billion annually, whereas
the public housing program cost $500 million.
104
reached a fever pitch during the Cold War. At the same time, proponents of public housing
adopted a similar rhetoric for opposing ends. They argued that public housing fostered
democracy by demonstrating, both domestically and internationally, that the United States
provided for all of its citizens.
While low-income older people had lived in public housing since the inception of the
program, the Housing Acts of 1956 and 1959 were specifically designed with the older
contingent of the population in mind. Before 1956, the law made no provision for one-person
households, which meant that, following their partner’s death, the remaining person would be
evicted to make room for another family.21 In addition to extending public housing eligibility to
widowers, the 1956 Act authorized the construction of public housing units designed specifically
for the elderly. Beginning in 1959, the FHA insured lenders against losses on mortgages used for
the construction or rehabilitation of senior housing, in an effort to incite for-profit developers to
invest in this market.22 Five years later, the 1961 Act eased the construction cost limitations on
these projects, given the increased awareness of the added expense of building accessible
housing. Since the median income for senior citizen families moving into public housing in 1961
was $119 per month, the government also increased rent subsidies for elderly residents.23 The
Senior Citizens Housing Act of 1962 established several new housing aids to stimulate the
development of senior housing in rural areas. By 1963, there were ten federal programs designed
to stimulate the construction and improvement of housing for the elderly.
21 Based on census figures, about 22 percent of people above 65 lived alone. Developments in Aging:
1959 to 1963, A Report of the Special Committee on Aging, 104.
22 A rental housing project was eligible for mortgage insurance when it included eight or more units of
new or rehabilitated housing specifically designed for those over 62. For more information on the
mortgage insurance bill, see: Developments in Aging: 1959 to 1963, A Report of the Special Committee
on Aging, 101.
23 Developments in Aging: 1959 to 1963, A Report of the Special Committee on Aging, 100.
105
It was also understood that the elderly were one of the only groups, in addition to
minorities and recent immigrants, who inhabited urban centers. Unwilling to leave behind their
past and needful of the services the city had to offer, the elderly were perceived as the rightful
inhabitants of the dense urban environment. For many government agencies and architects,
solving senior housing was solving the problem of the city itself. The buildings seniors inhabited
were uniformly decried as decaying, unsuitable, at odds with the progress and affluence of the
era. Rebuilding these was paramount to the larger postwar urban revitalization project and as a
result, the elderly were one of the groups most commonly displaced by urban renewal projects.
At the same time, there was widespread awareness that older people were difficult to relocate,
their vulnerability stemmed from their long-term ties to the immediate community and their age
made them more resistant to change, particularly when that was forced upon them. This meant
that senior housing was a popular solution for new construction embedded in urban renewal
projects.
In his overview of Boston public housing, Lawrence J. Vale noted a shift in public
housing policy in the late 1950s and early 1960s.24 At this time, when critiques of public housing
were reaching a fever pitch, public housing authorities increasingly invested in senior public
housing, at the expense of other types of housing projects. On the one hand, the elderly poor
were a group that was easy to rally public support around. In a country largely resistant to any
forms of social programs, those that catered to the elderly were perceived as more palatable than
ones targeting other groups.25 It is therefore no surprise that developments in social housing in
24 Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Harvard
University Press, 2009); Glendinning, Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – A Global
History. 25 Even when it was deemed morally correct, care of the worthy poor needed to be reframed as a
financially sound investment. Designing suitable housing for the elderly would enable them to “carry
their own lives in their own way.” In turn, this would ensure that older individuals do not become
106
the postwar period coalesced around projects for this group. When public housing faltered as a
solution for many, it remained a widely popular solution for the elderly. Building senior housing,
particularly as part of larger family-oriented projects, was a way to achieve an elusive racial
diversity. As housing projects in large urban centers became overwhelmingly non-white, senior
housing projects—which were drawing from a much larger pool of applicants—could favor
white candidates to create an appearance of overall racial balance. And while the building of
senior housing was uniformly supported, there was less of a consensus regarding what it should
look like.
Architecture of Public Housing
Formally, American public housing projects largely drew from precedents established in
Europe in the period following World War I.26 The ideological sources that informed their design
were even older.27 In response to poor living conditions in worker housing around the country’s
industrial hubs, mid-19th-century housing reformers began advocating for design interventions
such as daylighting, air circulation, and the mitigation of overcrowding as safeguards against
disease. More tenuously, reformers tethered the period’s social concerns to environmental
factors, arguing that slums not only bred disease but also increased crime rates. These reform
efforts resulted in a series of standards established by city governments. Most influential among
institutionalized or otherwise dependent on public charity. Isolation, too, was singled out as an issue with
costly consequences. The development of congregate housing eased the management of aging bodies and
promised the centralization of services the elderly were likely to need. See: Developments in Aging: 1959
to 1963, A Report of the Special Committee on Aging, 109.
26 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s chapter on the Siedlung in The International Style gives
a useful overview of influential European examples. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, The International Style
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1932), 89–95.
27 For an overview see John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin Szylvian, From Tenements to the Taylor
Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 10.
107
these were a series of laws implemented in New York City between 1867 and 1901, intending to
improve multi-family housing through design interventions like daylighting, ventilation, and
indoor bathrooms. When the Great Depression redirected governmental housing efforts from
setting standards to constructing housing projects managed by housing authorities, the
preoccupations with light, air, and space persisted. On a practical level, the goal was to bring
modern amenities, such as plumbing and heating, to a population that wanted for these comforts.
Ideologically, public housing was envisioned as a way to bring densely populated neighborhoods
up to the vision of modernity that social reformers, government agencies, and associated
architects espoused.28 Yet, the progressive vision buckled under the increasingly rigid laws. In
response to pressures, both internal and external, over the twenty years between the first US
public housing projects and the postwar era, the government regularly reduced apartment sizes,
trimmed amenities, and cut corners.
In this period, many East Coast and Midwest housing projects transitioned from a crossshaped form to longer, slab towers. While the cruciform plan clustered apartments around a
central service core, the long slabs, occasionally merged in Y or X shapes, featured doubleloaded corridors that accommodated more apartments. This increased occupancy was offset by
the projects’ low ground coverage. The expansive stretches of undifferentiated lawns that
encircled the projects, with their meandering paths, bare playgrounds, and scattered benches,
were envisioned as way to reduce the overall population density of the neighborhood. The red
brick facades, also characteristic of East Coast and Midwest public housing, attempted to temper
the overall starkness of the projects. However, the uniformity and outsized appearance of these
28 Bauman, Biles, and Szylvian, 10.
108
developments, a result of a lack of proper investment, played a role in informing public opinion,
which further restricted the financing of these projects.
Senior housing, as a new public housing category, came into an already fraught field.
Housing authorities deemed that many of the established features of public housing, such as
playgrounds within view of apartments, had little relevance in the senior housing context. Other
spaces, like activity rooms and communal dining rooms, were perceived as crucial. Aside from
these generalizations, there was little consensus regarding what older people needed or wanted.
As Jane Jacobs observed, while there was no end of theorizing into this topic, planners had little
practical guidance.29 There was also minimal research on the architectural implications of
housing a group understood not only through the lens of their socio-economic status but also
their age. At the same time, federal and local governments stressed that the proper
implementation of senior housing necessitated extensive research into the needs and desires of
this population.
Many organizations stepped in to fill this lacuna. Supporting this research were grants
from the Ford Foundation, which, in the second half of the 1950s, focused attention to aging.
Most notably, it supported a highly influential Cornell University Housing Research Center
study. The study began with Housing Requirements of the Aged: A Study of Design Criteria
(1958), a summary of existing research and literature on the topic of housing for the elderly. This
background research was followed up by over 5,000 personal interviews which were, in turn,
published as three separate reports. Samples covered a 15-county area in central New York State;
Cook County, Illinois; the St. Louis metropolitan area, and Los Angeles County, California.
Unlike Cornell’s other prominent research projects, including a study of kitchens and bathrooms,
29 Jacobs, “Housing for the Independent Aged,” 86.
109
research into housing for the elderly was not followed up with testing in full-scale settings with
live models. Instead, the findings were relayed to other stakeholders, who, in turn, implemented
them. Rather than in a laboratory, experiments into the suitability of various housing
arrangements were conducted in real-time.
The Guild House (1962-1966)
Located at Spring Garden and Perth Streets in Philadelphia, the Guild House is
conspicuously ordinary [Figure 3.5]. A combination of big gestures and a banal visual
appearance, the Guild House revived the understanding of architecture as a communication
device. The commercial brick front of the poured-in-place concrete building signaled continuity
with surrounding buildings—dark red to “better match the smog-smudged brick of the
neighborhood.”30 At the same time, a series of unpredictable moments loudly broadcast the
Guild House’s idiosyncrasies. The large dark pillar in the front, the arched window at the top,
and the bold typographic treatment above the entrance were all designed to provoke a reaction.
Even in its details, the Guild House was brimming with tongue-in-cheek humor. Its stringcourse
appeared to cut across windows, as a commentary on the arbitrary nature of this architectural
element that nevertheless maintained its function of breaking up the uniformity of the façade.
And finally, there was the antenna. The steeple-like gilded antenna crowning the building was
envisioned as “a flourish,” yet another proclamation in the overall program. Its role was both
visual, as “an imitation of an abstract Lippold sculpture,” and emblematic, as “a symbol for the
elderly.”31 The aesthetic intensity of these irreverent moments quickly made the Guild House
infamous, the joke proving louder than the building’s social programming, or the lack thereof.
30 Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 91.
31 Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 92.
110
While scholars have emphasized the playfulness of the Guild House’s symbolism, far less
attention has been trained on the building’s actual design and the ways it served its residents. I
address the ways the architecture of the Guild House erased its residents from the public life of
the neighborhood and replaced active participation with passive viewing and the street with the
television screen.
Unlike other projects that will be analyzed in this chapter, the Guild House was not
affiliated with its local housing authority. Instead, it was built and maintained by the Friends
Neighborhood Guild, a Philadelphia non-profit Quaker organization, with federal aid. Founded
in 1879 by the Religious Society of Friends, the Guild had long-established neighborhood ties. It
prided itself on serving the community by helping individuals meet their own housing, social,
and economic needs and, in turn, making them more effective participating citizens. The Guild
considered its relationship with the people of the neighborhood as one of partnership in the
shared pursuit of the community’s self-development.
While independent from the city’s public housing, the Guild House’s design and
construction were steeped in the period’s debates around urban renewal and slum clearance. The
Guild House’s construction cannot be detached from the broader redevelopment of the East
Poplar neighborhood. As part of their research into the population living in the 37-block radius
cleared for urban renewal, the Guild staff discovered that it was home to over 250 single people
62-years and older.32 Given its close contact with the community, the Guild was aware of the
difficulties these people would face if uprooted from their neighborhood in old age. The Guild’s
solution was to provide new housing for these individuals. It took advantage of the section 202
32 “Philadelphia meeting of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Housing of the Special Committee
on Aging,” October 18, 1961, 83, box 102, folder 370, Special Collections Research Center, Temple
University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA.
111
of the Housing Act of 1959, which allowed non-profit organizations to borrow directly from the
federal government. Indeed, it was the first apartment building to be built in Philadelphia under
one-hundred percent low-interest federal financing. The project went to Venturi and Rauch and
Cope and Lippincott, two local architecture firms. As a young, up-and-coming firm, with
effectively no experience in executing large scale projects, Venturi and Rauch were eager to
obtain such a high-profile commission. To ensure the Guild chose them, they put in the lowest
design bid and pledged to keep overall building costs to a minimum.
As constructed, the Guild House is a six-floor structure housing 91 units, predominantly
efficiencies (one-room apartments equipped with kitchenettes rather than full kitchens), in
addition to one and two-bedroom units. Six units feature a private balcony. To qualify for federal
financing, the Guild House had to incorporate a series of accessibility features.33 The apartments
were made wheelchair accessible with easy access to the laundry room, the floors non-slip,
shower stalls outfitted with a built-in seat or room for a bath stool and the doors were given lever
handles to aid arthritic hands. Applicants were eligible for apartments at the Guild House if they
were over the age of 62 with an income of $4,000 per year if single or $4,500 if married.
34
Rentals varied from $70 a month to $122 for one and two-bedrooms.35 From the outset, the Guild
House was on the higher end of the senior housing market, making the Friends Neighborhood
Guild resistant to any additional amenities or architectural embellishments that would have an
impact on the tenants’ monthly rent.
For Venturi, the Guild House was primarily an exercise in formal and symbolic
expression. Any interest in the lived experiences of its residents revolved around ameliorating
33 The project followed standards and criteria set by the Senior Citizens Housing Loan Program: Policies
and Guides for Project Design, published by the Housing and Home Finance Agency in 1961.
34 Equivalent to $42,000 and $47,000 today.
35 Equivalent to $735 and $1250 today.
112
the issue of loneliness. Guild representatives also stressed a need for the design to address the
residents’ isolation. Press releases published on the occasion of the Guild House’s opening day
emphasized these concerns. Newspapers publicized the idea that the building’s primary aim was
“easing the growing problem of loneliness among aging people of modest incomes.”36 “We are
particularly interested in whether friendships will be formed to help fill voids created by the
dispersion of old family groups,” the Guild noted.37
The large community room, “designed to encourage friendship building,” was the
primary site of socialization [Figure 3.6].
38 The open space, made possible by the irregular
column spacing of the flat plate reinforced concrete structure, was planned around a thirty-foot
semi-circular floor-to-ceiling window at the room’s southern end. With a budget of $2,500, the
architects were charged with furnishing the room with two sofas, several small easy chairs, and a
low table, all from Stendig, as well as ten sturdy four-person folding tables and folding chairs. In
choosing the furniture, the architects were guided not only by thriftiness but a desire for products
that made affordances for flexible, spur-of-the-moment use.39
In designing the community room, the architects created a container for socialization.
They argued that the existence of a shared space would itself spur on the establishment of
relationships. But the very location of the community room on the top floor of the building
distanced it from the tenants’ everyday routines and impeded frictionless interactions. It also
effectively cut off residents from connections outside the building. The emphasis on the
community room’s “impressive views of the city” highlights this expectation of passive
36 “New Apartment for Aging Ones,” Philadelphia Daily News, August 12, 1966.
37 Alexander McCall, “Press Release,” August 1966, folder 225.II.A.6104.41, Venturi, Scott Brown
Collection, The Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.
38 Alexander McCall, “Press Release.”
39 For the full furniture list see folder 225.II.A.6104.38, Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The
Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
113
consumption of vistas, viewed from afar. For Guild House residents, the city became scenery
rather than an opportunity for active participation.40
From the outset, the Guild, the architects, and the media, presumed the residents of the
Guild house were “lonely old ladies.”41As in other senior housing projects, women indeed
outnumbered men at the Guild House. The first two residents were Miss Chandler, a Black
divorcee who “couldn’t really afford to live at Guild House but loved it so much she was
determined to do it anyway,” and Mrs. Gamble, a white widow and former teacher.42 The two
women were chosen as representative of the incoming population and information on their
background and personalities was included in the media packets supplied to local and national
publications. Their selection spoke of what the Guild House wanted to be broadcast about its
tenants: that the project was integrated, the respectable (but often low paid) professions that
inhabitants retired from, and their lack of partner or family who could provide companionship
and assistance, which made them more dependent on outside care.
At the opening ceremony, Venturi handed out bouquets of flowers to incoming residents,
wishing that the “new quarters would give each of [them] a swing in their step and a chance to
make some new friendships.”43 He noted that while “architectural design cannot solve the
problem of loneliness among aging people of limited means, it can help somewhat by arranging
stimulating surroundings which meet special needs and bring together people of similar
circumstances so that new friendships are likely to be established.”44 Images from the opening
40 “Apartment of the Week: The Guild House, sponsored by the Friends Guild,” Philadelphia Daily News,
October 28, 1968, 38.
41 Mary Ellen Gale, “Friends Guild Gives Advice on High IQs, Floor Scrubbing,” The Evening Bulletin,
October 10, 1963.
42 Publicity materials, folder 225.II.A.6104.41, Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural
Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
43Alexander McCall, “Guild House Press Release.”
44 Ibid.
114
ceremony highlight the paternalistic attitude of the architect and the middle aged men in Guild
administration [Figure 3.7]. In one of the photographs, a seated group of exclusively female
residents looks up, engaged and grateful, at the line of men handing out paper cups of water. The
photograph establishes the women as needful of aid and filled with gratitude at the attention
given. In contrast with the Guild’s stated mission of helping the community assist itself, the
Guild House exhibits a much more involved, top-down form of assistance.
Like other housing projects of the time, the Guild House boasted a substantive outdoor
area. Yet, little consideration went into making this space directly usable for its residents. Red
diagonal lines bisected the concrete surface, punctured half-way by colorful rings in the form of
raised flower beds of resilient hostas and geraniums. This geometric composition was best
experienced from above, demonstrating its role as a visual attraction rather than a prompt for
bodily interaction [Figure 3.8 and 3.9]. The outdoor area was also entirely devoid of flexibility in
terms of use. The only exception to the rigid layout were the loose metal chairs and tables, which
were meant to be scattered throughout the area. Those too, were replaced in the final version by
pairs of benches placed in front of the lawn area.45
The outdoor space was entirely fenced off from the street by a common cyclone fence.
The fence was the primary cause of contention between the Guild and Venturi. Guild workers
urged Venturi to submit a proposal for a “simple, wrought iron fence.”46 They acknowledged that
“the design of the fence is of great importance to you.” At the same time, they reminded that “it
is of equal importance to us as the owners and the persons responsible for the tenants and their
45 At the Guild’s behest, the architects provided a space for gardening and games on the north side of the
lot. This amenity reads like an afterthought, the shaded area making planting difficult and maintaining
virtually no communication with the street or community.
46 Robert Marshall to Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincot, April 29, 1966, folder 225.II.A.6104.44,
Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA.
115
happiness.” In his response, Venturi ignored that the Guild had recommended a wrought-iron
fence and argued that a masonry wall would result in rent-increases. The chain link fence, he
asserted, would allow the “elderly residents to look out on Spring Garden Street from their
gardens” while securing them “from the casual incursions of pedestrian traffic.”47 Above all, he
claimed, the fence was an aesthetic decision, which would “contribute measurably to the
appearance of Spring Garden Street.”48
This collection of design decisions confirmed an overall desire to orient the tenants
towards the interior. The unshaded asphalt and concrete likely made prolonged use of the area
unusable, especially during humid Philadelphia summers. The high cyclone fence impeded easy
interaction between the residents and the public sidewalk. The lack of amenities and organized
activities or room for open-ended enjoyment of the spaces thwarted any traction for using this
space. Early photographs of the project make clear that tenants refused this wholesale push
indoors. While the authorized outdoor space gapes empty in images, the tenants are seen
congregating in the covered area of the main entrance.
The Guild also fought Venturi’s decorative antenna as another unnecessary cost.49 It
capitulated only when Venturi himself offered to put up $2,000 towards its construction. While
the project was mostly lauded, the antenna was the earliest source of criticism. Critics quickly
took the antenna as a derogatory symbol for elderly people’s way of life. Venturi countered, “It’s
not for us to tell people that television is bad, and they should read books. That horrifies us, that
47 Robert Venturi to the Mrs. Mae Belle Segal of the Redevelopment Authority,” June 15, 1966, folder
225.II.A.6104.44, Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives of the University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. 48 Robert Venturi to Mrs. Mae Belle Segal. 49 Israel Packel to Paul Cope Jr., February 8, 1968, folder 225.II.A.6104.47, Venturi, Scott Brown
Collection, The Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
116
is, that art should be explicitly for the betterment of people.”50 That Venturi took this critique as
an implication of highbrow as opposed to lowbrow entertainment is telling. The critiques,
however, likely stemmed from Venturi’s perceived cynical attitudes regarding the elderly. The
entire Guild House project revolved around the question of where the older person was expected
to be located. For Venturi, that was extracted from the outside and glued to the medium that
provides a simulacrum of the exterior. Spatially, the residents were discouraged from spending
their time outside and were corralled into the community room. An interest in indoor vistas
predominated and the motif of the screen followed residents throughout the interior. A series of
hand-painted ceramic tiles, resembling a film strip, lined the walls. These led to larger, screenlike murals at the ends of hallways. These design decisions can be read not only as an
economical decorative solution but also as a variation on the building’s overall theme.
Like the other buildings discussed in this chapter, the people involved in getting the
Guild House project off the ground considered it “an experiment that merits watching and could
create widespread interest” as it “faces up to a national problem particularly prevalent in the
larger cities.”51 The Guild regarded the problem of designing with consideration of the “unique
needs of aging people with modest incomes” increasingly urgent.52 On a more immediate level,
the Guild House offered housing to people displaced by the East Poplar redevelopment. It
targeted older individuals living on small savings and pensions who were not eligible for lowrent public housing. The value of its location largely rested on the promise of future
redevelopment, when the Guild House would be connected to Independence Hall by a greenbelt
50 Robert Venturi to Israel Packel, folder 225.II.A.6104.46, Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The
Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
51 Alexander McCall, “Guild House Press Release.” 52 McCall, “To the Editors Letter.”
117
walkway.53 These large-scale plans never materialized, but for the Guild House design that
seemed to matter little. While the architecture of the Guild House kept residents physically
within the neighborhood it effectively cut them off from any interactions with the area outside.
The design of experiences within the space and the vistas that the architects privileged, reveal
that the Guild House was largely ambivalent about its residents and their ability to contribute to
both the neighborhood and the city at large. Instead, their lives were directed inward, towards the
care of their peers and the comfort of television.
Gaylord White House (1958-1964)
The earliest and the most idealistic of the post-World War II senior housing projects was
undoubtedly the Gaylord White House, a collaboration between the New York City Housing
Authority (NYCHA) and the Union Settlement.
54 From the outset, Gaylord White was
conceptualized as a high-stakes experiment, the results of which its sponsors believed would
have the “widest possible” circulation and influence on public housing for the aged throughout
the country.55
53 “Friends’ Neighborhood Guild Points the Way to Good Living for Older People,” box 225:0002,
Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA.
54 The project was named after Gaylord White, Union Settlement headworker from 1901 to 1923. White
was also the Dean of Union Theological Seminary from 1923 to 1930. Other names that were considered
were Maryal Knex, John Crosby Brown, and Coffin House (after Henry Sloane Coffin). The last option
was quickly deemed inappropriate for a senior housing project. William Kirk to Orville Schell Jr., August
1, 1958, Proposed Old Age Center 1956-59, box 37, Folder 3, Union Settlement Association records,
1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, NY.
55 Gaylord White was partially successful in this regard. While not many similar housing projects
followed in its wake, Gaylord White significantly influenced discussion around senior housing. The
project was highlighted in government overviews of the field and architectural publications such as
Musson and Heusinkveld’s Buildings for the Elderly, while the people involved in its design were often
called upon to discuss their findings in government committees and conferences on aging. William Kirk,
for instance, was invited to participate in the 1965 Governor’s Conference on Aging (Letter to William
Kirk, April 5, 1965, Senior Citizens 1960-65, box 37, folder 7, Union Settlement Association records,
1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, NY).
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Yet, neither NYCHA nor the Union Settlement had any experience in building
specifically for this age group. For NYCHA, Gaylord White was to be the first of what it hoped
would be many senior housing projects.
56 The Union Settlement, which offered programs for all
age groups (among other programs, it operated the largest daycare provider in the city), had no
existing services catering to the elderly.57 When these two entities embarked on a shared senior
housing project, planned in the wake of the 1958 housing act, they hoped to partner with a
private foundation that would bring their expertise to the table by guiding the design and
operation of the building. They looked to the Ford Foundation to help them develop this
“demonstration project in a key city of a key state.”58 When the Ford Foundation declined
involvement, the Union Settlement took it upon itself to “break new ground in this field.”59 They
looked to architect Albert Mayer and, more indirectly, the writer Jane Jacobs, to establish a
template that would guide this and future attempts in senior public housing.
Gaylord White was a concerted effort to innovate within the confines of city and federal
regulations. The adherence to codes meant that, by regulation, the building could not be
56 “Gaylord White Houses,” Social Service Review. 36, no.1 (March 1962): 83.
57 From 1941 to 1953 the Settlement operate a senior program, which was taken up by the Department of
Welfare in 1953.
58 “A Project for Low Cost Public Housing for the Aged,” 2, Proposed Old Age Center 1956-59, box 37,
Folder 3, Union Settlement Association records, 1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Columbia University, New York, NY.
59 While the Union Settlement board was shocked their proposal was rejected, Ford Foundation materials
make clear that support was unlikely from the outset. In an internal memo, Stacey Widdicombe expressed
dismay at William Kirk’s surprise at the decision, stating that he thought he made the Foundation’s
inability to support the project quite clear. The Ford Foundation exclusively supported research which
was “experimental and related to a specific research hypothesis” and summarily rejected any proposals
that asked for planning or operational funding. From the outset, Widdicombe also expressed skepticism at
the pressures placed on the design of the physical facilities and the lack of investment (less than one sixth
of the project’s total costs) in supporting social services. The sheer quantity of correspondence and
internal memos on Gaylord White speak to Ford Foundation’s awareness of the high-profile nature of the
project and its desire to do due diligence into the viability of lending it support. Stacey Widdicombe,
Request of the Union Settlement Assn for Support of a Service Program for the Aged,” 21, Union
Settlement Project, New York, Ford Foundation Economic Development & Administration: Aging, box
1, folder 16, Rockefeller Archive Center, New York.
119
architecturally innovative. My attempt at reading this design is therefore attentive to the smallscale decisions that mark departures from public housing tradition. What is immediately striking
about Gaylord White is that, unlike other housing projects of the period, the building is not set
back from the street, but rather asserts itself forcefully towards both Second Avenue and 104th
street [Figure 3.10 and 3.11]. The project comprises two, dark-brick towers housing 248
apartments. The eight-floor building is aligned with the scale of the surrounding tenement
houses, while the twenty-floor tower is set within the lower building and pushed back from the
street. The building faces not only its adjacent streets but it acts as a connective tissue between
the nearby large-scale housing projects, the George Washington Houses and Franklin Plaza. It
opens up to the neighborhood through a series of public plazas that encourage social interaction.
The Gaylord White project included not only senior housing towers but a rebuilding of Union
Settlement headquarters. In contrast with the housing project, the Union Settlement building is
demure. Low and set back from the street, it diverts attention to the imposing Gaylord White
House on its right. The prominent form of the senior housing project thus positions itself as the
Settlement’s proclamation on the position of the elderly in contemporary society, at a time when
the organization attempted to reckon with its role in urban renewal by becoming more directly
involved with public housing.
The project’s client was the Union Settlement House and more specifically, William
Kirk, the Settlement’s headworker between 1949 and 1971. Located at 237 East 104th Street, the
Union Settlement was founded by students, alumni, and faculty of Union Theological Seminary
in 1895.60 From its outset, the Settlement modeled itself on Jane Addams’s 1889 Hull House in
Chicago. It was a part of a broader progressive effort by the educated middle and upper classes to
60 For the first five months after its founding the Union Settlement Association was located at 202 East
96th Street. After which, the organization relocated to its present site.
120
provide services in low-income immigrant neighborhoods. Like the widely known Toynbee Hall
in London, the settlement’s distinguishing feature was the purposeful proximity of the settlement
house’s workers to the immigrant populations they were serving. As part of this model,
settlement workers took up residency in immigrant neighborhoods, which made dispensing aid
easier. They also hoped to combine their firsthand knowledge of issues these populations were
facing with their social privilege to inspire progressive legislation. Nevertheless, the movement
had its critics. Some faulted the Settlement Movement for the power imbalance inherent when
care is performed by those with more means. Others noted the forms of social control hidden
behind the veneer of altruism. For critics, the Settlement Movement was a misguided attempt to
alleviate social issues through philanthropy, rather than through systemic change.
61
The Settlement Movement played a prominent role on both sides of the postwar urban
renewal discourse, as Jamin Creed Rowan has illustrated.62 In their highly influential narratives
of life in urban centers, Settlement writers deployed two rhetorical strategies: the “sidewalk
narrative” and the “tenement narrative” to further their agenda. The sidewalk narrative
highlighted the vibrancy of organically developed public spaces, such as sidewalks and
61 For additional information on Jane Addams and the Hull House see: Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane
Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Jane Addams,
Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1910); Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors:
Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Ruth Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement
Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Mina Carson,
Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990); Judith Trolander, Settlement Houses and the Great Depression
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975); Judith Trolander, Professionalism and Social Change:
From the Settlement House Movement to Neighborhood Centers, 1886 to the Present (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987); Herbert Gans, “Redefining the Settlement’s Function for the War on
Poverty,” in People and Plans (New York: Basic, 1968), 249–59; Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform:
The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1967).
62 Jamin Creed Rowan, “Sidewalk Narratives, Tenement Narratives: Seeing Urban Renewal through the
Settlement Movement,” Journal of Urban History 39, no. 3 (2013): 392–410.
121
storefronts, which carried the capacity to establish and foster relationships and boost the
neighborhood’s economy. These neighborhood staples, which the Settlement greatly valued,
were often victims of clearance and renewal. Lawrence J. Vale has argued that settlement leaders
in the US played a seminal role in “establishing the neighborhood—rather than the individual
building—as the appropriate unit for housing reform.”63
The Settlement’s other space of interest, the tenement, created a counter narrative of
urban overcrowding and subpar conditions as inherent to this model and the root of much evil in
the contemporary city. The Settlement presented demolition and rebuilding of dilapidated
nineteenth century tenements as the only adequate solution to this problem and thus it played an
important role in the justification of slum clearance and urban renewal. In the two decades
following World War II, Union Settlement’s neighborhood, East Harlem, had been effectively
remade through slum clearance [Figure 3.12].
64 NYCHA built more than a dozen housing
projects serving an estimated population of sixty-two thousand people, its superblocks and highrise towers swallowing large swathes of the leveled neighborhood. The income and occupancy
requirements of these new complexes shifted the demographics of the area, with low-income
families with young children supplanting what had been a more heterogeneous mixture.65 The
redesign of the neighborhood cast out older people from its demographic makeup.
Despite its role in early discussions on urban renewal, the Union Settlement was one of
the first groups to sound the alarm on the negative effects of East Harlem’s redevelopment. Ellen
Lurie’s study of Gaylord White’s immediate neighbor, the George Washington Houses, likely
63 Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects, 73.
64 For an in-depth exploration of the post-war remaking of East Harlem see: Zipp, Manhattan Projects:
The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York, 251–353.
65 Ellen Lurie, “A Study of George Washington Houses,” conducted by Union Settlement Association,
1955–1956, section V, 2, in box 11, folder 13,
122
played an important role in the senior housing project’s founding.66 The George Washington
Houses were made up of fourteen twelve- and fourteen-story towers dispersed over three
superblocks. While the project featured a community center, a daycare, and two schools, its
population nevertheless felt isolated at a time when racial tensions were high. In 1955, the
Settlement assigned Lurie with preparing a report on the conditions at George Washington as
part of a broader redevelopment effort. Above all, Lurie sought to uncover the source of the
disjunction between the expectations of city institutions and activists and the reality of everyday
life in East Harlem’s public housing. Over the course of 1955 and 1956, Lurie and a team of
social workers interviewed about a third of the George Washington Houses’ tenants in an effort
to uncover why social, economic, and cultural life of the area had stalled despite new buildings,
modern amenities, and reduced density.
Among her study’s findings, Lurie highlighted that one of the few families actively
working towards improving the conditions at the project were the Edwardses, an elderly couple
who “stressed that they were old, retired, and had a lot of time on their hands to help.”67 Lurie
also noted that the reluctance of parents to participate in organized activities and informal
socialization was likely tied to the difficulty of obtaining childcare—given that there were “few
single elderly people such as usually do this work in other neighborhoods.”68 The George
Washington Study showed that Union Settlement was becoming increasingly cognizant of the
role elderly people played in the making of successful neighborhoods.69 They worried that East
66 Lurie, “A Study of George Washington Houses.”
67 Lurie, “A Study of George Washington Houses,” II-13.
68 Lurie, “A Study of George Washington Houses,” II-19.
69 This takeaway in reading the report was not unique to the Union Settlement. Stacey Widdicombe, Ford
Foundation’s program associate heading the old age arm of the organization, took note of this aspect of
the report’s findings, as indicated in a letter to William Kirk. “Stacey Widdicombe to William Kirk,” June
9, 1959, Ford Foundation Archive.
123
Harlem was becoming an area of “many grandchildren, but few grandparents.”70 However, the
Union Settlement was loathe to toss out the baby with the bathwater and lose public housing by
adding to its many critiques. Lest anyone use her document for contrary purposes, Lurie stressed
on the very first page: “Let this, above all, be understood: WE BELIEVE IN PUBLIC
HOUSING, AND WE BELIEVE IN IT STRONGLY.”71
The Settlement was invested in pointing the way for the future of public housing,
likening it to a phoenix that would emerge from the ashes, as Lurie phrased it in her preface.72
After all, the Settlement was enmeshed in the narrative of benevolent intervention, arguing that
airy, open apartments with modern amenities would help residents improve themselves. The
solution was not to return to the sub-standard housing in the form of five-story walk-ups with
railroad layouts, managed by absentee landlords. Instead, Settlement workers focused on
rebalancing the demographics of the neighborhood by catering to previously disregarded
populations such as the elderly. They believed that the proper integration of these groups,
achieved through the well-thought-out siting of public housing, would create a healthy
neighborhood made up of a less-alienated public that possessed a sense of civic responsibility for
their home and its surroundings.
Gaylord White purposefully placed older people at the very center of the community.
This desire to integrate seniors into the neighborhood merged architecture and programming.
Childcare facilities were placed immediately adjacent to the senior center, the physical proximity
70 Lurie, “A Study of George Washington Houses,” II-19.
71 Lurie’s study proved influential beyond the immediate circle of East Harlem activists. It was
extensively quoted by Jacobs in her writing, Ellen Lurie, “A Study of George Washington Houses.”
72 Ibid.
124
intended to enrich the programming of both centers.73 A street-level public restaurant, which
never materialized, was to provide food service for apartment-bound residents while establishing
itself as a neighborhood gathering place, facilitating social and business interactions while also
strengthening the Union’s relations with the community.74
While the Gaylord White project originated with William Kirk and the Settlement, it was
refined through a long collaborative process with Jane Jacobs and Albert Mayer. In applying for
grants, the Union Settlement strategically mentioned Jacobs’ involvement, reminding grantgiving organizations of the wide reach of her work and her expertise in urban issues.75 Jacobs’s
Architectural Forum article “Housing for the Independent Aged,” was considered the
authoritative text on the topic and widely cited in both government and architectural circles.76 In
the article, Jacobs cited Mayer (who had just finished a senior housing project in Cincinnati) as
the foremost authority on housing for the aged, their shared experience with Gaylord White
likely the primary reason for highlighting his work. Jacobs’s close relationship with William
Kirk is more widely known. The influence of East Harlem social workers permeates her 1961
book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and no one made more of a mark on it than
Kirk, whom she credits with the book’s “basic idea” of trying to “begin understanding the
intricate social and economic order under the seeming disorder of cities.”77
73 Community Organization, Day Care Center / Old Age Center, Gaylord White House, 1958-59, box 33,
folder 6, Union Settlement Association records, 1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Columbia University, New York, NY.
74 Proposal, Gaylord White House, 1958-59, box 33, folder 6, Union Settlement Association records,
1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, NY.
75 Recent works on Jane Jacobs include: Dirk Schubert and Uwe Altrock, Contemporary Perspectives on
Jane Jacobs: Reassessing the Impacts of an Urban Visionary (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2014); Sonia
Hirt and Diane L. Zahm, The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs, Planning, History and Environment Series
(London: Routledge, 2012); Max Page and Timothy Mennel, Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (Chicago:
American Planning Association, 2011).
76 For instance, the article is cited in Clinton H. Cowgill, “Facilities for the Aging and Infirm: Part I,” AIA
Journal, May 1960, 69.
77 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 15.
125
As a member of the East Harlem Council for Community Planning, Jacobs had already
been involved in a neighborhood public housing proposal.78 Along with Kirk and Ellen Lurie,
Jacobs contributed to the reimagining of the DeWitt Clinton Houses in East Harlem, designed by
architects Perkins & Will [Figure 3.13].
79 In a premeditated violation of PHA codes the group
deemed unreasonable, this project featured a mix of high and low-rise structures, with walk-up
apartments organized around interior courtyards, and a public space oriented around engagement
with the neighborhood streets with space for pushcarts and food trucks—features that were all
prohibited by the PHA. This flaunting of codes made it easy for NYCHA to reject the proposal
and move ahead with the much more conventional solution of 18-story towers separated by
grassy lawns. While the Clinton project was decidedly a speculative proposal suggesting an
alternative approach to public housing, Gaylord White was instead a more concerted effort to
innovate within the government’s strict framework. The Gaylord White project maintained the
earlier interest in the street, but whereas the Clinton Houses segregated older people by
concentrating them on the upper six floors of the high-rises, Gaylord White put them at the
center.
In the eyes of Union Settlement board members, Albert Mayer was the obvious choice to
take on the role of the project’s architect.
80 Mayer had a long been involved with public housing
78 Other members included: Chairman Mildred Zucker, director of the James Weldon Johnson
Community Center; William Kirk, headworker of Union Settlement, Ellen Lurie, program director of the
East Harlem Project.
79 Richard A. Miller, “Public Housing… For People,” Architectural Forum, April 1959, 135-7. For a
deeper analysis of the project see: Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in
Cold War New York, 327–33.
80 Albert Mayer (1897-1981) attended Columbia University, followed up by a degree in civil engineering
from MIT in 1919. He toured Europe in the early 1920s and spent the majority of the decade working for
his father’s company. In 1935 he joined Julian Whittlesey to form Mayer and Whittlesey. The company
designed several prominent apartment buildings including 240 Central Park South (1939-40) and 40
Central Park South (1941). In both projects, the buildings occupy only about half of the site, a feature that
was to become signature for Mayer. Mayer held that the added light and air would benefit not only the
resident quality of life but the real estate value of the building itself. Over the years, the firm expanded
126
in many different guises. In 1933, along with Lewis Mumford and Henry Wright, Mayer founded
the Housing Study Guild, a not-for-profit center dedicated to researching the social and practical
issues relating to housing and community planning. The Guild, whose members included
William Lescaze and Catherine Bauer, performed its own studies on local housing conditions.
Owing to the dearth of building and consulting opportunities during the Great Depression, the
Guild leaned into its educational role. It held public lectures, published an influential technical
review, housed an impressive library, and commissioned the translation of numerous
international housing studies. Among the Guild’s foremost convictions was the emphasis on the
importance of maintenance in public housing. Maintenance, for the Guild, was understood
expansively, encompassing not only repairs and upkeep, but social services as well. The Housing
Study Guild dissolved in 1937, but its impact reverberated across the profession and is visible in
the output of both its founding members and the generation it educated.
Throughout his career, Mayer also designed public housing. Before World War II, he
participated in the design of prominent housing projects such as Fort Greene Houses in Brooklyn
and Thorneycroft in Queens. After the war, Mayer became involved in designing subsidized
housing across the United States, although he maintained the closest involvement with NYCHA
and East Harlem developments. By the time William Kirk offered the Gaylord White project to
Albert Mayer, the two had maintained a close relationship for years.81 For official approval,
further, with the addition of partners Milton Glass (1945) and William J. Conklin (1951). It continued
producing block-like apartment buildings with interior courtyards, largely for New York’s upper middle
class. Notable projects from this period include 220 Central Park South (1954), Manhattan House,
designed in 1950-51 in collaboration with Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the Kaplan and List
buildings of the New School for Social Research (1956-1559).
81 Kirk was also bound to Mayer due to his generous contributions to the Settlement, both as an individual
and as the representative of the Mayer family.
127
Mayer first had to petition to the New York Housing Authority, given that they ran the
construction.82 This was largely a formality.83
Mayer’s architectural career was rife with contradictions. Throughout his life, he
maintained a connection to the family real estate business he was born into and saw no conflict
between his work as a developer of luxury buildings and a champion of low-income housing. 84
Mayer also rarely tried to braid the two strands of his approach to urban development. On the
one hand, the organizing element of his town planning approach was the neighborhood unit.85
82 Mayer, Whittlesey & Glass to New York City Housing Authority, May 9, 1958, Gaylord White House,
1958-59, box 33, folder 7, Union Settlement Association records, 1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Columbia University, New York, NY.
83 NYCHA only rarely became involved in the project, leaving the majority of decision making to the
Settlement. The day to day running of the project was largely in the hands of the Settlement and
maintenance was paid for by cash grants from the city association but managed by the Settlement.
Nevertheless, representatives of the Settlement often raised concerns about the need to maintain “selfdetermination of not only plan but operation of the facilities.”
84 Mayer was born into a prominent real estate family. His father, Bernhard, had founded the J. H. Taylor
Construction Company at the turn of the twentieth century, capitalizing on the housing boom New York
was experiencing at the time. The J. H. Taylor Company, whose developments dot Manhattan from Wall
Street up to the Upper East Side, was incorporated in 1913, but there is evidence to suggest it existed as a
smaller real estate and construction company beginning with the 1890s. Over the course of his career,
Mayer also designed many block-like apartment buildings with interior courtyards for New York’s upper
middle class. Notable projects from this period include 220 Central Park South (1954), Manhattan House,
designed in 1950-51 in collaboration with Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the Kaplan and List
buildings of the New School for Social Research (1956-1559).
Thomai Serdari, “Albert Mayer, Architect and Town Planner: The Case for a Total Professional” (New
York University, 2005), 77, https://search.proquest.com/docview/305469042?pq-origsite=primo.
85 Mayer’s experience in India during World War II played a key role here. While stationed in India and
Burma, Mayer served as a lieutenant colonel with the Army Corps of Engineers, designing various
military structures such as airfields, supply depots, and officer's clubs. He absorbed lessons in local
building practices and was taken by the low, dense neighborhood clusters that facilitated social and
economic activities. Towards the end of his time in India, Mayer became increasingly involved with
Indian nationalists and offered his services to Jawaharlal Nehru. As Prime Minister, Nehru called on
Mayer to create urban development plans that would mirror the political shifts the country was
undergoing. This meant designing planned communities and rebuilding existing neighborhoods with the
goal of reducing inefficiencies and increasing function through slum clearance, streamlining traffic
systems, and constructing large-scale government projects. Most notably, in 1949 Mayer was appointed
as the master planner for Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab. In collaboration with architect Matthew
Nowicki, Mayer began planning the city. However, when Nowicki was killed in a plane crash in 1950,
Mayer was unwilling to appoint another architect and dropped out of the project, so the Chandigarh
commission went to Le Corbusier. Despite his exit from the Chandigarh assignment, Mayer remained
closely involved with the Indian government and executed several other important projects. During his
128
Yet, like other architects and urbanists of the time, Mayer went about achieving this tight-knit
community ideal by building it from scratch, rather than working with what was already present.
While he certainly was not the only architect who wrestled with the clash between good business
and public good, he embodied this contradiction so fully, that many found it easy to discount his
ideas and overlook his accomplishments. Perhaps this lack of congruence is what contributed to
Mayer fading from histories of architecture.
A key tenet of Mayer’s postwar housing projects was the Main Street: a planned central
pedestrian throughway connecting public housing towers with the surrounding neighborhood.86
Main Street was meant to be an improved street, offering a space for both informal socialization
and organized entertainment sheltered from traffic, yet it turned out to be a little more than an
artificial version of the organic street life that existed beyond the bounds of the project. Main
Street was a prominent feature of Mayer’s work on the East Harlem and Franklin plazas,
designed at the same time as Gaylord White in the late 1950s. A comparison between Mayer’s
drawings for the Franklin Plaza and Gaylord White, however, reveals the stark difference in
approach. In his drawings of the Franklin Plaza and in requesting photographs of the project,
Mayer privileged the surveying view from above [Figure 3.14 and 3.15]. At Gaylord White, it is
the street level view that is deemed most valuable. While Mayer frequented his plazas and
promoted them to media, Gaylord White offered him an opportunity to explore an alternative
tenure as consultant, Mayer worked as an architect and town planner for Mumbai, generated the master
plan of Gujarat University in Ahmedabad, and designed the Allahabad Agricultural Institute. Mayer’s
work in India has been interpreted differently. Some argue that he imposed a foreign modernism on a
context unsuited for this style, while others point to his fascination with local building practices and
different modes of being and knowing. Andrew Friedman, “The Global Postcolonial Moment and the
American New Town: India, Reston, Dodoma,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 3 (2012): 553–76,
https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144211428765.
86 Albert Mayer to William Kirk, January 6, 1966, box 39, folder 3, Union Settlement Association
records, 1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, NY.
129
way of engaging with the neighborhood, through a building that plugs into the existing
streetscape.
For Mayer, the Gaylord White project was about staggering the levels of socialization.87
The rooms themselves received the least attention [Figure 3.16]. The project featured nonskid
ceramic tile bathroom floors, kitchen ranges with automatic shutoff devices, windows that
opened and closed with a minimum of effort and large radiators to maintain higher-than-usual
temperatures in the cold months. But these features interested Mayer less than the potential of the
public space to foster and maintain connection.88 Instead of one large activity room, Mayer was
hoping to introduce smaller community rooms on each floor to support intimate ties between
immediate neighbors.
The most important connection, however, was with the neighborhood outside the bounds
of the building. On this front, Mayer was united with headworker William Kirk who often
claimed that the people in the neighborhood were a “street-oriented people,” who “had no
interest in grass and trees.”89 Mayer envisioned several ways for the building, and its residents, to
interact with the community [Figure 3.10, 3.17, and 3.18]. The larger tower opens onto Second
Avenue. A covered walkway bridges the street and the entrance, with another fixed overhang
87 Musson and Heusinkveld, Buildings for the Elderly, 180.
88 Gaylord White’s description in Noverre Musson and Helen Heusinkveld’s Buildings for the Elderly
illustrates the points of divergence between this and other eldercare projects in the period. Among the
nearly fifty projects the authors highlight as notable, there is very little variety. The majority of project
descriptions are replete with dry pronouncements of creating an illusion of home (see Chapter One) and
the attempts to marry comfort with economy. The goal, for most of these projects, is to provide an
“adequate and comfortable” home (page 78) while easing “control and administration” (page 96), with the
result being “an institution, but in appearance and in feeling, […] a home” (page 109). Among these
projects, Gaylord White stands out for its lack of interest in accessibility features and “essential creature
comforts.” Instead, Mayer stressed the importance of “social facilities” and building for “satisfactory
individual and social relationships.” Musson and Heusinkveld, 180.
89 Meeting between W. Kirk and W.J. Conklin, September 24, 1958, Gaylord White House, 1958-59, box
33, folder 6, Union Settlement Association records, 1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Columbia University, New York, NY.
130
providing shade to a series of tables and benches. On the other side of the building, further down
104th Street, the mass of the first tower gives way to a plaza that connects Gaylord White to
Union Settlement headquarters. This area was initially meant to accommodate a community
stage that would double as a space for resident performances in the evening and a play area for
the associated daycare during the day. These areas modulate the connection to the public space
of the street, allowing tenants to be as removed or integrated into street life as desired. A
sequence of trees leads the eye from the sidewalk towards the entrance. A tree set in-line with the
low masonry wall strengthens this connection, for a low bench is integrated into the curving of
the wall around the tree.
NYCHA, on the other hand, envisioned a more detached, inward-looking community,
closing-off the garden from the street and supporting a large activity room on the first floor and a
rooftop sundeck on the ninth floor as the primary places for socialization [Figure 3.19]. These
spaces privileged certain experiences and certain audiences—primarily that of its white, Englishspeaking, and educated residents—even though from its founding, Gaylord White was planned
as integrated housing. Unlike other area projects, senior housing worked with a much larger pool
of tenants and could artificially produce the desired diversity. Gaylord White accepted many
seniors who had lived in the immediate neighborhood. However, the renting office also
purposefully expanded its catchment to include Yorkville, a neighborhood historically inhabited
by white European immigrants. In the end, Gaylord White housed an inflated number of white
residents relative to the demographics of the area [Figure 3.20]. The interior spaces imposed an
order that worked to the advantage of these residents. Given that there was only one
entertainment hall, the programming was only offered in English and the committees in charge
with activities and day-to-day goings-on were all composed of English-speaking tenants.
131
Similarly, the management chose “the most literate” tenant to reward for the gardening efforts in
the backyard, which led other members to leave the project gardening group.90 And finally, when
the George Washington Houses senior citizens program merged with Gaylord White, the social
workers noted turf tensions in the transitional period, as Gaylord White residents were reluctant
to share their space and amenities with the majority-Black residents of Washington Houses.
Overall, the scant but large gathering spaces made it easier to establish and maintain hierarchies
of power. The lack of more intimate community spaces may have hindered small-group
conversations and organizing. For many residents, it was the unstructured space of the front area
that offered not only entertainment in the form of watching the “relatives and neighbors coming
and going with their groceries, fire engines and trucks careening along the avenue,” as a yearly
report stated, but also an opportunity to choreograph their own everyday experience.91
In the 1970s, Gaylord White established Channel R, a private cable-TV station that began
as a Mount Sinai School of Medicine experiment to deliver medical and lifestyle information to
tenants, in a medium perceived as most suitable to older people.92 Yet, the tenants subverted
expectation and began contributing to the programming, conducting long form interviews with
community members or devising public service announcements such as an informational spot
where shots of tenants ogling women in the street developed into a prompt to a get free EKGs on
the ninth floor. The television, far from a passive medium, proved another connective tissue,
working in tandem with the architectural design to bring the residents closer to the
90 Laura Brown, “Report: Gaylord White,” September 1966, box 33, folder 6, Union Settlement
Association records, 1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York,
NY.
91 Laura Brown, “Report: Gaylord White,” October 1967, box 33, folder 6, Union Settlement Association
records, 1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, NY. 92 Les Brown, “Channel R Zooms In on Elderly Tenants in Halem,” The New York Times, August 14,
1975.
132
neighborhood. Gaylord White envisioned an alternative way of strengthening community ties, by
making its oldest members the connective tissue.
At the same time, this complex carried within itself signs of skepticism about the larger
idea of senior housing. In its insistence on the integration of older people into the community it
dealt another blow to isolated public housing superblocks. But by indicating that healthy
communities are age-diverse, it also questioned age-segregated housing projects. Soon after the
founding of Gaylord White, the Union Settlement shifted its attention to home-based services
[Figure 3.21]. By offering assistance in people’s own homes, which were scattered throughout
the area, it seemed to prove that the only better way to integrate seniors into the community was
by not taking them out of it at all.
Raymond Hilliard Homes (1963-1966)
In March 1963, Charles Swibel, the head of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA),
contacted Bertrand Goldberg and commissioned him to design an ambitious urban renewal
project on Chicago’s South Side. Swibel was convinced that Goldberg, fresh from the success of
his Marina City project, was the perfect choice to boost the public profile of Chicago high-rise
public housing. At the time, CHA had been plagued by critiques from both civil rights groups
and urbanists who saw large-scale, high-density projects as an unsuitable solution to the housing
needs of the city’s low-income residents. Instead, the groups advocated for alternative solutions
such as rent subsidies, funds for retrofitting already existing buildings, and low-rise public
housing.
93
93 For histories of public housing in Chicago see Martin Meyerson and Edward Banfield, Politics,
Planning and the Public Interest: The Case of Public Housing in Chicago (Glencoe: Free Press, 1955);
Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York:
Cambridge University’ Press, 1983); J.S. Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building
133
Advocacy groups were particularly critical of developments on the city’s South Side,
which was already marked by the monumental and monumentally fraught Robert Taylor
Homes.94 Adding another high-rise housing project to so-called “poverty row,” the four-mile
chain of South Side projects which contained over 95 percent of the city’s 32,000 public housing
units, threatened to stoke the flames of already simmering criticism. To allay fears, CHA and its
partner, the federal Public Housing Authority (PHA), decided to build for a demographic
unlikely to ruffle any feathers, the elderly. They tasked Bertrand Goldberg with preparing a
preliminary proposal for the senior housing project, building on the material and formal
experimentation begun at Marina City. However, as the project developed, PHA recommended
using this opportunity to clear a nearby area, deemed as the “city’s worst concentration of
junkyards and shabby bars,” and adding low-income family housing to the plan.95
Given the high stakes of the project, CHA went to great lengths to publicize it. The
project, soon named Raymond M. Hilliard Homes (also known as Raymond Hilliard Center),
appeared on the cover of the Chicago Housing Authority Times twice, once during construction
and again after the residents had moved in. CHA also sent a flatbed truck to the neighborhood
announcing that “Chicago Housing Authority Builds for the Elderly.” The truck showcased a
model of Hilliard atop painted renderings of the existing block, the sleek monumental forms
Community in Chicago (Wesport, CT: Praeger, 2003); and D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The
Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
94 The design of the Raymond M. Hilliard project was expected to address the legacy of the nearby Robert
Taylor Homes (1962), which housed 4,415 families in twenty-eight sixteen story high rises. Stretching
over 96 acres, Robert Taylor was the largest housing development in the country at the time of
completion. Much like Pruitt-Igoe (1956) in St. Louis, Robert Taylor quickly became shorthand for the
failures of public housing. These failures were framed as not only a result of policy, but as inherent to the
form of the buildings, the long housing slabs and vast barren courts judged as fundamentally unable to
support the residents’ expected move towards financial independence.
95 John Morris Dixon, “Goldberg’s Variation on Chicago Public Housing,” Architectural Forum,
November 1966, 26.
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visually and physically overpowering the rendering of the dated slums [Figure 3.22]. From the
outset, the media focused on the role the striking design played in these publicity efforts.
Goldberg told reporters that the project aimed to “put an end to generalizations that pervaded our
thinking at the time.”96 These included critiques that cities and high-rises were not fit places to
live, that they merely stored people and produced crime. For Goldberg, the quality of the design
showed that the city respected the individuals who inhabited these buildings. Hilliard’s manager,
C. L. Dupree, argued that the eye-catching buildings gave residents “something to be proud
of.”97 And by continually stressing the connection between Goldberg’s Marina City and the new
project, CHA broadcast its desire to move away from stale solutions that resulted in
unsatisfactory social outcomes and its commitment to innovative design as a partner in
improving the quality of life in public housing.
Located on the northern tip of “poverty row,” Hilliard acted as the connective tissue
between the predominantly white Loop and the predominantly Black South Side. Its design was
also explicitly used to stimulate racial integration within the project.
98 By emulating the
appearance of Marina City, a largely middle-class apartment building, the CHA hoped to bring in
more white residents to Hilliard. The commingling of family and senior housing had a similar
aim. The CHA expected that senior housing would be easier to integrate than the family
buildings, so it placed emphasis on these buildings from the outset. I argue that this centering of
the elderly was not only an attempt to achieve a racial balance in the project, but that the
96 Betty J. Blum, Oral History of Bertrand Goldberg (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1992), 177.
97 Dixon, “Goldberg’s Variation on Chicago Public Housing,” 26.
98 In a 1965 interview Goldberg referred to it as “architecture of integration,” “Bertrand Goldberg with
Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner in Chicago,” The Art Institute of Chicago, Archive of Bertrand
Goldberg, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. In her 2014 dissertation, Marisa Angell Brown explored this
issue in detail. Marisa Angell Brown, “Imagined Communities: Race, Gender and the Architecture of
Public Housing in America, 1933-1974” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, Department of the History of Art,
2014), 141.
135
architecture also supported the role of older people in mentoring and monitoring the project’s
Black youth.
Goldberg’s site plan built on his original senior housing proposal. The 16-story senior
housing towers with 182 units in each building maintained their position perpendicular to the
one-story glass and steel community center and amphitheater, all bounded by a U-shaped path
[Figure 3.23].
99 The curve of the U was now echoed by two 22-story, arc-shaped towers with 168
units [Figure 3.24], which extended the project beyond its original bounds. On the other side of
the family towers, two large play areas bookended the site, while parking spaces and
undifferentiated park space filled out the remainder of the lot.
Hilliard allowed Goldberg to continue the spatial experimentation begun with Marina
City, while heeding government regulations and restrictions [Figure 3.25]. While the size of each
room was mandated by Congress, the shape was not. Goldberg’s petal-shaped, corner-less room
yielded greater overall dimensions than a conventional rectangular room. The project’s 121
square foot bedroom, as an example, had an average width of 9 feet and a length of 15 feet 8
inches—eking out additional space on the interior. This enhanced clearance for furniture and
allowed more freedom in devising layouts. The four years between Marina City and Hilliard also
made Goldberg more confident in designing floor plan variety. While Marina City featured
sixteen repetitions of the same plan, senior housing had 12 bedroom/bath modules alternating
with 12 kitchen/living room modules, both provided in two sizes.
Like Venturi and Mayer, Goldberg was preoccupied with how the space could reduce
frictions in socialization and coax regular interactions. Instead of Venturi’s large community
room or Mayer’s outdoor patios, Goldberg proposed small communal areas on each high-rise
99 The unusual positioning of the towers was a result of underground utilities crisscrossing the site along
former street lines. Dixon, “Goldberg’s Variation on Chicago Public Housing,” 26.
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floor, made possible by the building’s unorthodox structure. Instead of relying on a structural
concrete core in order to open the building’s façade to large expanses of glass, Hilliard’s exterior
shell was load bearing. This shift in structure significantly freed up the building’s core [Figure
3.26]. Two elevators and a staircase were placed at the center, with apartments spread out like
petals around it. Between the elevator and the individual apartments stood a circular communal
area. To enter any of the apartments, one needed to move through this shared threshold space.
Goldberg designed this area, one that had to be navigated numerous times a day, to gently spur
the building of community between the residents. It eased what he perceived as the two primary
problems of elderly residents: loneliness and physical limitations. On the one hand, it was a
space for sharing and entertaining. It housed lending libraries and bulletin boards. Some floors
included shared television sets and seating. On the other, it made asking and offering help easier.
Goldberg was working under the assumption that poverty made care more difficult to obtain. The
systemic lack of access to medical care, for instance, made the elderly poor much more
medically vulnerable than their wealthier counterparts. “It’s a strange thing to be so
impoverished and so needing of medical care that when you go to bed at night you question
whether you have the resources to wake up in the morning—both physical resources as well as
the energy,” Goldberg observed.100 The shared space, which encouraged reciprocal visibility and
interactions as residents crossed the space from the elevator to the apartment, made checking
systems—a popular informal strategy of ensuring neighbors were alive and well in the
morning—successful because it lessened apathy.101
100 Blum, Oral History of Bertrand Goldberg, 193.
101 Goldberg hoped that this spatial organization meant that “If [the tenants] didn’t see a familiar face,
they would rap at a door and see if there was some way in which they could be helpful.” Blum, 193.
137
Instead of creating one catch-all activity room, as was common in senior housing
projects, Goldberg organized socialization around practical needs. Thus, a spacious laundry room
was envisioned as “a party room.”102 Located on the roof level, it was placed near shuffleboard
courts and a solarium, allowing for a relatively seamless maneuvering between practical and
recreational spaces. Goldberg overcame the friction of leaving one’s apartment by planning
interactions around this necessary space and offering options for the extension of socialization, if
and when it was desired. For Goldberg, the guiding thought behind the project was to harken
back to an idealized past, to “recollect the community life around a campfire” where “everybody
looked after everybody else.103 He often referred to Hilliard as a village, both in terms of the
communities that were formed on each floor and those that carried across the project.
104 For
Goldberg, this feeling of living in a village could be achieved by reinstating older people to a
position of authority, as “the wise people of a society, [who] tutor, teach, and in a certain sense
administer the governance of that community.”105
Goldberg materialized these ideas in the architecture of the project. Despite the imposing
size of the family towers, it is clear that senior housing remained at the heart of Hilliard. Models
and photographs highlight the centrality of these structures to the overall plan. Located at the
main entrance to the complex, the senior towers were immediately visible from the street, unlike
the family towers which were pushed back deeper into the lot. Formally, too, the family housing
oriented itself towards the senior towers. The longer, more undifferentiated northern side of the
family housing appeared to turn its back to the city, at the same time as it opened up towards
102 Blum, Oral History of Bertrand Goldberg, 193.
103 Blum, 194.
104 Goldberg purposefully distanced himself from the more contemporary influences of his teacher, Mies
van der Rohe, and cited housing designed by Southwest Indians as his primary source of inspiration.
Blum, 195.
105Blum, 202.
138
senior housing through 150-foot-long exterior galleries on the south side of each floor. Indeed,
the family towers are almost deferential to the architectural form of the senior housing, fanning
out around the circular volumes. This is particularly noticeable in models and photographs,
where the curving form of the family towers seems to embrace the towers, as a sheltering
presence in the background [Figure 3.27 and 3.28].
106 The orientation of the family towers
towards senior housing imbued the space in-between the projects with a unique tension, directing
sightlines from the four buildings towards the project’s central public spaces, primarily the
amphitheater, playgrounds, and bicycle paths, and easing the surveillance of children and youth
using these spaces.
For Goldberg, one of the primary interests in the development of the project was the
establishment of sightlines and vistas across the various structures and amenities. As in the case
of Guild House, the views of the grounds were primarily envisioned as coming from above. The
small playgrounds, for instance, resembled clover leaves when seen from apartment windows.
This attention to outside views was most noticeable in the design of the senior housing project.
Goldberg purposefully oriented the windows of the living room and bedroom of the senior
housing towards the project green. He also specified dim lighting in hallways and painted
ceilings and doors shades of gold and orange to prompt a visual thrust outward, from dark to
light. In Imagined Communities: Race, Gender and the Architecture of Alterity in American
Public Housing Design, Marisa Angell Brown observed that “Hilliard was organized as a series
of shifting and absorbing views” and argued that this provision of views and the preoccupation
with the experience of viewing empowered the tenants of Hilliard [Figure 3.29], giving them
106 Brown reads the form of the family towers as a turning away from Chicago’s white North Side.
Brown, “Imagined Communities,” 134.
139
access to views that they were usually denied.107 I would counter that these comprehensive views
of the grounds instead encouraged a near-constant surveillance of activities. In many ways, the
senior tower performed the function of a panopticon’s central rotunda, serving as the observation
tower of surrounding spaces. The spatial organization endowed the elderly with power by
allowing them to remain hidden in the privacy of their rooms while giving them visual access to
the activities taking place in the public areas as well as the ability to monitor the comings and
goings of family tower residents.
The layout of the grounds caught the attention of psychologist and counterculture figure
Timothy Leary.108 In a 1965 tour of the Hilliard construction site, Leary observed that Goldberg
placed the windows of the senior housing to overlook the public areas and that the general
project plan encouraged older residents to monitor all nearby activities, from the goings on at the
community center and amphitheater to the use of the bicycle drag strip and the footpath.109
Indeed, Leary noticed that in several instances the elderly people were placed in closer proximity
to the children than their own families. Goldberg was satisfied with how the design prompted
involvement from its older tenants. At Hilliard, older people were “not just going to sit and wait
to die,” he argued.110 Instead, they would be “called upon once again to participate in family
existence.”111 They would not only look “down” and “out” onto the activities but would “get
games up” and “administer as judges.”112 The amphitheater, in particular, Goldberg hoped,
107 Brown, “Imagined Communities,” 142.
108 In 1965, Bertrand Goldberg led Leary and his collaboration Ralph Metzner on a tour of the recently
completed Marina City and the Hilliard construction site. The three also discussed psychedelic art.
109 Tour of the Hilliard Homes,” 1965, 7. series XIII, box FF 16.15, Ryerson and Burnham Art and
Architecture Archive.
110 “Tour of the Hilliard Homes,”, 7.
111 “Tour of the Hilliard Homes,”, 7.
112 “Tour of the Hilliard Homes,”, 7.
140
would be “used by the older folks in assisting the youngsters’ staging of pageants, plays, and
other performances.”113
The spatial and visual proximity of senior housing to the outdoor recreational areas also
assisted in maintaining order and safety. As in most subsidized housing projects, safety was a
central concern for the housing authority and a widely accepted marker of project success.114
Goldberg boasted of Hilliard’s reputation as the “only public housing in the city of Chicago that
has never required uniformed police to keep order.”115 And while the CHA and Goldberg were
quick to credit the project’s design for this achievement, its roots can likely be traced to tenant
selection. The project’s high status meant that the office of the CHA could select from a wide
pool of residents and only admitted tenants who came recommended for good behavior from
previous landlords, minimizing the likelihood of troublesome tenants.116 The racial breakdown of
the project in its early years is more difficult to determine. Some articles claimed that the project
“successfully attracted white tenants to the Negro section of the South Side.”117 Others reported
that while CHA asked eligible white families from across Chicago to consider Hilliard, not one
accepted.118 At the same time, early reports noted that white elderly found the project much more
113 “2 ‘Marina City’ Edifices Planned at 22nd, State,” 4.
114 It is difficult to gauge the true success of Hilliard. After the initial investment in the project, there was
little guidance or support from the management to activate the outdoor spaces and to utilize the various
amenities. Goldberg himself lamented the lack of lighting in public areas which would support nighttime
use and the presence of social services that would provide training or supervision on how best to utilize
the public amenities. Personally invested in making the project work and well-aware that architecture
“does not stop with the walls,” Goldberg contributed an oven, a kiln, and a television for the activity
room. Nevertheless, Hilliard was the last high-rise development built on the South Side. Blum, 201-3.
115 Blum, Oral History of Bertrand Goldberg, 178.
116 Dixon, “Goldberg’s Variation on Chicago Public Housing, 26.
117 “New CHA Housing Booms Integration Hopes on South Side,” Chicago Sun Times (n.d., 1966).
118 The surveyed white families indicated being worried that their children would be harassed in a housing
project where they would be in the minority. Dixon, “Goldberg’s Variation on Chicago Public Housing,
26.
141
attractive than white families.119 Consistently, the senior housing population skewed whiter than
that of the family towers.
There is reason to believe that Hilliard was built with this assumption of racial distinction
between the senior and the family housing. In describing the residents of the family buildings,
Goldberg often employed entrenched period stereotypes as descriptors of Black families,
referring to them as “maternal societies” and “rather prolific child-bearing groups.”120 His use of
language indicates the presumption that the family buildings would be primarily inhabited by
Black residents. Conversely, his accounts of senior housing do not turn to the same
terminology.121 In announcing the plans for the ten-million-dollar housing development,
Chicago’s Mayor, Richard J. Daley commented: “This is one of the most interesting and finest of
projects. It is hoped that these unusual buildings will attract retired artists, musicians, and actors
who might share their talents with the children of the adjoining buildings.”122 The conjoining of
creative professions and retirement carried an undercurrent of assumption about the group’s
whiteness. That there was a racial dimension ascribed to this professional group is made clear by
a memory Goldberg retold of a meeting he had had with a Washington committee of public
housing experts and planners, led by PHA Commissioner Marie McGuire. The group set out to
convince Goldberg that his design was “too good for the poor” and would have been “better
119 Despite all efforts, white elderly tenants were still in the minority in the early years of the project. In
October 1966, white tenants occupied 35 out of 145 elderly units. “Goldberg’s Variation on Chicago
Public Housing,” 26.
120 Goldberg was familiar with contemporary studies in sociology on the topic of race and poverty. He
often cited studies such as Edward Hall’s The Hidden Dimension (1966) and Nathan Glazer and Daniel
Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot (1963) as evidence of his belief in the essential differences
between races and ethnicities. Blum, Oral History of Bertrand Goldberg, 192–93.
121 He does assume that the residents of senior housing would be predominantly women.
122 “2 ‘Marina City’ Edifices Planned at 22nd, State,” Chicago Daily Defender (Daily Edition), January 29,
1963, 4.
142
suited to a more artistic element of society, perhaps impoverished artists.”123 That “impoverished
artists" were not the same as the “poor,” who were elsewhere mentioned as the tenants of
primarily Black projects, gave this comment a distinctly racial undercurrent. And indeed, a
columnist for the Chicago Defender, an influential African American publication, noted: “Rumor
has it that these uniquely modern buildings (designed by the architect of Marina City) are being
used to woo white people into an integrated set-up. Question arises why can't an integrated
solution be applied to the regular “ghetto boxes” across the street, up the street and down the
street as well? Does it take special type dwellings—a form of preferential treatment—to get
whites to live with or near Negroes?”124
The factor of race dramatically changes any interpretation of the intended relationships
between the two groups in the Hilliard project.125 The elderly tenants were not only envisaged as
a wise presence and source of help due to their lifetime of experience but a white influence and
source of uplift for the Black youth. Perhaps even more so, their role was to monitor behavior.
Photographs of Hilliard by Filipino American architectural photographer Orlando Cabanban
highlight the sensation of looking that is so central to the project. Some of Cabanban’s
photographs offer framed views of Hilliard’s public areas, still under construction. One, for
instance, shows the bright view of the buildings and outdoor areas from the darkness behind the
lozenge shaped window of a senior housing living room [Figure 3.30]. The photograph
emphasizes the invisibility of the onlooker, hidden in the privacy of their apartment, who has all
123 Blum, Oral History of Bertrand Goldberg, 196.
124 “Confetti,” Chicago Defender, September 29, 1965.
125 In addition to being racialized, the overall Hilliard project was highly gendered. Goldberg often
referenced contemporary popular science literature which claimed that as many of a quarter of urban
African American families were headed by women. He was also aware of period statistics indicating that
women often outnumbered men in senior housing projects. These insights likely account for Goldberg’s
elaboration of women’s spaces such as laundry rooms and the arts and crafts room in the community
center. Blum, Oral History of Bertrand Goldberg, 203.
143
outdoor activity at their visual disposal. Cabanban took another series of photographs with a fisheye lens, artificially exaggerating the views. Perhaps the most famous of the project’s early
photographs captures a boy on a bike standing in front of one of the senior housing towers
[Figure 3.31]. While no tenants had yet moved into Hilliard, Cabanban felt compelled to insert
people into his photographs of the project. The decision to include the boy happened spur of the
moment. Cabanban, who was at the site photographing the construction “saw him riding around
and just asked him to pose.”126 In the photograph, the boy, feet planted firmly on the ground,
leans forward on his bike handles looking down intently towards the crouching photographer.
The foregrounded form of the boy blurs, directing our attention to the crisp architecture behind
him. While the boy and his bike loom over the photographer, the senior housing tower behind the
boy looms even larger, the rounded windows of the building resembling uncannily a
disembodied cluster of eyes trained on the form of the young boy. At Hilliard, the premium put
on viewing seemed to shift the burden of the surveillance of youth from law enforcement and
security details to their mothers, and even more so, to the elderly residents of the senior housing.
When public housing in the United States went on the defensive against increasing
attacks from both critics and activists, instead of folding entirely it began targeting what was
perceived as a much less contentious group: low-income older people. Investment in the welfare
of the elderly was perceived as a mark of the benevolent state. Interventions into senior housing
were a way to honor the past contributions of older citizens and to showcase internationally the
country’s generosity to those needful of care. Less overtly, senior housing was also a moderating
force in the increasingly uniform landscape of the subsidized housing project. It sought to
126 Lee Bey, “From UIC To Marina City, Architecture Photographer Orlando Cabanban Brings Chicago
into Focus,” Chicago Sun Times, June 3, 2023.
144
balance the population of neighborhoods, both in terms of age and race. Mid-century senior
housing transcended decision-making at the level of architecture and contributed to the social
engineering of entire neighborhoods.
The architecture of senior housing proposes tentative answers to the question of the value
that senior citizens brought to the American city of the second half of the twentieth century.
Much of the discussion revolved around the spaces older people were meant to inhabit and the
relationship between these spaces and the surrounding communities. As in the design of nursing
homes and homes for the aging, some architects drew from disengagement theory, asserting that
a voluntary withdrawal from active involvement in society is a natural consequence of aging and
should be reflected in architecture. Other architects questioned these beliefs and suggested novel
ways that older people could contribute to the building of a strong public sphere. They suggested
that, instead of their value as citizens arising from consumption or political engagement—ideas
that other chapters explore—their participation in public space was a crucial element of healthy,
thriving cities and communities.
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Chapter 3 Adventures in Group Living: Grey Gables, Sun City, and the
Architecture of Retirement
According to company lore, the story of the American Association of Retired Persons,
better known as AARP, begins as a story about housing. As Director of Welfare for the
California Retired Teachers Association, AARP’s soon-to-be founder, Ethel Percy Andrus, was
entrusted with making house calls to retired teachers. On a Saturday morning in 1946, Andrus
received a tip about a former teacher who was ill and needed assistance. Yet, when Andrus tried
the door of the bungalow at the address she was given, no one responded. A neighbor suggested
that she might instead be looking for the old woman living in a chicken coop at the back of the
property. For the remainder of her career, Andrus frequently recalled the moment of knocking on
the sagging door of the windowless shed and witnessing the woman’s embarrassment as she
attempted to slip through the door without alerting the visitor of her humiliating circumstances.
The teacher’s story, Andrus knew, was significant in its ubiquity. The old woman was
unmarried, a common occurrence given California’s long-term marriage bar (a married woman
could not hold a full-time job), and she had no children. The money she had saved in her youth
to buy land was lost during the Depression. And while California did offer a teacher’s pension, it
averaged at about $40 a month, a woefully inadequate sum.1 For Andrus, the chicken coop
became the ultimate symbol of the indignity women teachers suffered in their old age. In
response, Andrus took it upon herself to “restore dignity,” first to the retired teacher, and then to
retirees in general.2
1 Today, this would approximate $650 per month.
2 Like other parties who took a professional interest in aging (see Chapter One), Andrus was preoccupied
with the question of dignity in old age. Andrus understood dignity as both an individual quality (during
her time at Hull House she was struck by the “innate dignity” of immigrants) and a result of social
circumstances. Andrus believed that for many teachers dignity and social status were conferred by their
146
Since she saw aging as a spatial, in addition to an economic issue, Andrus did not stop at
the efforts to increase pensions and provide other forms of monetary support to retirees. For her,
housing was an essential part of what she considered a successful retirement. Grey Gables, the
retirement community she founded in Ojai in 1953, was designed as a material manifestation of
her vision of retirement. It was an experiment in “building a new world” that would allow both
for self-sufficiency and community, as a harbor for those who did not have traditional networks
of support. Predominantly occupied by unmarried older women, Grey Gables was a space of
feminine intimacy and care, a found family that ran counter to expectations of a normative
nuclear family that necessitated a masculine presence. It was a space where aging women were
made visible, rebuffing the expectations that they were to retreat from the public realm and
recede into the background.3 These women saw their value as arising not from their reproductive
or domestic contributions, but from an investment in bringing about a better future through their
involvement in local causes. They also eschewed outside care, since proving their “elegant selfsufficiency” and independence from public aid was the basis on which they declared their value.
Above all, Grey Gables was a political statement. It was presented to the membership of the
National Retired Teachers Association (NRTA), AARP, and the wider American public as the
solution to congregate housing in retirement.4
As she was developing this new identity for old age, Andrus had to contend with the
deeply ingrained stereotypes of frailty and dependance, which were perceived as the unavoidable
profession, which made their loss in retirement even more distressing. She hoped to reinstate dignity
through supporting the financial and social independence of retired teachers. Housing played a key role in
this process.
3 “Grey Gables,” NRTA Journal, September 1955, 16.
4 As perhaps the first self-supporting, continuing care retirement communities (CCRC) and a key NRTA
and AARP project, Grey Gables suggested a future of retirement living. Today, CCRCs are one of the
most popular and widespread living options for older people, yet the role and significance of Grey Gables
in this history has remained unexplored.
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conclusion to the aging process. In staking a claim to the social relevance of retired Americans
and their continuing contributions to society, Andrus elaborated the visual culture of what would
soon become known as the “young-old” or the “third age.” In amplifying the voice of the “third
age,” Andrus and AARP solidified the idea of “the fourth age” as the dreaded state of helpless
otherness.
Architecture played an important role here, too. In materializing her vision of old age in
the form of a retirement community, Andrus had to contend with the most prominent model of
architecture catering to an infirm old age, that of the nursing home. In its design, Grey Gables
purposefully distanced itself from the nursing home model, by encouraging individualization and
suppressing institutional surveillance. Unlike other buildings constructed for aging in the postwar
period, Grey Gables was contrarian and intentionally unsympathetic to the ailments of old age.
Multiple floors, uneven paths, and dim lighting minimized the ability of the designed
environment to offer physical assistance to a disabled body. Instead, these features, Andrus
believed, could promote independence and better health. Grey Gables, as one of the earliest
attempts to envision an architecture of the third age, emphasized the mobility of its residents and
their intertwinement with the surrounding community. It made the lives of its residents available
to the gaze of both Ojai, through the permeable membrane of its grounds, and the wider public,
by disseminating the images of the residents’ everyday lives through a series of publications.
Andrus’s perspective on aging proved highly influential. Soon, a new crop of retirement
communities took up the cause of elaborating the concept of the third age. Among these, one the
most successful was Sun City, built by developer Del E. Webb in 1960. Unlike Grey Gables, Sun
City created a clear boundary between the retirement community and the surrounding urban
fabric. It also replaced political engagement with personal indulgence. Yet Grey Gables and Sun
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City shared a commitment to severing associations between old age and disability. While Sun
City homes included accessibility features, the community’s marketers hid their existence. Sun
City avoided even the image of the domestic interior, replacing it with visions of outdoor space
carefully organized to facilitate the experience of active aging, separating older people from a
world that continually devalued their existence.
While they differed in their definition of the third age and in designing its associated
architecture, Grey Gables and Sun City both offered the fantasy of a utopian space of aging and
divorced the process of aging from physical and mental disability. The third age became
associated with a distinct class (middle), race (white), and physical and mental ability (ablebodied). In short order, its members established themselves as an influential political and
consumer category. Instead of reframing how value was assigned to individuals in a postwar
consumer capitalist society, they instead deposited all negative associations of aging into
another, less physically and cognitively able notion of old age. As part of this process, those
unable to participate in society in such an active manner were driven ever further towards its
margins, with architecture that matched their outcast status.
Ethel Percy Andrus and the NRTA
Ethel Percy Andrus was born in San Francisco in 1884. When she was in elementary
school, her family moved to Chicago for her father’s law studies at Northwestern University.
Although there is no record of Andrus studying under John Dewey, who was a faculty member at
the time, Progressive era ideas permeated the educational environment at the University of
Chicago, where Andrus studied.5 After earning her bachelor’s degree, Andrus taught English and
5 Dewey headed University of Chicago’s philosophy department between 1894 and 1904. He also ran an
experimental elementary school, managed by the University’s philosophy department, with wife Alice.
149
German at the Lewis Institute and volunteered at Hull House, the Chicago settlement house cofounded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Andrus was greatly influenced by
Addams and stressed the link between education and social action throughout her career. In
1910, Andrus and her family moved to California, where she taught at the Santa Paula High
School before taking on the job of assistant principal at Lincoln High School in Los Angeles in
1916. A year later, she took on the principal role, as the first female secondary school principal
in California.
6 She would hold this position for the next twenty-eight years.
Soon after the chicken coop incident, Andrus founded the National Retired Teachers
Association (NRTA). As precarious as retirement was for California’s teachers, Andrus was
aware that other states made even fewer provisions for retired educators. Andrus’s primary goals
were to find an insurance company willing to offer health insurance to NRTA members, increase
pensions, establish programs that would allow retired teachers to maintain a sense of purpose,
and to address the question of housing in one’s later years. While the NRTA did not grow at the
speed that Andrus envisioned (by the founding of Grey Gables in 1954 its membership was
about 10,000), it nevertheless became an important agent of change. In the first decade of its
founding, NRTA chapters were established in every state, working on retiree-friendly legislation
on a local scale.7 In 1956, insurance protection in retirement was passed, ensuring that older
people would be able to maintain health insurance after they retired. Because the government
only had oversight over federal pensions, it could not increase state teacher pensions. Instead, in
Andrus enrolled into the philosophy department in 1900 and joined a teacher training program at the
Lewis Institute a year later, speaking to the significant influence Dewey’s ideas, if not direct personal
contact, had on Andrus.
6 While serving as the principal of Lincoln High, Andrus earned her MA in 1928 and Ph.D. in 1930, both
from the University of Southern California.
7 At its founding, NRTA had chapters in thirteen states.
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1954, it levied the requirement to pay income tax on money received in retirement.8 This left
housing as the final, and in Andrus’s opinion crucial, item on NRTA’s agenda. Since many
NRTA members were not in immediate need of group housing, Andrus felt that it might be
easier to establish a pilot project that would “demonstrate how teachers in retirement might, by
cooperative pooling of their resources, meet their housing needs” by forming a subsidiary
corporation under NRTA.9
Andrus’s life was marked by the decision to take care of her own aging parents. Her
father’s failing health was the reason behind her family’s return to California. And her mother’s
recovery prompted Andrus to retire a few months before her sixtieth birthday so she could
dedicate herself to her care. Andrus was affronted when her mother’s resident nurse suggested
Andrus delegate all caregiving to the professional. Instead, Andrus maintained that providing for
her mother and making her final years “happy, rewarding, and useful” was entirely her
responsibility.10 She would later say that the decision to care for her mother was “well worth the
sacrifice of [her] professional career.”11 Andrus’s own circumstances in old age were markedly
different. Andrus never married nor had children, and while she maintained close ties with
extended family, she balked at the prospect of requiring their care. Andrus was therefore highly
aware of the need for alternatives to family-based eldercare. She began envisioning a new type of
community, a novel space where a group of peers would come together and perform many of the
functions usually reserved for families by offering each other companionship, support, and care.
In 1953, while on a speaking tour, trying to encourage teachers to contribute money
towards a retirement home fund, Andrus came across a property in Southern California that
8 Emma Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook, 1964, 9.
9 Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook, 10-11. 10 Ibid, 7. 11 Ibid, 9.
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caught her attention as a potential site for a model retirement community. Grey Gables, as the
property was already named, was largely developed in 1949 as a teacher boarding house and
cultural and community center. It met many of the spatial and communal requirements Andrus
was only beginning to formalize. Andrus had no funds for a down payment but was confident
that, when informed of the opportunity, many teachers would jump at the chance to be a part of
this experiment. In the end, the money for the down payment came from a wealthy friend.
Andrus, for her part, tackled the administrative maze that was establishing a state-regulated
retirement home.12
More importantly, Andrus began actively promoting the community to NRTA members.
A gifted marketer, Andrus was well-aware of the capacity of media to inspire and influence. As
soon as the idea of Grey Gables solidified in her mind, Andrus used the NRTA Journal as a
platform to send out an invitation to approximately 10,000 retired teachers asking them to join
her in this endeavor.
13 She was hoping that their imagination would be sparked by what she
termed “an adventure in group living.”14 Not an issue of the NRTA Journal (and later AARP’s
Modern Maturity) went by without an update on Grey Gables. A model of the community was
prominently displayed in AARP’s pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair [Figure 4.1].
15
12 Andrus founded the Bureau of Homes as a subsidiary corporation of the NRTA and instituted a nineperson board of trustees elected by the NRTA. Management at the residence was the responsibility of a
resident trustee and a coordinator, both of whom were expected to be in residence. Policy within the
residence was worked out the by residents themselves. Grey Gables was a non-profit, life-care residence
under the license and auspices of the California State Department of Social Welfare, which ensured that
Grey Gables conformed to all local ordinances and state regulations in regards to zoning, sanitation, and
safety. The license was renewed annually as the department reviewed the financial soundness and
adequacy of care offered by Grey Gables.
13 Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook, 14.
14 That some people indeed jumped at this opportunity is evident from the words of Grey Gables’s first
historian, Emma Turner, who noted that she had mailed in her request for an application mere days after
receiving the NRTA issue.
15 Located in a cluster of pavilions that included Coca-Cola, Du Pont, and 7 UP, AARP’s pavilion
featured a large display of four seasons imagery at the entrance, followed by an exhibition of humorous
illustrations by Kurt Ard, a camera obscura, a history of NRTA and AARP’s founding, and an
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Andrus also promoted it in all her campaigns and interviews. Interest in the community went
beyond US borders. It appeared in several articles on retirement communities in Sweden and was
featured in a French magazine Troisième Age, where it was referred to it as the “first retirement
village in North America.”16 While this was inaccurate, Grey Gables maintained that it was the
first self-supporting, life-care retirement community.17
The first mention of Grey Gables appeared in the 1953 December issue of NRTA’s
quarterly.18 The eight-page inset made it clear that Andrus had a ready vision of the Grey Gables
project, although it was one that she would soon revise, replacing the initial promise of privacy
and seclusion with a push to making the residents visible and known. The three goals Andrus
highlighted at this time were “protection, privacy, and freedom,” in direct opposition to the
perceived lack of these qualities in period homes for the aged. She elaborated on these by
explaining that what she was hoping to offer residents was “security through healthcare, an
environment adapted to diverse needs, and a location that is removed from the “smoke and
confusion” of the city, all in a town that is replete with cultural and social offerings. The inset
featured images of the existing buildings, at the time named Coleman and Conneaut Hall [Figure
4.2]. The photograph of Coleman Hall shows a side view of the building, its distinctive gables,
prominent in all early advertising, creating an immediate identity for the project. The photograph
is taken at somewhat of a distance, the nearby vegetation obscuring some of the structure and
highlighting the landscaping potential. A photograph titled “view from terrace” went even
further to suggest the arcadian, unspoiled setting of Ojai valley as the community’s backyard and
informational booth for questions about retirement. A model of Grey Gables was given a central position
in the exhibition, supported by information about the community.
16 P. B., “Ojai: Ier village-retraite d’Amerique du nord,” Troisième Age, 1966, 9.
17 Craig Walker, email correspondence with author, November 11, 2022.
18 Andrus encouraged readers and potential applicants to reach out to her directly and listed the address of
her home in Glendale, which she shared with Ruth Lana and Lana’s daughter Lora Lee.
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asked the readers to envision themselves taking in this view on an everyday basis. The final
image, of Conneaut Hall, brings the architecture and landscape together once more. The building
is depicted, but at an even greater distance. The gently undulating Topatopa mountain range
frames the man-made structure, while a table and chairs are placed in the immediate foreground.
The photograph offered both a factual view of the building setting and gave space for projection
and aspiration. Grey Gables, it was suggested, was a place of immeasurable potential for a
dignified, communal life in a pastoral location.
Ojai and the Grey Gables Plan
Ojai, indeed, proved to be the perfect setting for Andrus’s group housing project.19 For
over a thousand years, the mountain-backed valley was the home of adept fishers and basket
weavers, the Chumash. When settlers sized their lands in the late eighteenth century and early
nineteenth century, the native populations were compelled to servitude at the Mission San
Buenaventura, their numbers dwindling as a result of imported infectious diseases. The
displacement of the Chumash was made official when, in 1837, the Mexican government granted
Fernando Tico close to 18,000 acres of the upper and lower Ojai Valley for the establishment of
Rancho Ojai. Tico soon sold the ranch to prospectors who also bowed out of the area when the
land proved insufficiently bountiful in oil. The area’s speculators instead pivoted towards an
investment in tourism. In 1873 R. G. Surdam developed a plan for a town in the lover valley,
naming it Nordhoff after Charles Nordhoff, the author of California for Health, Pleasure and
Residence, an influential travel book that lay the foundations for California’s claims to a healing
climate, motivating many to settle there. Nordhoff, or Ojai as it became known in 1917,
19 For a more in-depth look at Ojai’s history see: Patricia L. Fry, The Ojai Valley: An Illustrated History
(Ojai, CA: Matilija Press, 1999).
154
capitalized on these promises of a climate cure, publicizing its warm winters, mountain hot
springs, and unblemished natural beauty in an attempt to draw in wealthy visitors and settlers
from the East Coast. By the time Ojai caught the attention of Ethel Percy Andrus, it was a town
of about 4,500 that maintained its image as a pastoral haven, far away from the congestion and
pollution of Los Angeles.20 In her articles, Andrus consistently foregrounded the alleged benefits
of Ojai’s healthful climate that promised longevity and well-being.21 Having found a setting that
matched her vision, the next step was building out the community.
The first structures on the property were not designed with the retiree population in mind.
They were, however, the site of another, albeit failed, experiment in communal living. The only
building that existed in the early 1940s, a many-gabled, eight-room frame house, was purchased
in 1944 by Alee Sanford (née Barbee), a classically trained soprano who had married, and soon
divorced, an heir of the Sanford Ink Company, one of the period’s largest stationery products
manufacturers.22 Sanford, a Theosophist, had been attracted to Ojai for its proximity to the
Krotona Institute of Theosophy. She purchased a five-and-a-quarter acre subdivision of Rancho
Ojai for $14,000. Like Andrus, Sanford was invested in establishing a space owned and shared
by women. She had moved to Ojai with two of her female friends and adopted daughter Louise
and hoped to establish a cultural center and boarding house she described as a “serene and lovely
home free of daily chores.”23
Sanford redesigned Coleman Hall, a two-story stucco-finished structure, with the help of
a local builder. The design was largely Sanford’s and the project unfolded as “inspiration
20 Andrus notes its similarity to Carmel, which, incidentally, is the location of another retirement
community built with the same ideals as Grey Gables.
21 See Grey Gables articles in the NRTA Journal in the first year of the community’s founding.
22 “Mrs. Sanford Remembered as Grey Gables Architect,” Ojai Valley News, 1964, 70.
23 Sanford had moved to Ojai with Maria Louise Redfield, who passed in 1948, and Jane Webster. Freda
Dunning, “Teacher Recalls Grey Gables Beginnings,” Ojai Valley News, January 17, 1987.
155
occurred.” This meant that Sanford added new spaces around existing rooms, each room
different than the others in size and layout. This additive design approach also meant that inner
rooms often did not have any windows.24 With its meandering layouts and prominent gables,
Coleman Hall maintained the picturesque air of a Victorian boarding house. In addition to
apartments, the Hall featured a lounge, dining rooms, and an office. Sanford’s seemingly endless
streams of cash made possible the constant revisions and additions and upwards of thirty skilled
craftspeople present on site at any given time.25 In 1948, she added another building to the
grounds. Conneaut Hall was an apartment building with a library, music room, and concert hall
on the top floor, the three-story structure connected by Ojai’s first elevator [Figure 4.3].
Sanford was known as an exceedingly generous eccentric. She allowed access to her rare
books library, which included a formidable selection of theosophist and occult material, and
displayed her collection of sixteenth-century art across the public spaces of the two buildings. At
the same time, she exerted dictatorial control over resident comportment, attire, and activities.
Insisting on fostering a communal atmosphere, Sanford refused to include kitchens in the
apartments. Instead, meals, which were provided to tenants free of charge, were served in the
dining room. Sanford not only failed to charge her tenants for meals but refused to take any
money for rent or utilities. Unsurprisingly, her free spending caught up with her and she was
forced to sell the property just as it was about to be foreclosed upon. Sanford was adamant about
selling to someone who understood her vision and found a worthy successor in the form of Ethel
Percy Andrus.
24 This issue would prove expensive for Andrus to fix, as it did not meet fire code. Jim Brown, “I Just
Found Out: The Real Estate Brokers Are Sad,” Star-Free Press, July 2, 1953, 2.
25 Jim Brown, “I Just Found Out: The Real Estate Brokers Are Sad,” 2.
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In her plans, Andrus was even more ambitious than Sanford, continuing to expand Grey
Gables by building nine structures over the course of the 1950s and 60s.
26 The organic growth of
the community is evidenced by its fragmented plan. Coleman and Conneaut Hall, now known as
South and North Hall (to avoid “the suggestion of co-eds in big dormitories”), marked the southeast portion of the grounds [Figure 4.4].
27 The multi-story gabled buildings built by Sanford were
soon joined by clusters of low apartment buildings [Figures 4.5 and 4.6]. Six months after
purchasing Grey Gables, Andrus annexed Sycamore Lodge to the west, a one-story motel with
an attached pool and hobby shop [Figure 4.7]. In 1956-57, she added a series of single-story
apartment buildings (Gateway Lodge, Hillside, and Mountain View) to the northern perimeter of
the property [Figure 4.8]. Meadow View and Rose Terrace followed in 1957-58 in the western
section [Figure 4.9]. Design-wise, the new apartments were markedly different from the original
buildings. Low and unassuming, the complexes clustered small, attached bungalows in barshaped groups with shared porches or gardens in the front and large picture windows or sliding
glass doors in the back. While the exact layout varied between apartments, the overall
configuration was similar. The buildings all housed efficiency apartments, with a living-bedroom
combination, or one-bedroom units. Over the course of a decade of building, the apartment
clusters created a ring around a central parking lot [Figure 4.10 and 4.11]. The large lot broke up
the cohesion of the grounds but played a prominent symbolic role as the connective tissue,
linking Grey Gables to the world outside the community. The starkness of the parking lot was
embellished through landscaping, most prominently a substantial rose garden.
26 After concluding the initial expansion, Andrus restricted the growth of Grey Gables, keeping resident
numbers under 100 in an effort to maintain “a home-like atmosphere without the regimentation that
becomes necessary when serving great numbers” in places that are “almost cities in themselves.” “Grey
Gables,” NRTA Journal, September 1961, 16.
27 Emma Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook, 60.
157
After all the nooks and crannies of the lot were filled, Grey Gables grew beyond the
confines of the original town block. In 1959, NRTA and AARP offices moved into a new
building on the other side of N. Montgomery St. The Acacias nursing home also opened in 1959,
across Grand Ave, and expanded in 1967. That same year, an intermediate care unit named the
Andrus Apartments rounded off the project on the same block as the Acacias.
While William B. Wade, a little-known architect who mostly worked on modest,
residential projects, was the architect of record for the projects, the expansion and design of Grey
Gables was largely Andrus’s undertaking. Many photographs show Andrus and Wade at work,
with Andrus relaying her expectations of the project. She was adamant in defining what Grey
Gables would not represent. She definitively distanced it from associations of a “rest home” or
an “old folks home,” and aspired to develop congregate housing without an institutional air.
Sanford’s unorthodox room designs now proved advantageous, as Andrus emphasized how each
apartment was unique, with no two layouts alike. Andrus must have hoped that the
differentiation in the design of the space would speak to how the administration of Grey Gables
perceived its residents, as unique individuals with distinctive personalities, wants, and needs.
Andrus demanded similar variety in the new apartments. Absent were double-loaded corridors,
no layout was the same, some apartments had balconies while others were surrounded by patios,
and features rarely deemed necessary in nursing homes, such as large windows and closets, were
made prominent.
Grey Gables is not immediately visually striking. However, its economy of form was
purposeful. While this chapter will demonstrate the privileges that undergirded the founding and
the functioning of this community, showy luxury was distinctly absent from its outward
appearance. Instead, the architecture of Grey Gables is modest, efficient, and inexpensive, in line
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with the overall trends of mass residential housing in the postwar period.28 Absent is the glamour
of the hospitality industry, another solution to old-age housing which increasingly beckoned
wealthy retirees.29 In particular, wealthy older women who could not or chose not to live with
family, often retired to luxury hotels as a way to receive care while avoiding the standard
medicalized setting of old-age facilities.30 Grey Gables offered another option for the future
architecture for aging, one that did not rely on outward ostentation.31 There was another, more
prosaic reason for the humble architecture of Grey Gables. In order for the community to
maintain support, it was crucial to convey to NRTA members that the association used its funds
sensibly and conservatively.
Organizationally, Grey Gables was structured as a club-type, self-sustaining, non-profit
home for group living. The cost of the building was divided among the possible residents, with
apartment prices within range of their retirement benefits. Life-lease prices were established
28 The rationing of materials and the dearth of skilled labor during World War II led to significant
innovation across numerous industries. After the war, developers applied these new technologies to the
building industry as the ensuing economization of constructions processes allowed for cheaper, more
standardized construction. In doing so, developers both capitalized on the urgent need for housing and
manufactured an even greater desire for home-ownership as a marker of success, personal identity, and
citizenship. Elaine B. Stiles, “No Simple Dwelling: Design, Politics, and the Mid-Twentieth-Century
American Economy House,” Buildings & Landscapes 26, no. 1 (2019): 73–93,
https://doi.org/10.5749/buildland.26.1.0073; Isenstadt, The Modern American House; Kenneth T.
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, USA, 1985).
29 For an in-depth analysis on the role of glamour in mid-century architecture see Friedman, American
Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture. 30 The Mather Home for Aged Ladies in Evanston, Illinois, was a notable example of this type of postwar
old age housing. It featured a wide array of recreational facilities “for keeping the ladies occupied,” in
addition to a medical suite overseen by the Northwestern University Medical School. “Building Types
Study Number 214: Buildings for the Aged,” Architectural Record, September 1954, 185–208.
31 In the absence of architectural bells and whistles, the glamour at Grey Gables was provided by the
landscape and interior decoration. An article on a new phase of constructions centered the landscape
instead of the buildings themselves, proclaiming: “you will thrill with pride at the beauty you see about
you.” But this beauty is in the “colorful flower gardens, winding paths, spacious lanais” and, above all,
“the Topa Topa range, seemingly your nearest neighbor.” In contrast, the new buildings themselves were
described as merely “charming.”
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according to floor area, view, and apartment desirability, with prices varying between $4000 and
$8500. Residents were given copies of floor plans from which they chose the apartment that they
wished to occupy. Monthly care was computed on the basis of one employee for every three
residents and included medical services and food costs.32 From its inception, Andrus hoped to
establish an endowment fund from gifts and bequests, which would allow admittance to “men
and women of good character who have served as teachers but lack the funds for the lifetime
lease.”33 It does not appear that this plan was ever implemented.
Living Together and the Ethos of Care
Grey Gables officially opened on September 1, 1954, with twelve founding residents,
who would later be referred to as the “pioneers” or “founders.” The first to begin moving in were
Andrus herself and her friend Ruth Lana, who was appointed the community’s coordinator.
Another acquaintance, Emma M. Turner soon joined, followed by eight other former teachers
over the course of the next six months. Many of these early residents were Andrus and Lana’s
friends and acquaintances, harkening back to their time in Chicago.34 The community catered to
retired teachers between sixty and eighty years old. Applicants were eligible if they had worked
in education for over ten years. Aside from teachers, school administrators and general
practitioners in the field of education were encouraged to apply. Andrus boasted that residents
came from alma maters as distinguished as Harvard, Vassar, the Sorbonne, University of Berlin,
and University of California at Berkeley. While admissions policy stressed that Grey Gables was
32 The fees for board, general care, and cleaning were payable monthly in advance. The fee also included
general cleaning, but daily cleaning was the responsibility of members. A nurse was present on site five
days a week.
33 “Grey Gables,” NRTA Quarterly, December 1953, 5.
34 Of the first twelve residents five were from Chicago, four from California, two from Cincinnati, and
one from Philadelphia.
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operated on a non-discriminatory basis, “according equal treatment and access to services
without regard to race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry,” the resident pool was
homogeneous.35 Demographically, the residents were overwhelmingly white Christian women of
some means.
Grey Gables also accepted life companions, understood broadly, as long as they met age,
health, financial, and social requirements. Applications materials called for “friendly, congenial,
gracious folks of culture, imagination, and common general social interests,” who possessed a
zest for life and easily got along with others.36 A personal interview in Ojai or in Washington
D.C. (given Andrus’s increased involvement in government lobbying for retiree causes) was
required to insure “congeniality and compatibility with already existing residents.”37 While the
requirements were exacting and the application process rigorous, once a resident was admitted
they were considered a part of the Grey Gables family. The residents referred to each other as
such and considered Lora Lee Lana, Ruth Lana’s teenage daughter, as “our child.”38 The
relationship between the residents was framed in familial, or even romantic terms. “The test of
whether a person is acceptable here is a simple question,” Lana told a reporter, “Would you like
to sit across the table from him the rest of your life at breakfast?”39 The use of the word “he” to
refer to Grey Gables residents in all public-facing materials was pervasive. Photographs
depicting Grey Gables also presented a highly distorted image of the community demographics.
For instance, an image accompanying a September 1958 NRTA Journal article shows five
35 “Grey Gables Admission Policy,” Manual of Policy and Resident Procedures (Ojai: Grey Gables,
1954), 1.
36 “Grey Gables Admission Policy,” Manual of Policy and Resident Procedures, 1.
37 Ibid, 1.
38 Emma Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook, 58.
39 Richard G. Hubler, “Gowing Old Can Be Graceful,” Woman’s Day, 96B.
161
women and four men posing behind a table in the community’s garden.
40 At the time, only four
men resided at Grey Gables out of a total of sixty-six residents. Over the course of the first ten
years, 123 people joined the Grey Gables group and, consistently, men made up less than a
quarter of the resident population.41 The first ten years skewed even more female, with only
seven men to eighty-six women. Not only were there few men, but most of the resident women
were unmarried or widowed. More than two-thirds of the initial twenty residents had never
married, and the remaining third was widowed or divorced at the time of joining. Over time that
scale changed, with about half married and half single at the point when the community reached
50 residents five years in.42
This statistic is not unexpected, given that in the first half of the twentieth century it was
not uncommon for college-educated women to remain unmarried. This only began to change
towards the mid-century period, when over ninety percent of women graduates married, in
contrast with fifty percent at the beginning of the twentieth century, the period when Grey
Gables residents were pursuing their degrees.43 Even among other professional women, teachers
were often the least likely to marry, as their positions were often subject to formal or informal
marriage bars. Yet, teaching remained an appealing profession because it was often seen as the
most appropriate and respectable source of paid employment for women. And while unmarried
working women had been the subject of intense debate and social anxiety in the late nineteenth
40 “Grey Gables,” NRTA Journal, September 1958, 33.
41 Over those ten years, eleven residents withdrew voluntarily.
42 “Roster of Residents During the First Decade,” Grey Gables Scrapbook, 1964.
43 Even at mid-century, many did not maintain a professional career after marriage. Barbara M. Solomon,
In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
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and early twentieth centuries, the profession of teaching, seen as a proxy motherhood, proved to
be least objectionable.44
Framing teaching as a profession of care helped justify the development of a pension
system. Karen Leroux examines how late nineteenth-century activists drew on both associations
of public servant patriotism and the mothering work of teachers in advocating for the
establishment of pensions. On the one hand, these activists assumed a masculinist rhetoric and
framed teacher pensions as recognition of a nation’s gratitude for public service like that of
policemen, firefighters, and those retiring from military service. Yet, conversations around
pensions commonly invoked an image of an elderly woman (similar to Andrus’s chicken coopdwelling teacher) who not only pursued a profession that required sacrifice in the form of a long,
underpaid career, but who denied herself the life of a wife and a mother in order to perform an
essential service of unmeasurable value to the community. In turn, the activists argued, the
community abandoned her in old age, when she could no longer provide for herself and had no
family to support her.45 The invocation of a teacher’s mothering was also a response to critiques
that childless citizens were parasites feeding off the pension system, which relied on the steady
influx of new generations of workers.
Andrus’s efforts as part of the NRTA were in line with the long history of teacher mutual
aid associations, wherein the profession took on the care of ill and poor retirees. Yet Andrus
attempted another solution to the problem. Not only did she fight for pensions, but she also
provided a space where a retired teacher would be able to live out their remaining years happily
44 Karen Leroux, “‘Unpensioned Veterans’: Women Teachers and the Politics of Public Service in the
Late-Nineteenth-Century United States,” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 1 (2009): 34–62.
45Leroux, 43.
163
and productively. Grey Gables attempted to re-envision the course of old age, its physical
setting, its demographics, and even its social experience.
Inadvertently, it also offered an alternative interpretation of mid-century domesticity.
Domesticity is framed here as both an ideology, understood as a system of beliefs prescribing a
normative way of making a household and being within a house, and a performance that is
dynamic, flexible, and mediated by objects. Understood this way, ideology offers a socially
determined script that is then enacted on an everyday basis and individual scale. The script is
nonetheless open to interpretation and therefore it can be followed, rejected, supplemented, or
subverted. Crucially, the domestic also has a spatial and material dimension. Because the
material and social are entangled and mutually informing, it bears attending to how Andrus and
the Grey Gables residents manipulated objects and navigated spaces and, in turn, remade
domesticity to serve their needs.46
Queering Domesticity at Grey Gables
Domesticity, a crucial theme of postwar American ideology, has been extensively
documented and analyzed. In this context, the home was framed, almost universally, as the space
of the nuclear family. This hegemonic entity was made up of narrowly defined identities of
husband/father, wife/mother, and children, each with their assigned gender roles. An intricately
choreographed interaction between people and objects within the household made up the image
of family that was broadcast publicly. This family ideal was solidified through government
initiatives, media portrayals, and people duly performing assigned scripts. As Elaine Tyler May
46 For theoretical works that underpin the argument see: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
(Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1988).Certeau; Miller, Stuff; Dolores Hayden, The
Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and
Cities (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1981).
164
highlighted, the consuming nuclear family was given oversized attention and importance in part
to act as a bulwark against the threat of socialism, as a political tool for promoting the American
way of life.47 Beatriz Colomina expanded on how the images of the domestic were militarized as
part of Cold War efforts and Greg Castillo argued how home goods exhibitions served as
propaganda through “idealized domestic settings [that] lent physical and emotional immediacy to
abstract ideological concepts.”48 Furthermore, Lynn Spigel demonstrated the role of television as
a medium in shaping the ideological construct of the postwar nuclear family.49
In a world that was structured around a nuclear family, the aging single woman posed a
unique challenge to normative images of domesticity. In many ways, the societal expectation
was that old age, and particularly that of older unmarried women, would unfold elsewhere, out of
sight. The concentration of older unmarried women had such a social stigma that the town of
Ojai initially expressed reluctance to approve Andrus’s purchase of the property. In the end, the
town only granted its approval when Grey Gables was deemed a better steward of the property
than the other interested party, Alcoholics Anonymous.50 This skepticism on the side of the local
community further stoked Andrus’s commitment to proving the continuing value of old age.
As Steven Vider has shown in Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of
Domesticity after World War II, the domestic was not only a space of oppression and forced
conformity to heteronormative values but also a site of possibility, safety, and agency.51 It
47 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic
Books, 2008).
48 Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007). Greg Castillo, Cold War
on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010)., xviii.
49 Spigel, Make Room for TV. 50 Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook, 23. 51 Stephen Vider, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World
War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
165
offered room for negotiation and resistance. Domesticity as enacted at the Grey Gables was
decidedly political. Grey Gables was designed as a stage for the performance of bodies that were
heretofore expected to retreat away from the public eye. Andrus, in contrast, put them front and
center. Grey Gables was a space to re-envision the meanings of domesticity, privacy, and the
source and object of care.
This alternative domesticity played out on an everyday basis. At its core was a subtle
dismantling of the idea of private possession. While Andrus wanted to highlight a general sense
of ownership of the space, Grey Gables did not conform to the typical postwar tract housing
projects with clearly marked property lines. The apartments, Andrus noted, were “his property,”
but they were “bought for him by its residents and dedicated to the use of his association in
perpetuity.”52 The home was both an individual property and a part of something larger. The
blurring of the boundaries between lots and houses was clearly visible in the design of the
property. Instead of detached housing, Andrus preferred clusters of apartments connected to one
another, which made it difficult to distinguish where one home ended and another began. This
boundary was further muddled by shared patios and decks and by the practices of residents who
gardened across lots. Instead of closed-off yards, only accessible to those invited, the gardens
here were enjoyed by all, residents and visitors alike.
This sense of joint ownership of Grey Gables’ space was present from the very
beginning. Emma Turner noted in her history of Grey Gables that distinguishing between group
and individual living in the community’s first decade was hardly straightforward.53 She credited
this emphasis on the shared ownership of the space and group living to the excitement of starting
52 “Grey Gables,” NRTA Journal, March 1955, 10.
53 Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook, 52.
166
something new by the pioneering group of residents.54 The women’s private lives spilled over
into the shared spaces of the community. They often brought in furniture from their previous
households to decorate the common rooms, making these public spaces more intimate. Lana and
Andrus donated a grandfather clock, tablecloths, and a portrait of Swedish opera singer Jenny
Lind which hung above the television in the library. Residents often equipped the common areas
with functional items such as fans, clocks, and sports equipment. They also supplied decorative
items such as chandeliers, rugs, and mirrors. At the community’s annual party, all residents
would donate various items such as punch bowls, draperies, and movie projectors.55 Through the
residents’ objects, a patchwork shared domestic space was created.
Personalization was part of Andrus’s design for Grey Gables. For $500 the individual
apartments could come furnished, but she encouraged residents to bring in their own furniture,
which all of them did. For Andrus, this conveyed the administration’s commitment to allow
residents to maintain control of their environment and establish continuity with their previous
lives. Even more importantly, it was another way to distinguish Grey Gables from nursing homes
and other institutional settings that prohibited residents from bringing in personal furniture and
larger items for fear of contagion or unhygienic clutter. Perhaps unexpectedly, Grey Gables
residents seemed more likely to furnish public rather than private spaces with objects of
sentimental value, such as family heirlooms, art, and ceramics. For instance, the carved mantel in
the dining room came from the Cincinnati home of the grandparents of one of the residents and
another donated a painting that had been in her family for generations. In particular, the residents
shared their good dishes and tablecloths for entertaining. At a time when women were judged
54 Ibid.
55 “Grey Gables Fetes its Eleventh Birthday,” Ojai Valley News, September 1965.
167
based on their ability to host, the women at Grey Gables created an environment in which they
shared in the practice and responsibility of entertaining guests.
For Andrus, Grey Gables was an opportunity to envision a more fulfilling domesticity.
As she indicated in a poem she performed at 1959 Christmas breakfast, Andrus desired to create
a residence “freed from mounting tasks and duties, the routine of the household.”56 Instead, the
residents would be able “to grow rich in spiritual values; to make time, formerly their master,
now their willing and rewarding servant.”57 Grey Gables was often framed as a respite from
household drudgery, given that “in everyone’s life there comes a time when one wants to be
relieved of household chores.”58
The making of home at Grey Gables went beyond the acts and objects of entertaining and
presenting one’s own family to outsiders, it went beyond the tools of cleaning and tidying that
display one’s ability to run a household. Domesticity was also about the unfolding of care and
the maintaining of relationships. While Andrus insisted that “most folks do not wish to be
beholden to a friend or relative,” she was aware that living alone came with difficult challenges.
“With high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, a touchy ‘ticker,’ or some other ill that flesh
is heir to,” she wondered if it was really “wise and prudent for one to live alone.”59 Grey Gables
56 Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook.
57 Ibid.
58 This communal participation in cooking, cleaning, entertaining, and even childrearing (in the form of
mentoring Ruth Lana’s daughter) resembles the ideas espoused by material feminists, a group of women
who campaigned for paid domestic work, communal kitchens and childcare, and more technologically
sophisticated domestic environments in the second half of the 19th century. However, there is no record
indicating whether Andrus considered this release from household drudgery a political statement and a
response to the exploitation of women’s domestic labor or whether she sought to minimize domestic work
so the residents could dedicate their time to what she perceived as more valuable, public-facing work. For
more information about material feminists see Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of
Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. For full Andrus quote see “Grey
Gables… an Invitation to a Retirement Paradise,” clipping from unknown newspaper in Grey Gables
Scrapbook, 1964, 44.
59 “Grey Gables of California,” NRTA Journal, September 1954, 7.
168
“gathered [these people] into a family that was equally dedicated to their best interests and
welfare.”60 Professional presence, too, was not made invisible, as was (and often still is) the case
in non-medical eldercare settings. Instead, the community’s cooks, housekeepers, and
landscapers were all profiled in the NRTA Journal and presented as a part of the community.61
At the same time, the boundaries between staff and residents were blurred. In the early years of
the community, Ruth Lana, officially the community’s coordinator, would often double as a cook
and Andrus would switch between her NRTA responsibilities and moving around furniture in the
lounge “to a better place an appraising eye had discovered for it.”62 Domesticity was a shared
endeavor as women took on household management and certain housekeeping responsibilities on
an individual basis. These included flower-arranging throughout the public spaces, distributing
linens, mail, and newspapers, bird care, and making the radio and television schedule. The
responsibilities went beyond the bounds of the community, as some women took over the role of
representing Grey Gables at the Ojai council and commission hearings.
When the residents got word that Sycamore Lodge, a nearby one-story building which
had been built by Alee Sanford but sold off before Grey Gables, would come on the market, they
jumped at the chance to make the lodge “a part of the family home again.”63 That very night, two
residents, Mrs. Hurtt and Mrs. Hughes, crossed the fence that surrounded the property and
surreptitiously took measurements, while Miss Neil, who had “gained some architectural knowhow in Honolulu,” made blueprints of the building. As the resident historian would later recall:
60 Dinsdale Walker, Grey Gables: An Appreciation (Ojai: Grey Gables), I.
61 “Living at Grey Gables,” NRTA Journal, June 1957, 18-10.
62 Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook.
63 Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook, 58.
169
“The year would end before Grey Gables might have a male resident to do it, but no male could
have done it any better.”64
The absence of men at Grey Gables, the residents’ shared life experiences, spatial
proximity, and lack of familial relations fostered feelings of mutual affection. The overall social
context was one of homosocial intimacy. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has argued that prior to the
twentieth century American society was one of separate spheres, where women’s lives largely
revolved around other women—their mothers, sisters, and networks of friends—while men were
relegated to the sidelines. These long-lived intimate female relationships were marked by intense
emotional expression and uninhibited physical contact, scaffolded by rituals (as women aided
each other through birth, marriage, and family deaths), and lasted undiminished throughout the
women’s lives.65 Over the course of the twentieth century, “cultural taboos evolved to cut short
homosocial ties […] and impel women towards heterosexual relationships.”66 Grey Gables is a
continuation of these Victorian mores in a world that was increasingly pressuring the
transference of intense relationships between women to husbands and the nuclear family. The
architecture of Grey Gables gave structure to the unfolding of these relationships.
Architectural history has long been interested in locating queerness in the built
environment.67 On the one hand, queer analysis often begins from identity, with the proposition
64 Ibid, 60.
65 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in
Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (1975): 27,
https://doi.org/10.1086/493203.
66 Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in NineteenthCentury America,” 27.
67 See: Alice T. Friedman, "People Who Live in Glass Houses: Edith Farnsworth, Ludwig Mies Van Der
Rohe, and Philip Johnson," in Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural
History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998); Katarina Bonnevier, "A Queer Analysis of Eileen Gray's
E.1027," in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, ed. Hilde
Heynen and Gulsum Baydar (London & New York: Routledge, 2005); Annmarie Adams, "Sex and the
Single Building: The Weston Havens House, 1941-2001," Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the
170
that spaces designed for gay, lesbian, and transgender clients are inherently queer. In this sense
queer space is concrete and queer biography is written into the material environment.68 On the
other hand, architectural historians have also posited that certain designs themselves are at odds
with the normative and therefore carry within themselves the potential of being queer. Through
their rejection, opposition, and subversion of hegemonic structures, these spaces allow for, and
even encourage, alternative ways of being. Queer space is therefore elusive, since it is, by
definition, contingent on an oppositional relationship to the normative. It is ineffable, fluid,
dissonant.69 Broadly, architectural historians often locate queerness in the tension between the
private and the public as the designers and clients are seen negotiating secrecy and invisibility
with public spectacle.70 If we understand queerness in its broadest form, as "whatever is at odds
with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant,” Grey Gables is most certainly a queer space.71 I
posit that queer space is not only about certain organizational qualities of the space, for instance
in the nonhierarchical arrangement of bedrooms, or select spatial features—notably the closet.
Vernacular Architecture Forum 17, no. 1 (2010); Timothy M. Rohan, "Public and Private Spectacles /
Paul Rudolph: Casa Rudolph, New York 1977-1997," Casabella 63, no. 673/674 (1999).
68 Alice T. Friedman, “Hiding in Plain Sight: Love, Life and the Queering of Domesticity in Early
Twentieth-Century New England,” Home Cultures 12, no. 2 (2015): 139–167. It is difficult to make
claims regarding the sexual orientation of the women who resided at Grey Gables. Andrus’s own sexual
orientation has not been explored. Andrus lived with Ruth Lana for many years following Lana’s divorce.
In the media, Lana was alternatively referred to as Andrus’s closest friend, long-time companion, and
foster sister. Lana’s daughter was called her adopted daughter or niece. Lana and Andrus first lived
together in Glendale before moving to Grey Gables, then Washington D.C., and finally Long Beach,
where Andrus passed away in 1967. At Grey Gables, the two never had a dedicated apartment but moved
around based on available rooms. After Andrus’s death, condolences were sent to her family—Ruth Lana
and her daughter.
69 While these are two distinct frameworks for defining queer space, in practice they are often conflated;
the owners’ identity is seen as guiding the design and the design guiding the embodied experience of
inhabiting.
70 Others have found evidence of queer space in the presence of high design, a predilection for renovation,
and the engagement with the past. More abstractly, queer spaces are also often seen to espouse a
theatrical, camp sensibility. (See Christopher Reed, “Imminent Domain.” Art Journal (New York.
1960) 55, no. 4 [1996]: 64–70.)
71 David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), 63.
171
Queer spaces are ones that would become sites of friction if attempted to be inhabited in a more
normative way. When Grey Gables was a boarding house for teachers, many bridled at the
limitations of its architecture. Mothers noted how limited they felt without easy access to a
kitchen and children claimed to be embarrassed to bring their friends over.72 From its inception,
the design of Grey Gables could not successfully house a traditional family. Yet, it worked
exceptionally well for Grey Gables elderly, and mostly female residents, releasing the women
from expectations of performative domesticity and easing the reciprocal exchange of care.
From the community’s founding, Andrus promised Grey Gables residents privacy. It can
be illustrative to compare Grey Gables to perhaps the most widespread age and gendersegregated congregate housing type, the college dormitory.73 Even before women began
attending co-ed college in greater numbers, the housing unit was a critical site for the teaching of
moral values. As Carla Yanni illustrates in Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the
American Dormitory, men’s residence halls, which were housed in entryway dormitories,
allowed students direct access to the outside, Women’s dorms, on the other hand, featured
double-loaded corridors and resident house mothers who were tasked with monitoring entrances.
Under the guise of protecting virtue, these spaces controlled and stymied women’s movement
within the space of the college campus. Unlike dormitories, which many of the Grey Gables
residents would have remembered from their own youth, this new form of congregate housing
raised few of the same concerns. The increased freedom that the design of Grey Gables offered
its residents suggested that their virtue did not need to be protected in much the same way as that
of younger unmarried women.
72 “Excerpts taken from letters written by one of the founders and builders of the Teachers club and
Library in Ojai, Miss Maria Louise Redfield,” 3, Grey Gables archives.
73 Carla Yanni, Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
172
Andrus also sought to address one of primary fears people had with eldercare institutions,
the lack of privacy and autonomy. At Grey Gables, she took pains to assure potential residents
that independence would not be taken away from them. They would still have utmost control
over their lives and environment. Andrus did not ask the Grey Gables staff to monitor residents
and keep track of their whereabouts. She insisted that residents were free to come and go as they
wished, and the design of the complex, with its meandering paths, multiple entry points, and easy
access to parking, supported this stance. The presence of a parking lot at the center of Grey
Gables was by design. It stood as a marker of the group home’s connection to the world outside
of it.74 About half of the residents owned cars; the women not only traveled for leisure but
participated in conferences and meetings across the country. Some even wrote books on travel.75
While the design of Grey Gables adamantly rebuffed the institutional gaze, it fostered a
different, more diffuse but nonetheless persistent type of looking. In fact, privacy was an elusive
quality at Grey Gables. Andrus often sacrificed it in her attempts to promote her communal
vision of retirement. The openness of the decentralized grounds encouraged visits from members
of the surrounding community and prospective residents. Far from a gated retirement
community, the boundaries of Grey Gables were more of a permeable membrane. Visitors
walking or driving up Grand Ave or Montgomery Street would likely encounter South Hall as
the entry point to the community. Yet, they could just as easily circumvent the main building.
Any of the other access points or the landscaped pathways around the main building led directly
to the clusters of residences [Figure 4.12]. Here, they would be met by large picture windows, a
74 At the same time, Andrus insisted that Grey Gable remain the women’s primary residence. Applicants
who planned to keep their Grey Gables apartment empty until disability made the move necessary were
summarily rejected. 75 For instance, Elsie Redman wrote Islands in My Life and More Islands and was profiled in local
newspapers.
173
feature that already at the time was noted for both being something to look into as much as look
out of.76 Indeed, contrary to their common purpose, the apartment windows and sliding doors did
not frame expansive vistas of manicured lawns. Instead, they led to paths immediately out front.
And for visitors walking the paths, their eyes were inevitably drawn inside.
This openness to Ojai was a source of pride for the Gables residents who hosted official
events for the larger community, including an annual gala and a Christmas tea. Visits were
encouraged on a more informal level, too, as a collection of overflowing guest books reveals.
One of the first interventions Andrus made to the community was the pulling of the high hedges
that obscured Grey Gables’ buildings from the street. An early historian of the community noted
how there was a conscious effort to “make themselves known to the community, as any new
family in it would wish to be known.”77
While each apartment had its own private entrance, a feature Andrus insisted on, there
was, nevertheless, an expectation that the women would open up their quarters to the public, if
requested. Images of Grey Gables were disseminated far beyond the immediate community.
NRTA Journal and Modern Maturity published more than a hundred images of Grey Gables in
the first decade of the community’s founding. There was hardly a space that evaded public
scrutiny. Features would group photographs based on the issue’s thematic focus, showcasing
interiors, activities, public spaces, or landscaping. A two-page spread, for instance, crowded
together 25 photographs of the Grey Gables grounds [Figure 4.13].
78 Laid out in a sequence of
76 Miller Lane, Housing and Dwelling, 272–309.
77 Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook, 51.
78 With the author noting their “regret that lack of space prevent[ed] the inclusion of Rose Terrace, the
latest and last of its units.”
174
views, one could almost use the photographs to trace the paths around the Grey Gables grounds.
As Andrus indicated in another article, the community doors “opened both in and out.”79
Interiors and Sociability
The interiors, too, were broadcast to guests and readers of Andrus’s magazines. Both the
community’s archives and retiree journals brim with photographs of apartment interiors, always
with an invitation to come visit this “retirement paradise” in person [Figure 4.14]. “This door
will open at a touch to welcome every friend,” a Henry van Dyke poem accompanying an article
of Grey Gables interiors, proclaimed.80 The earliest interior image published in the NRTA
Journal shows Andrus and another woman, perhaps Faustine Donnell, sitting in a living area of
one of the apartments [Figure 4.15].81 Donnell sits on a Queen Anne-inspired sofa, an
ornamented Chippendale-revival side table separating her from Andrus’s armchair. Behind
Andrus, a series of shelves display art, trinkets, and travel souvenirs. Other apartments are
similarly eclectic. They feature Tiffany lamps, classically proportioned Federal-style furniture,
oriental rugs, books, paintings, and sculpture. The items of varied historical and geographic
provenance attest to the women’s personalities and establish them as educated and worldly. A
1959 article in Ventura Star, for instance, observes, “In Miss Steward’s home, open planning and
quiet tones lend to the feeling of spaciousness, Mrs. Scoles’ residence reflects her love of
antiques, as well as travel, with framed sketches from European countries evident against one
wall, figurines from Copenhagen, and mementos from Damascus, Turkey, Sweden, and France
adding to the setting.”82
79 “A Pre-view of Grey Gables,” NRTA, first quarter 1957, 18.
80 Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook, 23.
81 Grey Gables, NRTA Journal, March 1955, 10.
82 “Mitz-Khan-A-Khan Chapter of DAR Tours Grey Gables,” Ventura County Star, May 30, 1959, 5.
175
Crucially, the rooms were styled for visitors, with numerous seating options, from
spindle-back Windsor chairs to La-Z-Boy recliners. The available interior photographs show that
each apartment contained several armchairs surrounding a large sofa, often covered with an
antimacassar. In photographs, these seating areas are usually highlighted as an invitation to join
the community’s robust social life. In the March 1957 issue, for instance, NRTA Journal
published a detailed tour of Grey Gables by one visitor, Ima Westrope, who took copious
photographs of every aspect of the community [Figure 4.16 and 4.17].
83 As was customary, she
was invited to visit several apartments as part of the tour [Figure 4.18]. The photographs of these
interiors show the resident seated, absorbed in either reading or writing. However, each
photograph features another seat visible in the frame, as if a cue for the visitor to sit across. In
the final interior photograph of the article, the resident puts a magazine down in her lap and
looks at the camera with a smile. The rocking chair in the foreground, turned towards the viewer,
is a now a clear invitation to join the woman in conversation. Indeed, in the populated
photographs of Grey Gables’ interiors the women look directly at the camera, smiling at the
viewer as if greeting a long-awaited friend. In the previously discussed photograph of Donnell
and Andrus, the woman looks at Andrus, who, in turn, gazes directly at the camera, inviting the
viewer to participate in this “familiar scene”84 and partake in the “gracious informal
hospitality.”85
The photographs of the interiors did draw certain boundaries. Bedrooms were
consistently excluded from these features in an effort to distance Grey Gables from associations
with traditional nursing homes, which regularly depicted bedrooms in their promotional
83 “A Pre-view of Grey Gables,” NRTA Journal, March 1957, 18.
84 “Grey Gables,” NRTA Journal, March 1955, 10.
85 Grey Gables,” 10.
176
materials. Occasionally, readers would get glimpses of the bedroom areas located behind partial
walls, but their function was merely insinuated. The reader’s view of these private spaces
mimicked how a visitor would perceive them. The extensive closet space each apartment came
with also indicated that residents had ample opportunity to make invisible the objects they did
not wish to display to visitors.
Despite Andrus’s herculean efforts at promoting Grey Gables and the community’s rapid
growth in its early years, the project was under financial strain from the start.86 Prospective
residents found that both the monthly rate and the buy-in price quickly rose. Andrus was
adamant about keeping costs within the range of teacher pensions. But healthcare costs were
higher than anticipated. This contributed to an ableist tenor already present in the enrollment
materials. For Andrus’s experiment to work, the resident of Grey Gables needed to conform to
her vision of old age. She cautioned that admittance would be denied to those who had waited
“until life had become empty and stagnant” and whose “sole drive was the consciousness of the
future’s desperate need of care and affection and medical service.”87 Andrus was adamant that
Grey Gables was not a “sunset house.”88 Instead, she welcomed the “adventurous and the daring,
86 Over time, Andrus’s attention shifted away from NRTA and Grey Gables toward large-scale issues
impacting retirees nationwide. She was chosen to sit on the national advisory committee for the White
House Conference on Aging in 1961 and became a member of the advisory board of the American
Association of Homes for the Aging. As NRTA’s affordable health plan had proven to be highly
successful, Andrus became invested in establishing a similar insurance model for all retirees. In 1957,
Andrus founded the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), which quickly grew into an
influential advocacy organization, arguably one of the most powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill. In 1958,
AARP instituted a group health insurance plan. It also offered non-profit mail order drug services which
sent prescription drugs to members at a low cost. Ruth Lana ran an international travel program catering
to retirees, while the Institute of Lifetime Learning offered classes on public speaking, creative writing,
painting, and typing. Legislative staff tracked the progress of pertinent laws on state and national levels
and consulted lawmakers on issues relevant to retirees.
87 “Grey Gables: Ojai, California,” NRTA Journal, September 1955, 16. 88 “V.I.P’s Recognized,” NRTA Journal, December 1957, 5.
177
those for whom the future still holds savor” who had not yet “squeezed dry the joys of present
living.”89
Health, Age and the Acacias
From the beginning, strict criteria for pre-entrance evaluation of health and mental
conditions were established. But as financial concerns became more pressing, the enrollment
process became more elaborate. In addition to submitting references, a prospective resident had
to undergo a physical with the community’s doctor, who checked their teeth, vision, and
performed a chest x-ray, followed by an interview with Andrus herself and requiring final
approval by no less than five of the nine trustees.90 Once admitted, Andrus did not allow any
assistive devices that “increased self-pity” and she prevented attendants from wearing uniforms
for worries that it would remind people of an institutional setting and encourage them to magnify
their physical woes.91 The architecture of Grey Gables also reinforced this message. In the design
of both public and private spaces few allowances were made for disability of any kind. Residents
needed to be “able to come to meals under one own’s power” as there were no provisions for
assistance on the meandering paths of the Grey Gables grounds.
92 South and North Hall both had
second floor apartments reachable by steep and narrow staircases. Apartment bathrooms did not
follow accessibility recommendations such as bath seats and low thresholds for shower access,
noted in the period’s most prominent old age congregate housing guides.
In a context where resident longevity was largely the measure Grey Gables’ success,
Andrus went to great lengths to highlight this metric to incoming members. Grey Gables prided
89 “Grey Gables: Ojai, California,” NRTA Journal, September 1955, 16.
90 “Grey Gables Admission Policy,” Manual of Policy and Resident Procedures, 1.
91 “Richard G. Hubler, “Gowing Old Can Be Graceful,” 96B.
92 “Richard G. Hubler, “Gowing Old Can Be Graceful,” 97.
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itself on the health of its residents and the community’s ability to evade death.93 Administrators
boasted in promotional materials that the community’s well-equipped convalescent center was
never used. They proposed that the residents were too full of life to give into death, and that
“happy activity, congenial companionship, and an atmosphere of friendliness and concern”
universally brought on an “improvement in mobility, strength and energy.”94 Andrus credited not
only the congenial atmosphere and the healthy diet with ensuring the healthfulness of its
residents, but she saw the architecture itself as a contributing factor. Counter to contemporary
rhetoric regarding architecture and aging, Andrus proposed that it was the absence of any
architectural accommodation and design supports that maintained the health of Grey Gables
residents. If Grey Gables was the first significant project boosting resident health through spatial
challenges, it was soon joined by other similar projects in California. In designing the Aldersly
Danish Home community for the aged in San Rafael, California, Rex Whitaker Allen, a noted
designer of mid-century hospitals, refused to flatten the uneven lot and instead made
maneuvering the hillside part of the residents’ everyday experience [Figure 4.19]. The
community’s administration singled out this specific feature to explain the longevity of its
residents, which supposedly exceeded that of all other communities of the kind in California.95
As the increasing medicalization of end-of-life processes shifted the locus of death from
the domestic environment to the hospital, aging and death became increasingly severed over the
course of the twentieth century.96 Andrus made this a crucial feature of her platform. For her,
93 Despite claims to the contrary, deaths at Grey Gables mounted quickly. In 1958, Grey Gables
promotional materials declared that there was “no record of illness or death” due to the “good food and
the many interests of residents.” Yet, internal record show that their first death had occurred in April
1957, with at least two more in 1958. By 1964, 29 residents had passed away out of a total of 112.
94 Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook. 95 “Nursing Homes,” Architectural Record, October 1967, 171.
96 See Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in TwentiethCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)., Philippe Ariès and David E. Stannard,
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aging had virtually no connection to disability, and even less with death. Any mention of grief,
end-of-life planning, and age-related disability was absent from her publications, a glaring
omission given their nearly comprehensive coverage of other topics relevant to aging.97 The
essence of Grey Gables as “an adventure in gracious living,” as Andrus characterized it, relied on
constructing a vision of aging that was well-mannered, self-sufficient and cerebral, and never
burdensome, or even physical. For Andrus, activity and civic responsibility in old age had the
power to extend life and ward off death.98
In an attempt to distance Grey Gables from associations of frailty and disability, in 1959
Andrus founded the Acacias, a twenty-five-bed nursing home across the street from the original
community.99 At first glance, the addition of Acacias to the AARP/NRTA community in Ojai
appears to indicate the “continuum of care” approach, which segregated the elderly based on
their care needs. However, Andrus went to great lengths to create a distinction between the two
communities. Modern Maturity articles avoided insinuating that the Acacias was the next stop in
Death in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975). James J. Farrell, Inventing the
American Way of Death, 1830-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
97 Even Andrus’s own death, in 1967, was glossed over by the magazine. Within the span of a few issues
Andrus shifted from being a constant presence whose editorial voice permeated its pages to an ahistorical
figure present only in the form of memorable quotations, her death an almost indecorous transgression of
the magazine’s aspirations.
98 Crucially, it was precisely resident health that precluded Grey Gables’ success on a mass scale. The
organization’s life-care contracts proved to be a continuing financial liability, as life expectancy rose
dramatically over the course of the 1960s and 70s. NRTA membership dues initially covered deficits and
life-care contracts were replaced by annual contracts in 19878. By that point Grey Gables had already set
NRTA back $1.6 million. Aside from occasional loans, AARP claimed it had no financial obligation to
the NRTA and therefore to Grey Gables. This changed in 1981, when NRTA merged with AARP. The
organization soon threatened to relocate the remaining residents until a lawsuit compelled them to honor
the residents’ original contracts. When the last of the life-care residents passed away in 1999, Grey
Gables was sold to Parsons Group, a family of companies that own and manage a series of independent
living, assisted living, and memory care communities in California and Texas, and renamed Gables of
Ojai. Nevertheless, Grey Gables looks much as it did in the 1960s, from the rose gardens which are now
maintained by a gardening staff to the tributes to Ethel Percy Andrus present throughout the community’s
spaces.
99 It expanded to fifty beds in 1967.
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the caring process for the Grey Gables residents. Instead, it was framed as an entirely separate
institution, one catering to a different demographic. Indeed, the residents of the Acacias were
generally some ten years older than those of Grey Gables and the ratio of women to men was
about the same.100 Nevertheless, Grey Gables residents perceived the Acacias as something of a
memento mori, at all times visible from their perch at Grey Gables. While the Acacias patients
were consistently portrayed as an other in NRTA materials, referred to as “our ailing friends,”
the Grey Gables residents understood the distinction between the populations to be temporary,
“as it may be that of any one of us some day.”101
The design of the Acacias followed established conventions in nursing home design. The
long and low ranch-like building abutted the sidewalk, but its uniform façade with small
windows and a tucked-away entrance impeded access to the grounds both physically and visually
[Figure 4.20]. Instead, the building was oriented inwards, its four wings enclosing a large inner
courtyard. Economy of form prevailed in the interiors, where two-bed rooms were furnished with
only a bed, toilet, hand-basin, and storage [Figure 4.21].
102 Decorated in pastel colors, the rooms
centered looking as opposed to doing. Promotional materials highlighted the presence of
televisions, and the wide doors facilitated the wheeling of beds onto the adjoining porch. Unlike
at Grey Gables, the Acacias emphasized “equipment and furnishings of the latest look”103 and a
“modern aesthetic” that would provide an atmosphere of “freshness and beauty.”104 While it was
advertised as a convalescent center, an intermediary space that would nurse residents back to
health, it often became a more long-term care solution.
100 At opening, the residents of the Acacias ranged in age from 73 to 91. “The Acacias,” NRTA Journal,
December 1959, 31.
101 Turner, Grey Gables Scrapbook. 102 As was common in period nursing homes (see Chapter One) mirrors were absent in the bedrooms.
103 Ibid.
104Ibid.
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Landscaping is a particularly illustrative example of how design decisions helped
distinguish between the two types or phases of aging manifested in these communities. At Grey
Gables, the resident-tended rose garden was positioned at the heart of the community. It not only
beautified the parking lot, itself a symbol of the residents’ mobility, but made known the
residents’ involvement in the maintenance of the property. Articles on Grey Gables described the
plants present on the grounds, the majority of which were relatively easy for amateur gardeners
to plant and maintain. In contrast, an article on the gardens at the Acacias discussed the many
exotic cultivars planted for the visual enjoyment of residents, which, in concert with the
architecture of the space, organized around a solarium and inner court, were both designed to
bring the outside world to convalescent patients with limited mobility.105 Many of the plants
which were planted in front of the building façade, such as Mahonia and Podocarpus, were
shrubs commonly used as privacy barriers, adding another layer of separation between the
building and the community.
Aging and AARP
In The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir suggested that contemporary society offered
the aging two identity options: “the white-haired and venerable sage, rich in experience, planing
high above the common state of mankind,” and its counterpart “the old fool in his dotage, a
laughing-stock for children.”106 This distinction between the elder, seen as wise and independent,
and the state of senility, marked by mental and physical weakness and overall dependency, stark
in pre-modern times, became less discernable over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth
105 “Gardens of the Acacias,” Modern Maturity, August/September 1960, 13.
106 Beauvoir, The Coming of Age. 4.
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centuries and was reinstated once more in the twentieth century.107 Psychologist Bernice
Neugarten made the first attempts to give a name to these categories, as they were reimagined in
the post-World War II era. Her terms, the “young-old” and the “old-old,” while somewhat
clunky, remain in use today. They are used interchangeably with the “third age” and the “fourth
age,” coined by Peter Laslett in 1989. While the associated terminology appeared decades later,
the later 1950s and early 1960s were already forming the cultural field that was the third and
fourth age. Increasingly, the third age became associated with “choice, autonomy, selfexpression, and pleasure” while the fourth age became burdened with implications of a “feared
state of becoming” frail, senile, other.
108
The third age, which received an upswing in interest in the mid-century period, broadly
encompasses those between the ages of fifty-five and seventy-five, or more conservatively,
between sixty-five and seventy. It was defined as a “new stage of life,” “a short-hand term for
the well-off elderly,” and “a generationally-defined cultural field shaped by later life
consumption patterns.”109 While these explanations all accurately capture facets of the social
construction of the third age, I argue that the construction of the third age was also an overtly
political statement, a purposefully adopted identity, and an embodied experience intertwined
with its material expression.
107 Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs, “The Third Age: Field, Habitus, or Identity?,” in Consumption &
Generational Change, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2009), 23–36, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315080482-2; Chris
Gilleard and Paul Higgs, “The Fourth Age and the Concept of a ‘Social Imaginary’: A Theoretical
Excursus,” Journal of Aging Studies 27, no. 4 (2013): 368–76,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2013.08.004.
108 Gilleard and Higgs, “The Fourth Age and the Concept of a ‘Social Imaginary’: A Theoretical
Excursus,” 368.
109 See “Stage of life” (Laslett, 1989) a short-hand term for the well-off elderly (Bury 1998 and Blaikie
2002) and (Gilleard and Higgs, 2009), respectively.
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I place the inception of this segregation of old age in Andrus’s efforts as part of the
NRTA and AARP. Andrus, in staking a claim for the value of old age, codified the difference
between the third and the fourth age in the architecture of her community buildings and in its
visual and design culture. While Andrus claimed to wish to redefine the entirety of the aging
process, a more accurate description is that she merely extended the period that was deemed “of
value.” Through its segregation of different age and ability groups, Grey Gables contributed to a
new hierarchy of old age, where those deemed too old or disabled were eliminated from public
view. Since one’s value was largely based on one’s ability to contribute to society, associations
of frailty and helplessness were merely deposited into the “fourth-age.” This distinction reveals a
contradiction of Andrus’s widely promoted positive notion of aging. Her stress on the visibility
of old age rested on the erasure of the types of aging that were deemed less palatable.
Depicting and Selling Retirement
The overarching concern that Andrus needed to overcome was how to bring into a
cohesive body a disparate group of individuals whose only shared characteristic was being over
the age of sixty-five and in retirement. Andrus’s publications proved critical in this regard. Early
issues of the NRTA Journal and Modern Maturity speak to this lacuna of imagery suitable to
Andrus’s vision of old age. NRTA Journal, as a mouthpiece of the organization, contained almost
no illustrations, the first five years of the journal was marked only by a bold typographic cover.
After 1959, the covers became more eclectic as Andrus experimented with various visual styles.
Black and white images were soon replaced with color photography, each cover centering a
different subject matter. Grey Gables was featured on the second-ever photographic cover,
preceded by an image of the Washington Monument, and followed by a series of images of
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vegetables and flowers. Within the NRTA Journal, the only photographs were those of Grey
Gables. It can be reasonably argued that Grey Gables, in its architecture and its photographic
imagery, served to model and sharpen Andrus’s concept of old age.
From its inception, Modern Maturity’s goals were different than those of the NRTA
Journal. Andrus wanted Modern Maturity to capture the attention of a wide audience. To achieve
this, she made use of bold color, numerous illustrations and photographs, and combined notices
on AARP initiatives with interviews and lifestyle articles. Particularly striking were the cover
pages, which for the first five years featured photographs of unpopulated landscapes. The
photographs marked the changing of the seasons, from overflowing spring rivers to snowy
mountain ranges in the winter. In the absence of imagery she found suitable, Andrus tapped into
a longstanding associations between the changing of the seasons and the different phases of life.
Over time, Andrus and her editors embraced more direct depictions of retirees. To begin, Andrus
visualized old age as almost exclusively white and able bodied. Retirees were presented either up
close or at a distance, in turn wise and vigorous. Close-up portraits, often in high contrast,
featured subjects looking pensively into the distance or smiling directly at the camera. The
numerous activities presented were always approached by their participants with singular focus,
whether the process of a drawing class or the achievement of a caught fish. The elderly body, as
presented in Modern Maturity, does not mimic a youthful appearance. At the same time, it is
never disabled or frail. A visual distinction between the third and fourth age is common. For
instance, an article on a nursing class conducted in partnership with the Red Cross illustrates this
desire to differentiate between the two groups.110 In the photograph accompanying the article, a
group of eleven participants observe a nurse’s attendance to a nursing home resident [Figure
110 “The Story of a Senior Citizen Organization,” Modern Maturity, February-March 1959, 46.
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4.22]. The photograph and the article position Modern Maturity readers as observers and the
givers, rather than receivers of care.
Sun City and Active Living
Grey Gables set out to “realize the dream of a purposive and productive” life in
retirement.111 But it was not the only attempt to materialize a new architecture of retirement in
the postwar period. At the same time Andrus was designing her utopian community in Ojai,
developers across the country began assessing the economic viability of designing communities
that would cater to retirees. Building on the lessons learned from early retirement communities
developed for members of unions and fraternal and service organizations (with 1922
Moosehaven in northeast Florida as a prominent early example), a series of age-restricted,
active-living communities began cropping up across the United States, beginning with
Youngtown, Arizona (1954) and reaching peak form with Sun City (1961), a mere two miles
away. While Youngtown experienced only middling success, its underlying philosophy caught
the attention of real estate speculators who rushed to purchase cheap tracts of land outside
developed areas and build out small single-family houses catering to retirees. The low down
payment and monthly payments kept these homes within range of pensions. Over time, proven
ventures would expand to include various amenities, including grocery stores and recreation
areas. As these types of communities proliferated across the country, they often became a front
for what were little more than land scams.112 A 1959 article in the Saturday Evening Post painted
a worrying picture of communities with cracking sidewalks, drained pools, and the resounding
111 “V.I.P’s Recognized,” NRTA Journal, December 1957, 5.
112 Judith Ann Trolander, From Sun Cities to the Villages: A History of Active Adult, Age-Restricted
Communities (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 40.
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silence in public spaces, all on the shoulders of retirees who tied up their savings in the hopes of
a new life in these communities.113
To ease the worries of prospective buyers, self-made millionaire and then-co-owner of
the New York Yankees Del E. Webb, relied on the weight of his name to both add value to Sun
City, his retirement community, and serve as a guarantee of trustworthiness.114 In Sun City
advertising materials, it was not uncommon to find Webb’s name appear dozens of times within
a single ad. Webb’s decision to build his first community near Phoenix, Arizona, was not
accidental either. Arizona had long capitalized on its associations with healing climate
conditions.115 The intimations of Sun Belt locations as offering a “climate cure” were first
cultivated in the late nineteenth century, in response to the threat of tuberculosis. These
connotations were then easily translated to more amorphous claims of general wellness that were
sold to retirees as part of the Sun City sales pitch. Arizona also capitalized on other existing
connotations of the Sun Belt, which formed links between the region’s warm climate and the
promise of employment, family life, and perhaps most importantly, of fulfilling retirement.116
Communities like Sun City further elaborated this myth, tethering climate and landscape to
113 Bill Davidson, “Thistles in Paradise: The Truth about Retirement Housing,” Saturday Evening Post,
January 16, 1965, 20.
114At the same time that Webb assured potential residents of his large-scale development know-how, Sun
City went to great lengths to obfuscate the source of his expertise with building entire communities. Behind
what Sun City materials referred to as “numerous defense contracts to help the country prepare for war,
some of which called for building entire cities,” lay in fact Webb’s development of the Japanese Relocation
Camp at Poston in 1942. Designed for 36,000 internees, Del Webb employed 5,000 men using a double
shift schedule to hastily construct a boxed town featuring schools, community facilities, and full
infrastructure, all essentially overnight. Trolander, From Sun Cities to the Villages: A History of Active
Adult, Age-Restricted Communities, 55.
115 Philip VanderMeer, Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix, 1869-2009 (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 2012), 34.
116 Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk, Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 12.
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idealized social and economic conditions. At the same time, the appeal of Arizona was also
rooted in more practical concerns, as many were drawn to the state due to its low property tax.
Marketing and advertising played an integral role in the building of Sun City even before
the community had its official name. The Chicago marketing firm, R.H. Donnelly, oversaw a
contest to name the project that appeared in 1959 in several national publications, the winning
entry slated to be rewarded with a house in the community.117 Elaborate, full-page ads in
periodicals such as Better Homes and Gardens, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest, and TV Guide
continued for several decades after the community’s founding. Extensive market research
preceded the construction of Sun City and continued even after people had moved in, through
thick binders on each resident’s background, interests, and opinions.118 This created a simple
feedback loop that gave marketers immediate access to information that could, in turn, be sold
back to both current and prospective residents. For instance, a survey administered to all
homeowners informed the marketers that seventy-five percent of residents liked Sun City’s early
1960s jingle “Wake up and live in Sun City, for an active new way of life.” In turn, Garland
Agency advertisers, who wrote the jingle, made the track into a recording that was then sold to
the residents as a gift-suggestion; the record bringing in both promotion and profit.119
A representative Sun City ad is composed of 12 photographic vignettes around a block in
the shape of the state of Arizona [Figure 4.23]. An illustration of a mountainous desert landscape
117 Trolander, From Sun Cities to the Villages, 69.
118 The research sometimes contradicted academic writing on the topic of aging—a fact that the company’s
marketers saw as a point of pride. Sun City’s Senior Vice-President at the time, Thomas Breen, argued that
“ninety-five percent of the people living in Sun City are happy because Sun City is precisely what solid
market research, as opposed to academic theorizing, showed that they wanted.” In a 1964 New Yorker
article on Sun City, Calvin Trillin observed that “some of the most intensive Sun City advertising seems to
be directed toward the people who already live there.” Calvin Trillin, “A Reporter at Large: Wake up and
Live,” New Yorker, April 4, 1964, 136.
119 Trillin, “Wake up and Live,” 133.
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and saguaro cacti at the bottom grounds the viewer in a locale that looks both specific and
romanticized. The predominance of bright orange and green hues across the ad appears eager to
convey a feeling of health and energy. The mixture of typefaces works hard to communicate
several different messages. Rendered in light blue, “active” is expressive and whimsical. The
black color and solid typeface of the words “retirement” and “is a proven success” indicate the
reliability of the basic message. And finally, the jaunty letters of Sun City are in a playful red,
signaling the lively side of this utopian community.
The copy insists on the “uniqueness” and “exclusivity” of Sun City. It states: “You do
exactly what you want, when you want.” It follows this claim with an impressive list of
amenities: “A championship golf course,” “riviera-size swimming pool,” “fully equipped arts
and crafts center,” “agricultural project,” archery, croquet, horseshoe and lawn bowling courts.
The crucial point of the ad is in the sheer quantity and variety of the activities offered to
community residents.120 The staccato nature of the small vignettes supports this claim. Instead of
one fulfilling activity, a resident is offered a buffet of appealing options.121 Busyness is equated
120 And while the community offered seemingly endless options in terms of entertainment and activities, it
rested on a stunning sameness of consumers. In 1962, Arnold M. Rose proposed an important new
category for sociological research, “the subculture of aging.” Rose claimed that retirees developed group
consciousness based on age. Much like other subcultures, Rose argued, the participants of this group
possessed shared attitudes and rituals and self-identified as belonging to the group. Yet, it is important to
note that group affiliation based on age most certainly only worked in tandem with other markers such as
socio-economic status and race. Because of this, it would be inaccurate to say that Sun City attracted all
retirees equally. Rather, people were drawn to others of their class and race like homing pigeons. For
decades, Sun City published a directory that not only listed names and addresses of its residents but the
professions that they retired from. Evidence of past achievements by the residents—almost exclusively
middle and upper-management husbands and homemakers—reinforced the prestige of the community.
Sun City residents were similar in other regards as well. Most of them came to Arizona from other parts
of the United States, usually the Midwest and Northeast, they were overwhelmingly Protestant, and
politically conservative. Reporters observed how most residents tended to dress uniformly as well, golf
clothes being de rigueur, whether they were actually going golfing or not. Arnold M. Rose, “The
Subculture of Aging: A Topic for Sociological Research,” The Gerontologist 2, no. 3 (September 1962):
123. FitzGerald, “A Reporter at Large: Interlude,” 76.
121 In a criticism of these types of retirement communities, Ethel Percy Andrus stressed that older people
did not need “trivial activities and childish games.” She argued that the hobby shop at Grey Gables, for
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with happiness. Shuffleboard is placed at the top, as the quintessential senior activity. Bottom
center is an image of golf—the other requisite retirement sport. Golf performed double duty in
both projecting an aspirational image of the community by associating Sun City with elite
country clubs and providing retirees with an activity that was far from strenuous, an association
that was aided by the invention of the golf cart in the 1940s.122
Unlike other retirement housing—Charles Warren Callister’s projects for Ross Cortese’s
Rossmoor being a particularly illustrative example—Sun City was not a product of a single
architect’s vision, rather the community proudly arose from a cluster of buyer preferences, the
result of developers “listening to consumers and observing what they like.”123 In the 1960s, Sun
City offered 36 different models of houses, featuring entirely unrelated but vaguely sophisticated
names such as the Windsor, the Jefferson, and the Arcadian.124 Residents were presented with
the illusion of choice through a large selection of slight decorative detailing and color
combinations. Sales brochures boasted of durable materials, labor saving devices, and high-tech
details. Prestige was attached to house location and views; homes that opened up onto golf
courses were most coveted.125 Physical proximity to important public spaces was likely read as
instance, was not a place for play but work, in a pointed criticism not only of active-living retirement
communities, which were often dubbed by the media as retiree playpens, but of entrenched associations
of old age with childhood. Grey Gables also did not have a “social director.” Instead, residents planned
and executed social and recreational events, both individually and through committees. Even more
importantly, they rarely established new organizations restricted to the Grey Gables community, but
instead joined already existing societies (for instance, the County Gem and Mineral Society) and worked
to widen their reach.
122 Within Sun City, golf remained as one of the only remnants of pre-existing social hierarchies. While the
activity was available to everyone, there were additional fees attached to belonging to the golf club. There
are records of some resentment from other members of the community since the golfers essentially
“founded a private country club inside a semi-private country club.” Frances FitzGerald, “A Reporter at
Large: Interlude,” New Yorker, April 25, 1983, 74.
123 “Good Design Adds $$ to Home Value” The Web Spinner, February 1969, 2. For an analysis of
Callister’s work for Cortese see Lasner, “Retirement Planning.”
124 In the 1960s, Sun City built 700-800 houses annually, priced from $8,500 to $11,300. Trillin, “Wake Up
and Live,” 159.
125 “Good Design Adds $$ to Home Value,” 2.
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evidence of social standing, the conventional value of privacy less appealing than in other
suburban communities.
The development of the ranch house played a critical role in the success of Sun City and
other similar communities. In this context, the ranch house could be said to be less architecture
and more a lifestyle stage-set. It was often used to this effect by Sun City’s advertisers who
presented the houses as mere cues, as backdrops for activities that unfolded in front of them,
rather than on the inside. Ads depicted new residents being welcomed by neighbors outside the
home, already looking outward even while their belongings were being carted into the home
[Figure 4.24]. Any entertaining, whether discussions of Shakespeare or indulgence in
hamburgers, was shown as occurring out of doors [Figure 4.25] and the “Jones’ New Status
Symbol’ was no longer an object displayed prominently inside the home but a new two-seater
bike—or perhaps the fit, active bodies of the Jones’ themselves even more so [Figure 4.26].
While house façades made an occasional appearance in Sun City advertising, perhaps
most conspicuously absent from the community’s ads were the interiors of these houses that the
copy assures us were “quality homes priced with unbelievable modesty.” Unlike the ads for
nursing homes or other retirement communities of the time, the private interior was largely
erased from the outward narrative of Sun City. When interiors were depicted, they were the
spaces of community, the spacious meeting rooms of Sun City’s town hall, the luxurious dining
rooms, and the crowded workshops. This was underlined by Webb himself, in a quote frequently
included in Sun City advertisements, “Concrete, steel and lumber can make the buildings, but
people make the community.”
Another ad for the community, this one in the form of postcards that were handed out to
residents to send to friends back home, illustrates this proposition explicitly [Figure 4.27]. Unlike
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other similar postcards, which split the layout more evenly between two images, this one
allocates substantially more visual real estate to the photograph of the community pool than that
of the domestic interior [Figure 4.28]. As the text below the images makes clear, the photographs
are presented not as a reference to spaces, but the activities that take place within them—
“swimming” and “relaxing.” While the text below the image of the domestic interior offers “just
relax” as a valid pastime for Sun City residents, the composition implies that time spent indoors
is little more than an interlude between participating in the community’s more favored activities.
Despite the suggestion of a large glass wall and the fashionable color scheme, one that would not
be out of place on the pages of House Beautiful or other period shelter publications, the man and
his surrounding objects appear cramped inside the interior. The image is subtly claustrophobic,
the man’s movements restricted within the tight rectangle of the composition. His stiff posture
and the elegant, tightly buttoned outfit communicate that, in Sun City, relaxation means little
more than a moment of rest before one rejoins the community.
The absence of visual records of Sun City’s interiors means scholars must rely on outside
accounts to document their appearance. In 1960, New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin noted how the
old-fashioned furniture of Sun City interiors appeared incongruous against the modern
architecture of the exteriors.126 Twenty years later, in another New Yorker article on Sun City,
Frances FitzGerald made a similar observation.127 FitzGerald deemed Sun City residents
“collectors”—their interiors proudly displaying a lifetime’s worth of bric-a-brac, surfaces and
126 Trillin, “Wake Up and Live,” 162.
127 It bears noting how popular articles on aging often take Sun City as their premier case study, the
community perceived as a barometer of the tastes and interests of retirees. Sun City has lost this position
only recently, with the increased public presence of the Villages in Florida. Nonetheless, the ubiquity of
Sun City in public discussions on aging clearly signals its successes in constructing and promoting a new
vision of old age.
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cabinets replete with antique china, gold-rimmed glasses, figurines, and sports trophies.128 But
perhaps more importantly, FitzGerald took notice of the almost fanatical tidiness of these spaces,
which went as far as to involve plastic runners being placed over carpeting. Fitzgerald was struck
by the absence of life within these interiors, stating that “the objects seem to rule, having an
independent life and purpose of their own,”129 This perspective is eerily consistent with the
lifestyle that Sun City advertisements prescribed. Were the interiors of Sun City houses handed
over to the objects, while the everyday lives of the residents were conducted elsewhere?
Indeed, active retirement was a type of aging that needed to play out in public. Spaces of
enclosure began to be seen as spaces of death. Despite its airy window walls and open layouts,
the dwelling became perceived as confining and fraught with danger. This belief played out in
the everyday landscape of Sun City as well, where upon arrival, residents were given
windowpane sized pieces of carboard marked with a large orange X to place in their house
windows should they require assistance, as stories of people dying unattended in their homes
carried tragic connotations of isolation and abandonment.130 The outdoors and the community
were offered as a way out. Activity promised to ward off death. Another ad lays out the stakes
even more explicitly: “Time Cannot Be Stored; It Must Be Spent” the copy declares—once again
accompanying groupings of photographs and illustrations of the community’s numerous
recreational offerings [Fig. 3.29]. The ad brings out front and center the otherwise veiled
anxieties on the subject of death in retirement communities. Instead of suffocating in their
interior, much like the material possessions that clog their closets, consumers were urged to
spend: spend their time, their physical energy, and, of course, their money.
128 FitzGerald, “A Reporter at Large: Interlude,” 86.
129 FitzGerald, “A Reporter at Large: Interlude,” 86.
130 Beverly Brown, “Oral History of Jane Freeman,” Sun Cities Historical Society, August 5, 2007.
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Competing Interpretations of Successful Aging
Ethel Percy Andrus occasionally featured age-restricted retirement communities in her
publications. Privately, she was less enthused about the vision of aging they stood for. Over time,
this clash between the two perspectives on aging became more overt. In an issue of the NRTA
Journal, a Grey Gables representative (likely not Andrus, as she became less involved in
community promotion in the second half of the 1960s) highlighted the unscrupulous practices of
many developers of retirement communities and stressed the differences between Grey Gables
and places that advertise “an active new way of life” (widely known as Sun City’s tagline).
At first glance, Grey Gables and Sun City may appear similar.
131 Both communities
promoted the independence and self-reliance of their residents. Ethel Percy Andrus, a staunch
believer in the need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, created a fantasy of an older person
who cares for the world but does not ask for any care from the world. She envisioned Grey
Gables as a “model retirement community” guided by “a desire not to be a source of worry to
family and friends” and as a way to avoid being relegated to a “has-been status.”132 Our children
live their lives, we live ours,” Grey Gables materials proclaimed.133 Similarly, a pronounced
attachment to one’s own family was summarily derided at Sun City. Women who traveled back
131 Today, critics often discuss AARP ventures and active-living retirement communities such as Sun City
in the same breath, describing their commitment to “successful aging” and “leisured retirement living”
and their concerted efforts to divorce old age from the mention of death. See Margaret Morganroth
Gullette, Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2017), 49; Leland M. Roth and Amanda C. R. Clark, American Architecture: A History, Second edition
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2016), 372.
132 Grey Gables,” NRTA Journal, March 1955, 10.
133 Ethel Percy Andrus, “Invitation to Security,” Modern Maturity, October-November 1958, 5.
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to see their children too often or talked extensively about their grandchildren were mocked for
suffering from “gramma-itis.”134
The differences between the two communities become more noticeable as one attends to
their designs. As I have argued, Grey Gables did not wish to mimic the architecture of singlefamily households, with clear demarcation of lots and houses. It was composed of clusters of
small cottages with shared outdoor spaces. It also created a porous boundary between inside and
outside, the community eager to integrate itself into the social and geographic fabric of Ojai.
Age-restricted communities, on the contrary, purposefully distanced themselves from nearby
urban centers through clearly marked barriers and points of entry. In their visual and material
organization, these two-bedroom houses with kitchens that opened towards the living room area,
attached carports, and private yards emulated precedents from established suburban
developments.
135 Community demographics seemed to justify these design decisions. Indeed,
heterosexual marriage was the conventional nucleus of the community’s social structure.136 The
majority of Sun City advertising photographs depicted a husband-and-wife pair, the two similar
in physical appearance, mannerisms, and clothing. Period accounts related how couples were
134 Frances FitzGerald, “A Reporter at Large: Interlude,” New Yorker, April 25, 1983, 74.
135 Not only that, but these communities rested on many of the same ideological foundations, including
the “primacy of private property,” an “assertion of class wealth and privilege,” and “exclusion of
difference.” Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic
Books, 1987), 2/
136 Interactions between a husband and a wife went in tandem with socialization with a wider group,
whether with other couples or through gender-segregated group activities such as knitting and shop. Sun
City advertisements went to great lengths to promote this vision of group cohesion, promising that one
would be surrounded by likeminded individuals. This promised community was distinctly white,
heterosexual, and middle-class. This vision, thus, cast out anyone who did not belong to the group. While
Sun City was highly exclusionary on the grounds of race, it also explicitly cast out youth, as anyone under
19 was not allowed to spend more than 30 days in a given year in the community. Indeed, age-restricted
communities are often criticized for being poor neighbors due to their staunch refusal to fund schools in
the areas where they are located. Drew Thomas Meyers, “Sun Citizens: The Culture and Politics of
Retirement in Modern America.” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2016), 23
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perceived as unified entities more than individual subjects.137 Within Sun City, detached from
childrearing and with divisions between male and female spheres dissolving in the absence of
work, the bonds of marriage appeared to have been further strengthened. Yet, these changes left
no mark on the design of Sun City houses, the traditional layouts of suburban house merely
transplanted into another context.
Grey Gables and Sun City both greatly contributed to the elaboration of the concept of
the “third age.” Since entrance into this category was marked by retirement, freedom and
abundance of time were perceived as key characteristics of this group. The expectation of the
young-old was to “live much as they did before 65.”138 The heads of Sun City and Grey Gables,
however, disagreed on how this group should use their time, money, and attention. The main
point of contention was the contrast between what the creators of each community envisioned the
value and the role of retirees in contemporary society. For Andrus, the third age was a political
concept, and she urged this group to maintain their involvement with politics and reaffirm their
commitment to civic responsibility. If possible, Andrus advocated for second careers after
retirement. In the absence of those, she sought to make the “word retirement lose its terrors.”139
Andrus considered the gold watch one often received at retirement as the best example of a
future where all one could do is “look at it and count the hours until [they] die.”140 For her, the
social contribution of the elderly was to be no different than that of other life stages. She
believed it was the responsibility of older people to retain active citizenship, urging them to
137 These images remained predominant even as the demographics of Sun City began changing. By 1980,
widows made up more than a third of Sun City’s residents but were completely absent from the
community’s advertising.
138 “Environment for the Elderly,” Progressive Architecture, April 1964, 136.
139 “Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus Dies; Led Retired Teachers’ Group,” The New York Times, July 15, 1967,
18.
140 “Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus Dies; Led Retired Teachers’ Group,” 18.
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overcome inertia and move beyond a focus on their individual needs. Civic responsibility, for
Andrus, largely took place on a local scale. On a neighborhood level, this included beautification
in the form of planting trees and cleaning public areas to urging the town to implement safety
and accessibility features such as lights and curb cuts. At Grey Gables, Andrus insisted on
fostering an active life of service. It was an expectation that the residents would offer their
mentorship to nearby schools and volunteer for various other Ojai organizations. The material
and visual culture of grey Gables broadcast this vision of productive aging, buttressing Andrus’s
claims regarding the value of old age.
Age-restricted retirement communities wrested the concept of the third age away from
Andrus and emptied it of its larger political implications. Sun City reframed the third age as
mobile, energetic, and sound in both body and mind, all through a dedication to active living and
a commitment to consumption. Sun City was premised on the idea of entitlement, serving the
elderly a rhetoric of deserved indulgence as a reward for a lifetime of productivity. However, it
merely recast the deeply ingrained “work ethic” by transferring the effort from paid work into
leisure-time consumption.141 Individual consumption became a way to express one’s identity and
exercise a freedom of choice. Even more importantly, consumption was loaded with the promise
of delaying the negative associations with aging and warding off the fourth age.
This fear of the fourth age was perhaps the thread that most closely connected the two
communities. As in the case of Grey Gables, Sun City’s advertised lifestyle necessitated a willful
ignorance of the physical implications of aging. “People here talk about ideas, not about their
141 As sociologist David Ekerdt suggested in a 1986 article, the “busy ethic” was an abstract set of ideals that
ascribed a moral value to active retirement and translated “productive labor into feverish consumption. David J.
Ekerdt, “The Busy Ethic: Moral Continuity Between Work and Retirement1,” The Gerontologist 26, no. 3 (June 1,
1986): 239–44.
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ailments,” was a common refrain.142 This avoidance of death and illness was baked into the
design of the community.143 Unlike other retirement communities such as Ross Cortese’s Seal
Beach Leisure World, Sun City developers purposefully avoided incorporating accessibility
features such as grab bars and roll-in showers in their house models.144 The features that were
present, including raised electrical outlets and lowered light switches, were not publicized for
fear of being considered “offensive” by the residents.145 Old age was divorced from any physical
and mental ailments as the very notion of a body’s fragility went against the ideology at the core
of Sun City.146
Indeed, both Grey Gables and Sun City were preoccupied with the idea of successful
aging, which they equated with the maintenance of independence.147 For the creators of these
142 FitzGerald, “A Reporter at Large: Interlude,” 79.
143 The vision of old age that Sun City fashioned and promoted was not only for the benefit of the elderly
themselves. It also offered a reassuring fantasy to younger generations. On the one hand, they could feel
comforted that their parents remained safe and comfortable, the care that would have otherwise been
expected of the children now diverted onto a community specifically designed for their wants and needs.
While most Sun City residents reported taking care of their own parents in old age, they remained
steadfast in their desire to not impose this burden on their children. At the same time, younger generations
could look to these communities and see their own future. They could be reassured that their daily grind
would not be in vain, that a lifetime of work and sacrifice would be rewarded with a new life of leisure.
Retirement communities such as Sun City served to prop up the fantasy of hard work culminating in the
attainment of “a good life”—characterized by prosperity, freedom, and personal fulfillment. Yet, similar
to fantasies of adolescence, which were always haunted by the unavoidability of youth’s culmination into
adulthood, marked by the substitution of freedoms with responsibilities, the shadow of the future hung
over images of senior living as well. As Kathleen Woodward has argued, fear and rejection of old age
stem from an instinctual view of older people as “an intolerable sign of our own mortality. Woodward,
“Instant Repulsion: Decrepitude, the Mirror Stage, and the Literary Imagination,” 47.
144 Lasner, “Retirement Planning.”
145 Trillin, “Wake Up and Live,” 150.
146 Yet, death and illness did impact the look of Sun City homes and the surrounding landscape, if in a more
covert way. Even artificial turf and rock lawns, that are now prevalent in Sun City’s front yards, in stark
contrast to the well-maintained grass lawns that mark the community’s public spaces, came after the
community’s doctors publicized the role lawn-mowing played in a series of deaths in Sun City’s early years.
Trillin, “Wake Up and Live,” 159.
147 As a construct, “successful aging” bears only incidental markers of the aging process. Its all-embracing
goal is the maintenance of the appearance of youth, energy, health, and social activity. Only through
passing by disguising impairments and markers of age and impersonating youth and health can one regain
some semblance of status in the eyes of the world. Hailee M. Gibbons has termed this phenomenon
“compulsory youthfulness,” a mandate that works in tandem with other oppressive systems such as
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communities, it was the need for care marked the elderly body as burdensome. Given that
successful aging is not a state but a process, it implied an endless, and ultimately untenable,
insistence on self-sufficiency and the refusal of visible care.
148 For Grey Gables and Sun City,
being old was framed as an individual choice and responsibility. The failure to retain this ideal of
youthfulness resulted in further marginalization.149
compulsive able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality. These internalized disciplinary practices
that require a self-imposed control over one’s body to meet certain physical standards have also been
termed “disciplines of normality,” as an elaboration of Foucault’s institutional disciplinary practices that
set out to produce docile bodies. Hailee M. Gibbons, “Compulsory Youthfulness: Intersections of
Ableism and Ageism in ‘Successful Aging’ Discourses,” Review of Disability Studies 12, no. 2 & 3
(2016). Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York:
Routledge 1996.
148 At the same time, critics are becoming increasingly cognizant of the limitations of “successful aging”
as a goal and a mandate of aging. Indeed, the concept of successful aging, also produces its foil. When
activity and productivity are lauded as the benchmark of success, disability, illness, and frailty become
marks of personal failure. These moral pronouncements materialize in another social construct, that of the
“burden. Margaret Morganroth Gullette traces the shift in the use of the word “burden,” from a term
employed to emphasize with caregiver to becoming a descriptor of the person being cared for. Gullette,
Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People, 143.
149 Ultimately, as an ideal, successful aging is elusive. It reframes the participation of the older person in
capitalism from a worker to that of a consumer. It promises that one will maintain their status through the
compulsive consumption of products and services that halt, delay, or mask aging. Indeed, the pursuit of
youthfulness and consumerism are tied together, the anti-aging industry a particularly insidious mark of
this union.
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Epilogue: The Architecture of Care
While the postwar period saw a proliferation of architectural typologies catering to old
age, around two-thirds of the country’s older people continued living in their family homes as
they aged. In 1960, the Census for Housing for the United States showed that 70 percent of those
over 65 lived in dwellings owned by a member of their household.150 In most cases, older people
owned their own homes, tying up most of their savings in home equity. Thirteen percent lived
with relatives. While institutions remained the architecture for aging most firmly embedded in
the period’s social imaginary, only one in twenty older people lived in them.
Experts and media began sounding the alarm on the inadequacy of older people’s housing
conditions. It was estimated that nearly 30 percent of the dwellings owned by this group were
below a livable standard, lacking basic amenities such as running water and sanitary facilities,
offering too little protection against the cold and the rain, and increasingly falling into disrepair
due to a lack of maintenance.151 Most of these homes were located in urban areas, which younger
people had left behind, and critics worried that the prevalence of substandard housing in inner
cities would perpetuate slums. On the other side of the spectrum, high-value housing constituted
30 percent of dwellings owned by the over-65 contingent.152 These homes were “often relics of a
former day when families were larger, land and building costs lower, and large houses in vogue.”
Nevertheless, older residents could not easily maintain these sizeable homes and their dated
layouts and infrastructure were unsuited to the residents’ current needs.153
150 Glenn H. Beyer, Housing the Aged in Western Countries; Programs, Dwellings, Homes, and Geriatric
Facilities (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1967), 10.
151 Ellen Winston, “Housing for Older People,” Southern Architect, March 1962.
152 Geneva Mathiasen, “Some Current Attempts at Better Buildings for the Aging,” Architectural Record,
May 1956, 96.
153 Mathiasen, 196.
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Above all, experts in the field of aging cautioned that domestic spaces posed an everincreasing risk to the health of its elderly occupants. At the same time that the older person was
becoming emotionally or economically tied to their home, the space itself was becoming
progressively hostile. The house was pronounced a collection of hazards, “a machine too
dangerous and difficult for [the elderly] to operate.”154 The old-fashioned, slippery bathtub put
people at risk of straining a ligament of breaking a hip. Stairs were a trip hazard that could lead
to a dangerous tumble. And the gas stove “threatened asphyxiation for the old person who may
fall asleep while the cereal boils over.”155 Many older people also lamented having to decide
between their personal health and the maintenance of their home. “The house needs painting, but
John can’t do it,” a sixty-five-year-old woman was quoted in a New York Herald Tribune article.
“He can’t climb the ladder. He’s seventy-one you know. It will cost $400 if we hire somebody, I
guess it will have to wait.”156 This same couple reported using only a couple of the six rooms in
the house because climbing stairs and house cleaning had become too difficult to do on a regular
basis.
To drive home the dangers of typical domestic environments, a lighthearted pamphlet
prepared by the Administration on Aging and the National Safety Council (1969)
anthropomorphized the architecture and furniture of a home. The pamphlet framed these
dangerous objects and spaces as “dragons to be faced,” but reassured residents that with the right
knowledge “they could be defeated.”157 In one of the pamphlet’s illustrations a dragon lurks at
the bottom of the stairs, waiting for residents to trip over small rugs or clutter unwittingly left at
154 Ubell, “A New Look on Old Age: Housing.”
155 Ubell.
156 Ubell.
157 Dorothea J. Lewis, Handle Yourself with Care: Accident Prevention for Older Americans
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, Administration on Aging, 1969).
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the top. In another, the home itself transforms into a dragon that needs to be vanquished by a
sword-wielding resident [Figure 5.1]. At the end of the pamphlet, the resident is shown holding
the dragon on a leash [Figure 5.2]. “You now have the weapons to fight the dangers lurking in
the home,” the pamphlet assured. “You are your own most precious possession,” it stated,
positioning the resident as both a passive object and the sole agent responsible for vanquishing
the foe that is the domestic interior. The pamphlet, titled Handle Yourself with Care, placed the
responsibility of care in the hands of the resident. It did not give voice to the question of who
provides care once the resident was no longer able to care for themselves.
Others took this question as their starting point. They attempted to flip the relationship
between architecture and inhabitant by making architecture a source of care instead of danger.
The Ford Foundation, which, in the second half of the 1950s, entered the field of old age
research, played a key role. Founded in 1936 by Henry and Edsel Ford, the Ford Foundation
focuses on identifying social problems at the national level and underwriting efforts towards
their solution. From the outset, it aimed to be at forefront of emerging social issues, alerting to
problems before they had gained widespread attention. The Foundation “moved vigorously in an
out of problem areas,” taking up projects such as privately supported hospital care, mental
health, and international legal studies, before deeming them adequately brought to the public’s
attention and moving on to other issues.158 The Foundation also prided itself on being “primarily
problem-oriented rather than discipline-oriented.”159
158 Thomas H. Carroll, “A National Foundation Expresses Its Interest in the Problems of Older People”
(White House Conference on Aging, January 9, 1961), 7.
159 Carroll, 7.
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The Foundation’s interest in aging arose from a more general concern with the economic
development in industrial societies.160 At the time it became involved in aging, the Foundation
also supported eleven other programs deemed of national importance.161 When it came to the
topic of old age, the Foundation’s aim was two-fold. It supported research into the conditions of
aging, with a primary interest in the difficulties faced by older people. Secondly, it invested
funds into projects that promised to address those challenges and “release the potentials of older
citizens.”162
Before it officially entered into this field, the Foundation conducted a comprehensive
survey of the state of interdisciplinary efforts into addressing the “problem” of old age. Over the
course of 1956 and 1957, Stacey Widdicombe, the assistant to the Foundation’s Vice President
who was entrusted with running the old age program, met with hundreds of experts, including
labor leaders, doctors, and social workers. As a result of the survey, the Foundation singled out
three areas of particular importance: health, housing, and meaningful activity. It immediately
ruled out health as an area of interest, given the immense financial resources of groups such as
the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation. Instead, the program in
aging concentrated on housing, employment, and retirement, with a particular emphasis on
housing. To highlight the reason for this decision, Thomas H. Carroll, Vice President of the Ford
160 Under its regular program, the Foundation had supported three grants which resulted in findings
relevant to the topic of aging. One was a grant to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
for a study on consumer spending, which dedicated a monograph to the expenditures of older people. The
other two, a University of California analysis of occupational disability and workmen's compensation
programs and a University of Michigan study on the characteristics of low-income families, also offered
insights into the topic of old age.
161 These included education, urban and regional program, humanities and the arts, youth development,
international affairs, and others.
162 Carroll, “A National Foundation Expresses Its Interest in the Problems of Older People,” 1.
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Foundation, in a talk at the White House conference of Aging, singled out “where will I live”
and “who will take care of me” as the primary two concerns of the elderly.163
The Ford Foundation did not participate directly in research or advocacy but funded other
nonprofit organizations instead. In a letter to a prospective grant-applicant, Stacey Widdicombe
declared “the most important consideration was: was this a good project focused on a problem
with which the Foundation was concerned, was it well designed, would it be well-staffed?”164
However, the Foundation’s scope of giving was rather narrow. While proposals (like that of
Union Settlement for Gaylord White) asking for assistance with planning, building, operating,
and training expenses, made up most submissions, the Foundation summarily rejected them,
reluctant to support any individual projects unless their findings could be extrapolated and
applied more widely.
Despite consistently putting housing at the forefront of its mission, tackling it proved to
be an elusive mission.
165 Among the hundreds of professionals Widdicombe had interviewed,
scarcely any were architects, Whitney R. Smith and Wayne Richard Williams of Smith and
Williams being one of the few exceptions. From the outset, Widdicombe highlighted design as
the “sticky” issue in designing housing for the elderly. His hope was to fund a university-based
research and consultation group which might be available for “early’ advice to local groups
seeking help in planning and building special housing for the aging.”166
163 Thomas H. Carroll, “Interim Report on the Continuing Staff Investigation into Problems of the
Aging,” 9 January 1961, Ford Foundation, Economic Development and Administration and aging, box 2,
folder 31, Rockefeller Center Archives, New York.
164 “Report from discussions with Miss Florence E. Vickery,” September 18, 1958. San Francisco Senior
Center 1957-1962. Ford Foundation Development and Administration, Box I Folder 3.
165“Economic Development and Administration” Problems in Aging, 4. 166 “Letter from Stacey Widdicombe to Marie C. McGuire,” March 14, 1961. Texas 1958-1961. Ford
Foundation Economic Development and Administration, Aging, Box 1 Folder 13.
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To ground its program in rigorous research, in 1958 the Ford Foundation awarded a
$160,000 grant to Cornell University for a national study by its Housing Research Center (later
renamed Center for Housing and Environmental Studies) to examine the housing conditions and
requirements of older persons.167 As Barbara Penner has shown, Cornell’s Housing Research
Center was a prominent early proponent of multidisciplinary, iterative, empirically based, and
user-centered research, which distinguished it from much of the period’s top down, standardized
approach to design.168 The Center’s multilayered method consisted of historical research, field
surveys, and laboratory studies. Instead of coalescing its interests around an idealized, normative
user, the Center was more attuned to the ways a wide range of users, including women, children,
older and disabled individuals, navigated their environment and set out to outline how this
environment could be reshaped to support their needs.
Even by the standards of their other large-scale projects, Cornell’s research into housing
for the elderly was highly ambitious. The study began with Housing Requirements of the Aged: A
Study of Design Criteria (1958), a summary of existing research and literature on the topic of
housing for the elderly. This background research was followed up by over 5,000 personal
interviews with OASI (Old Age and Survivors Insurance) beneficiaries.169 Although the study
was limited to four geographic locations and to OASI beneficiaries, the large sample size and the
fact that, in 1960, OASI beneficiaries represented approximately two-thirds of the nation’s older
167 The project was led by Glenn Beyer, the Center’s director, and the resulting publication were
published under his name, while the majority of research was conducted by Alexander Kira, Assistant
Director of the Center.
168 Barbara Penner, “From Ergonomics to Empathy: Herman Miller and MetaForm,” in The Routledge
Companion to Design Studies, ed. Penny Sparke and Fiona Fisher (London: Taylor & Francis Group,
2016).
169 Samples covered a 15-county area in central New York State; Cook County, Illinois; the St. Louis
metropolitan area, and Los Angeles County, California.
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population, Cornell’s study was considered an exceptionally thorough and comprehensive
survey.170
The results of Cornell’s housing study were published as several reports: Economic
Aspects of Housing for the Aged (1961), which provided demographic data on the sample
population, including household composition, present housing situation, and housing need in
addition to an analysis of their overall economic status, Community Aspects of Housing for the
Elderly (1962), and Living and Activity Patterns of the Aged (1963). In 1963, the Center also
published The Elderly and Their Housing (1963). While much of this research was supported by
the Ford Foundation grant, additional funding came from various New York State research
funds, most notably the state’s Division of Housing. The Center’s projects, while maintaining an
air of scientific neutrality, nevertheless showed biases derived from the positions of their grantgiving institutions. Citations from its preliminary study show that the Center mostly drew from
British research and the standards manuals published by the Massachusetts State Housing Board,
published (1954) and the San Antonio Housing Authority (1957). These insights informed how
the Center structured and interpreted its research. The Center’s study, for instance, did not
include anyone living in an institution, as a clear example of its limitations in presenting a wide
variety of attitudes towards housing options. Supported by special legislative funds, Cornell’s
findings unsurprisingly matched the government’s shift in senior housing preference. In a quest
to reduce the reliance on institutional housing, the project’s findings focused on developing
170 An important caveat here is the racial makeup of the beneficiaries. Beyer chose to ignore race as a
factor in the study given that only four percent of interviewees were nonwhite (which he considered close
enough to the six percent of total OASI beneficiaries). However, this lack of attention to the element of
race meant that inequalities already embedded in the OASI structure, which was already biased against
minority applicants, were replicated in all future materials that were based on Cornell findings.
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services and facilities that would help the elderly live in their own homes for as long as they
were able.
The Massachusetts standards book defined the population it was designing for as those 65
and above who are “older than ninety percent of us.”171 It described this group as “our friends,
neighbors, and acquaintances,” but made no concession that they also are, or soon would be, us.
Despite lip service to the contrary, the manual categorized the population above age sixty-five as
a uniform group characterized by infirmities and the years after sixty-five as those of
unavoidable decline.172 Both state standards manuals and the Cornell publications presented the
older individual as a cluster of ailments that could only be managed through architectural
intervention. They defined aging as the process of diminishing ability. Since existing architecture
was not adapted to the needs of older people, it was framed as hazardous. It could cause injuries
and hasten decline. The studies suggested that housing should reduce the friction between the
aging body and the surrounding environment. They recommended direct paths between key
destinations such as the bed and bathroom to help minimize falls. Some architects went even
further, Walter K. Vivrette, an architectural consultant to the Federal Housing Administration
argued that “maximum significance” should be given to achieving direct paths between different
locations with the home so that residents were able to move in a straight line, with as few 90-
degree turns as possible, as “each turn represented an additional hazard.”173 The reduction of
space was an extension of this belief: the less space available, the lower the chances of accidents.
All other design decisions coalesced around ensuring safety. The standards book recommended
the bedroom include two nightstands to allow open circulation on all sides of the bed, in an effort
171 Housing for the Elderly: Standards of Design (Boston: Massachusetts State Housing Board, 1954), 1.
172 The manual also broadly categorized older people housed in senior housing as “old, poor, and lonely,”
appending a qualitative dimension of loneliness to the ostensibly factual assertions. 173 Albert M. Cole, “What the Aged Need in their Homes,” The New York Times, August 4, 1957, 11.
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to prevent injuries in making the bed [Figure 5.3]. The bathroom was located immediately
beyond the nightstand, the path to it “straight, wide, and free from obstruction.”174 All other
furniture items that were often found in a mid-century bedroom, such as dressers, chairs, and
wardrobes, were eliminated to reduce tripping hazards and give clearance for wheelchair users.
The conversations taking place in the realm of eldercare architecture resembled those
concurrently arising in disability activism. Following the end of World War II, the United States
government became increasingly invested in the question of disability, instating significant
programs to rehabilitate disabled veterans through design interventions including high-tech
prosthetics, customized furniture, and accessible homes.175 At the same time, Timothy Nugent
developed the first building standard for access based on his research with disabled students at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
176 The conclusions that were, likely
independently, developing at the University of Illinois and in eldercare projects at Cornell and
the country’s housing authorities, was that the environment could, and should, be remade to
remove barriers that hampered how disabled people maneuvered the world and performed the
tasks of everyday living. These approaches rested equally on retrofitting the environment and
demanding disabled people take on the responsibility and the hard work required to achieve
independence. The underlying belief was that given an even playing field, in the form of an
accessible environment and supportive infrastructure, a disabled person should be able to
perform tasks equally well as a nondisabled one. What often fell by the wayside in these
conversations was that there was no level of accessible architecture that could fix disabilities that
sometimes came with old age and that architecture could not replace other forms of care. As
174 Housing for the Elderly: Standards of Design, 4.
175 See chapter one in Bess Williamson, Accessible America. 176 See chapter two in Bess Williamson, Accessible America.
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Elizabeth Guffey has shown by analyzing the different editions of Selwyn Goldsmith’s book of
accessibility standards for British audiences, Designing for the Disabled (1963), the American
individualist approach was not the only possible solution designing for disability.
177 Indeed, as
Guffey illustrates, when Goldsmith was developing the second edition of his book and working
with populations that were older and poorer, he realized that no amount of environmental
affordances could replace the work of human caregivers.178
Indeed, American society found itself largely ill-equipped to address issues of disability.
The prevailing ethos of individualism and self-reliance, deeply entrenched in American culture,
stood at odds with the concepts of social care and aid.179 In the United States, disability efforts
were largely directed at veterans because their plight was perceived as legitimate. Legislators
could easily rally behind supporting their rehabilitation and social reintegration. They firmly
believed that an accessible environment would allow these men to regain their role as heads of
household and productive members of society. Eldercare introduced complexity into the
equation. There was no overcoming old age, no amount of accessibility that would return the
elderly into productive citizenship—at least by the standards of productive citizenship these
manuals established. Instead, architecture facilitating independent living functioned as a
prosthesis designed to prop up the older individual and delay decline. Material objects and
spatial arrangements were tasked with delaying the dreaded state of helplessness and diminishing
177 Bess Williamson and Elizabeth Guffey, Making Disability Modern: Design Histories (London:
Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2020), 101.
178 This issue was most noticeable, Goldsmith observed, in public bathrooms. Many of his interviewees
commented that finding usable bathrooms was one of the primary deterrents to going outside. However,
more important than the width of stalls and other accessibility features that would allow disabled people
independent use of the bathrooms, they protested the cultural mores that made caregiver help more
difficult, for instance by restricting bathroom use to a single sex. 179 This is why the second edition of Designing for the Disabled, which centered “a caring state” rather
than “infrastructure” as the solution to accessibility issue found fertile ground against the social welfare
backdrop of postwar Europe. Williamson and Guffey, Making Disability Modern, 106.
209
the burden on family and society. This narrow perception of care was focused on maintaining
health or slowing down decline rather than generating space for growth and joy. It also
emphasized deficit instead of seeing the older individual as a person with abilities and potential.
The standards books and Cornell publications scarcely make any reference to socializing,
hobbies, involvement with various causes or volunteer work. The presumed experience of
inhabiting these spaces was one of merely existing in them for a finite amount of time.
This architecture of care actively harmed its residents. The distances between destinations
within the dwellings were so minimized that the decreased mobility resulted in muscle atrophy
and increased the risk of chronic conditions and poor cardiovascular health. The contraction of
space in the service of preventing injury also prevented any opportunities for physical activity.
180
The prominence given to the bed and armchair left residents with few other ways of engaging
with the space than sitting or lying in the two locations. While acknowledging the importance of
a living room to older people who spend much more time at home than other groups, this space
is not visualized through any plans in the 1954 Massachusetts standards manual. Instead, an
illustration shows a woman reading in an armchair located by a large window in a room that is
likely the living room [Figure 5.4]. A diagramming arrow leads from the sun to the woman’s
head, signaling how light and air can directly reach the woman through the large expanse of
glass. Another arrow leads from the woman’s head towards a flower bush in the garden,
showcasing the garden views available from her position. The illustration contracts the woman’s
180 In the 1960s and 1970s there are no major articles acknowledging these risks in the Gerontologist, the
major peer-review publication on issues of old age. Today, the health impacts of sedentary lifestyles in
old age are well documented. See: Judith G. Chipperfield, “Everyday Physical Activity as a Predictor of
Late-Life Mortality,” The Gerontologist 48, no. 3 (June 1, 2008): 349–57; Fredric D. Wolinsky, Timothy
E. Stump, and Daniel O. Clark, “Antecedents and Consequences of Physical Activity and Exercise
Among Older Adults1,” The Gerontologist 35, no. 4 (August 1, 1995): 451–62.
210
world to the space of the armchair, implying that she need not move from her perch to benefit
from both the therapeutic effects of light and air and the soothing view.
Architecture became the facilitator of these passive environmental interactions. An
interior entirely adapted to needs of a frail body made the unpredictable world outside appear
progressively more hostile and uncertain. The home as prothesis made a resident less likely to
venture outside, inadvertently diminishing the older person’s field of activity. As a result, the
elderly resident at home in their community risked becoming even less visible than one residing
in the relatively public space of the institution.
The ideas presented in standards manuals quickly made their inroads into public housing,
as the efficiency and economy they promoted proved appealing to housing authorities eager for
validation in their cost- and space-trimming. An illustrative example is the proposal for Gaylord
White House written by James C. Mackenzie, architect and Union Settlement board member
who was briefly considered for the project before it was awarded to Albert Mayer.
181 Mackenzie,
who, among the few projects attached to his name, designed the Harlem YMCA on West 135th
Street and an apartment house at 250 East 105th Street, submitted to the Union Settlement a
lengthy manifesto that outlined both his general perspectives on the architecture of aging and
pragmatic considerations for building for this age group, both of which largely derived from the
recently published standards manuals.
182 Mackenzie noted that the problem of old age was one
that needed to be addressed with the same vigor as that of youth. For him, old age was
characterized by a host of physical and mental ailments—absent-mindedness, less acute sight,
181 William Kirk to Samuel Ratensky, June 16, 1958, Proposed Old Age Center 1956-59, box 37, folder 3,
Union Settlement Association records, 1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia
University, New York, NY.
182 James C. Mackenzie, “Building for the Aged,” Gaylord White House, 1958-59, box 33, folder 6,
Union Settlement Association records, 1896-1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia
University, New York, NY.
211
hearing, and smell—all of which made designing with safety in mind paramount. Even in the
absence of a disability, Mackenzie argued that old age was marked by a restriction in the
freedom of movement. In his design, he proceeded to restrict that movement even further.
Mackenzie envisioned the interior as a safeguard, protecting the residents from themselves. He
recommended electric cooking equipment instead of gas, a host of automatic safety devices, and
guard rails throughout the space.183 Using phrases directly borrowed from standards manuals,
Mackenzie recommended the reduction of steps necessary for any action taken within the
apartment. He argued that each major unit, such as bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom, needed to
be easily accessible from the other.
Rationalization and economization of the domestic environment did not begin with
elderly housing. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Frederick W. Taylor formalized
industry’s fascination with efficiency and productivity into a process of labor organization and
optimization.184 Guided by scientific studies into the patterns and timing of work actions,
scientific management proved appealing beyond the workplace and expanded to other settings. It
found fertile ground in the period’s domestic reform, promising housewives a quantifiable
increase in productivity and decrease in wasted effort, assuring them that this investment in
household professionalization would free them to dedicate extra time to uplifting pursuits. The
183 Other features recommended by Mackenzie included the elimination of stairs, thresholds, and right
angles, wide and shallow stair treads with handrails on both sides, mechanically operated casements, low
windows with guard rails, low shelving, sliding glass doors, non-skid bathroom floors and tubs, showerstall seats, buzzers. 184 Mary McLeod, “‘Architecture or Revolution’: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change,” Art
Journal 43, no. 2 (1983): 132–47.
212
design interventions that accompanied the rationalization of the home, and specifically the
kitchen, were conceived as “an extension of the operator’s hand.”185
In many ways, the history of modernism is the history of architecture as prothesis. In
Toward and Architecture, Le Corbusier proclaimed that the contemporary house “eats away” at
its residents, making them ill, weak, and passive.186 He expanded on this idea in The Decorative
Art of Today, proposing that domestic furniture (what he refers to as decorative art) needed to
“become orthopedic.”187 For Le Corbusier, furniture needed to be designed to perform the
function of “artificial limbs” that, among other things, would help us “avoid accidents.” Other
objects needed to “make good the inadequacies of our memory.”188 In X-Ray Architecture,
Beatriz Colomina interpreted these efforts to make the home a “mechanism for caring for the
body” as a reflection of a larger desire to produce a strong and healthy body.”189
Insights stemming from Taylorism and ergonomics could not so easily be applied to old
age settings. Indeed, the compression of distances between different points diverged from typical
scientific management ideas as its application was not in the pursuit of productivity, so more
work could be done more quickly and efficiently, but rather to conserve what was seen as the
residents’ already limited energy and a way of lowering the likelihood of injury. Eldercare
architecture as prosthesis did not intend to rehabilitate the body it housed. Instead, it sought to
prevent injury and maintain stasis.
185 Susan R. Henderson, “A Revolution in the Woman’s Sphere: Grete Lihotzky and the Frankfurt
Kitchen,” in Architecture and Feminism, ed. Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 235.
186Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 94–95.
187 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 1st MIT Press ed. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987),
72.
188 Le Corbusier, 72, 75.
189 Beatriz Colomina, X-Ray Architecture (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2019), 27.
213
It is only when we compare Mayer’s design with Mackenzie’s proposal do we see the
how unusual Mayer’s approach to senior housing was. Mackenzie believed that overall planning
for the project would “follow quite simply” from the details. He began his design from the
inside, making small-scale decisions meant to preserve the residents’ health in the interior. By
contrast, for Mayer, what was most important was the relationship of the housing to the
neighborhood outside and the design of the details within the apartments came last. After several
pages of listed safety features, only in the proposal’s final paragraph did Mackenzie consider the
importance of proximity to “someone who cares.” He framed that someone as a “trained
supervisor, preferably a registered nurse or someone with basic medical training and sympathetic
to various religious backgrounds,” a professional caregiver who could attend to the “general
welfare of the occupants.” For Mayer, it was the relationship between the residents and the
neighborhood that ensured reciprocal and personal care.
Considerations of caring architecture crossed the subsidized housing realm into the
general housing market. In the late 1950s, several manufacturers and developers attempted to
design a solution to single-family housing for older people, applying housing authority
recommendations to the much larger demographic of middle-class elderly. The most notable of
these attempts was the House of Freedom, manufactured by the Douglas Fir Plywood
Association and presented at the 1961 White House Conference on Aging.190
A seminal event in the field of aging, the White House Conference on Aging brought
together some 2800 delegates from every state to Washington D.C. from January 9 through
190 Unsurprisingly, the House of Freedom project began with Mary Cleverly, the assistant Public Housing
Administration Commissioner specializing in housing the elderly. Cleverly was undoubtedly aware of the
recent developments in housing standards for the elderly and suggested these could be applied more
broadly. Dick Monaghan, “Low-Cost House Aims at Retired Persons,” News Tribune, December 11,
1960, 32.
214
January 12, 1961, to discuss key issues relating to aging. In planning the conference, a 150-
member National Advisory committee broke down the topic of aging into twenty subtopics, each
assigned to a working committee. These committee submitted background papers with statistical
data, statements, brochures on relevant topics, and an annotated bibliography meant to guide
discussion. Federal efforts were matched by those at the state level, with each state tasked with
preparing reports on findings based on local conferences and expert recommendations.191 While
the critical issue at the conference was that of financing medical care, housing was another
prominent area of concern. The housing section provides a useful insight into the overall spirit of
the conference. “Solving the problem [of aging] calls for an integrated attack by private industry,
philanthropic organizations and government at the local, state and federal level,” argued the
subcommittee, signaling the desire to cut across these branches in providing housing support for
the elderly.192 The glaring absence of one piece in the eldercare puzzle did not go unnoticed. In a
meeting of the Connecticut conference advisory committee, James Hunt, the regional
representative for the conference, observed that next to nothing was said about the role of family
in considerations of care and housing of older people.193 “Too often the commandment “honor
thy father and mother” is forgotten,” Hunt chided. He blamed the lack of space in modern small
houses for older people being forced into institutions and urged the committee to integrate
discussions of supporting family care into the conference.194
191 At the event itself, regional differences were minimized and compromise solutions were favored to
ensure that conference findings remain not only a theoretical exercise but a “realistic means of meeting
realistic goals.” “Minutes: Connecticut Advisory Committee on the White House Conference,” December
4, 1959, in White House Conference on Aging - Connecticut Advisory Committee 1959-1960, Ford
Foundation Economic Development and Administration, Aging, box 1 folder 26, Rockefeller Archive
Center, New York.
192 Donald P. Kent, “The White House Conference in Retrospect,” The Gerontologist 1, no. 1 (March 1,
1961): 6, https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/1.1.4.
193 He also noted the absence of discussions of the role of religious organizations in the conference.
194 Kent, “The White House Conference in Retrospect,” 7.
215
One of the outcomes of the conference was the senior citizen’s charter, which highlighted
“the right to obtain decent housing suited to needs of later years” as an essential right of senior
citizens. The criteria for this suitable housing were framed around expectations of decline.195 The
committee concerned itself exclusively with issues of failing ability and illness. They stressed the
need for proper illumination, sound proofing, heating, and hazard control. The background paper
gave shape to what had been ambiguous common-sense belief regarding who the elderly were
and what they needed and set the stage for the elaboration of architecture of care.
One of the ways the private industry made their presence known at the conference was
through the House of Freedom, a demonstration project displayed in Washington D.C. for the
duration of the conference. Designed by Robert B. Waring, the association’s staff architect, the
House of Freedom was a two-bedroom house with 888 square feet of living space (plus another
112 feet in an attached hobby room) with an estimated price between $10,000-12,000, not
including land cost [Figure 5.5].
196 One side of the dwelling housed two bedrooms separated by a
shared bath and the other contained a spacious garage with a section marked off for hobby and
crafts work. In-between, under a high open-beam ceiling, the living and dining room surrounded
a long galley kitchen, both offering views of an inner court [Figure 5.6].
The house’s rather standard layout obscured a larger preoccupation with safety. The
architectural team designed the spaces for an imagined wheelchair user, making all doorways
and hallways three-feet wide. In the case ambulatory residents, architects went to great lengths to
prevent falls. The house featured no-step entries and nonskid flooring throughout the space. For
195 For an overview of the criteria proposed by the committee see: Ernest Mickel, “Background Paper for
Conference on Aging Sees Today’s Design Trends as Problem,” Architectural Record, September 1960.
196 Designed and built in a matter of two months, the house was constructed based on four-by-eight-foot
plywood panels.
216
ease of use, switches and doorknobs were installed 36 inches from the floor and electrical outlets
raised to 18 inches high (six higher than normal). Each room featured master light switches and
pull-down lights to facilitate cleaning and bulb changing. The design team paid particular
attention to the kitchen and bathroom, the two rooms where accidents were statistically most
likely to occur. In the bathroom, roughened ceramic tile in the bathroom decreased slipperiness,
a seat installed by the bathtub eased the process of dressing and undressing, and grab bars lent
support in case of dizziness or loss of balance. In the kitchen, upper cabinets were placed within
reach while lower cabinets raised off the floor. A sit-down sink made dishwashing less taxing.
While written reports on the Freedom House highlighted its consideration of impairment,
visual materials were less direct. In one photograph, a woman stands in the kitchen while her
husband sits at the dining table [4.7]. The woman is not shown utilizing any of the home’s
accessibility features. Rather, the photograph is nearly indistinguishable from other period
advertising—save for the age of the model. Another photograph shows the view from the dining
nook towards a partial wall that separates the kitchen from the living room. The position of the
chest of drawers and the dining table and chairs on the side of this wall actively hinders the
possibility of maneuvering the space from a wheelchair, a feature widely touted in promotional
materials. Throughout the promotional photography for the project, disability does not explicitly
make an appearance.
This combination of written and visual rhetoric likely attempted to highlight the universal
appeal of the house’s design. In the early 1960s, universal design, as a term and a formalized
approach, was not yet in circulation.197 However, the Freedom House is an artifact of early
197 The term is often credited to Ron Mace, who first used it in a 1985 article for Designers West. Mace
was critical of approaching accessible design as an “add-on” applied to products and spaces that failed to
consider disabled people in the conceptualization phase. Instead, he argued that designing with disabled
people in mind from the very start would result in solutions that work for everyone. Mace also framed
217
efforts at materializing the belief that design could both cater to a specific group while
maintaining appeal to a wider market. As architect Robert Wood Kennedy noted, housing for the
elderly was built for a hypothetical tenant who is “at the same time completely healthy and
ridden by a variety of characteristic ailments.”198 The Douglas Fir Plywood Association placed a
bet on this belief that a house designed to address the specific needs of the elderly would also
appeal to everyone else. The project’s rhetoric thus straddled the specific and the general. The
freedom promised in the project’s name not only referred to the liberation from “household
drudgery and excessive housing expenses”—features appealing to a wide audience— but also
from “poor lighting, drafts, narrow hallways, and steep stairs,” concerns paramount to the elderly
and the disabled.199 The project’s emphasis on storage space, too, catered to a consumer family
overcome by its possessions by promising to keep clutter organized and concealed.200 The
elderly, too, concerned themselves with the question of storing material possessions. As
discussed in Chapter One, the looming threat of downsizing would have been familiar to all
those who had considered entering an institutional residence, such as a nursing home. When the
executives of the Douglas Fir Plywood Association presented a key to the House of Freedom to
President Eisenhower, the issue of storage caught the president’s attention. “You know, I’m
universal design as a commonsense business move, claiming that its features, such as lever-shaped door
handles and lack of thresholds, would be more competitive in the market given their suitability for all
consumers. For an in-depth exploration of the history of universal design see Hamraie, Building Access;
Bess Williamson, Accessible America. 198 Eric W. Wood, “Design Criteria of the Hygiene of Housing for Elderly Persons,” Special Meeting of
the Connecticut Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, December 1, 159, White House
Conference on Aging – Connecticut Advisory Committee 1959-60, Ford Foundation, Economic
Development and Administration, Aging, box 1, folder 26, Rockefeller Archive Center, New York.
199 Advertisement in Tacoma News Tribune. “Premiere Showing: House of Freedom,” News Tribune,
November 24, 1961, 7.
200 For an exploration of the ideology of storage in the mid-century home and the role of storage walls in
particular, see Lynn Spigel, “Object Lessons for the Media Home: From Storagewall to Invisible Design,”
Public Culture 24, no. 368 (2012): 535–76.
218
going to be retired pretty soon myself,” Eisenhower commented, jokingly asking whether the
house could hold the 18,000 keepsakes he had accumulated over his time at the White House.201
When it was presented at the White House Conference on Aging in 1961, the House of
Freedom was advertised with NRTA and AARP co-sponsorship. It is difficult to understand the
design of the House of Freedom in relation to the ideas and work of Ethel Percy Andrus, who
insisted older people be challenged physically lest they stagnate psychologically.202 As the public
face of the leading organization on retiree issues, Andrus likely felt compelled to give the project
her stamp of approval, personal misgivings aside.203 However, the fact that she failed to mention
the House of Freedom in any of her publications speaks to her assessment of the project and
what she likely perceived as coddling rather than caring architecture.204
Exhibited in downtown Washington D.C. for the duration of the conference, the House of
Freedom was visited by some 3,000 people. In the period immediately following the conference,
the manufacturer received over 5,000 requests for plans.205 Yet, the DFPA was dissatisfied with
the House of Freedom’s performance. They placed some of the blame on the conference itself,
rebuking the participants’ emphasis on the “headline-grabbing battle over socialized medicine,
[which] overshadowed other achievements.”206
201 “Ike Tells Tacoman He’ll Have Hard Time Storing All His Souvenirs,” The News Tribune, 11 January
1961, 4.
202 “Retired Teachers to Hear Tacoman,” News Tribune, June 26, 1961, 5.
203 Andrus was present when the model of the House of Freedom was presented to President Eisenhower.
See Figure 4.8.
204 It is interesting to note that AARP now takes full ownership of the project, calling it a “housing
concept envisioned by AARP founder Ethel Percy Andrus,” likely in an attempt to connect the history of
the AARP to that of universal design. “The House of Freedom,” Aarp.org, 2018,
https://www.aarp.org/livable-communities/housing/info-2018/making-room-looking-back-the-freedomhouse.html. 205 “Ike Tells Tacoman He’ll Have Hard Time Storing All His Souvenirs,”4.
206 Ibid.
219
Wilma Donahue of the University of Michigan was one of the dissenting voices, finding
fault with elderly housing that “overemphasizes the protective devices.”207 In a conversation with
Jane Jacobs, Donahue warned “nobody is cheered by being constantly reminded of age and
disability, and architects who go ramp-and-rail happy are doing the elderly no service. The less
noticeable any special features are, the better.” Retirement communities took this idea to heart.
As I have argued, communities such as Sun City purposefully purged their visual imagery of
references to the interior, lest prospective residents be reminded of the potential of disability.
By the early 1960s, the Foundation was beginning to move on from supporting old age
research. At its December 1960 meeting, the Board of Trustees recommended phasing out the
program within three years. It justified the decision to withdraw from the field by claiming that
the problem of aging was no longer as unrecognized as it had been in 1956. Not only was there
more awareness of the issue, but there were also increased financial resources available to tackle
it. The National Institute of Health, for instance, had increased its aging research grant program
to $18 million, an impressive growth from the two million dollars it was allocating to this area in
1957.208 The Ford Foundation was also growing increasingly skeptical about the value of
centering old age as a determining factor in issues of housing and welfare. Instead, Widdicombe,
as the spokesperson, suggested that the Foundation would be more effective in tackling those
large-scale issues on their own terms, without requiring the lens of old age.
Widdicombe and other Ford Foundation staff were also disappointed with the results of
their investment in the question of old age housing. In a talk given at the White House
Conference for Aging, Thomas H. Carroll, Vice President of the Ford Foundation, noted that
solving the old age housing issue proved to be elusive, observing that “trying to make concrete
207 Jacobs, “Housing for the Independent Aged,” 87.
208 Stacey Widdicome, “Termination of the Special Program in Aging,” January 9, 1962, 2. (C572)
220
contributions to alleviate these situations has proved to have been the most difficult and least
successful part of the aging program.” 209 Foundation staff found that much of the research they
supported had been surface level and did not adequately consider the various financing options,
the cost of constructing and operating special old age housing, and the training of management
and personnel.210 Even the design standards could be elaborated, with a particular focus on the
current impediments to developing proper housing for older people.
The Ford Foundation’s exit from the field heralded a larger cooling in eldercare
architecture innovation. After making inroads into this field in the 1950s and 1960s, federal and
state governments also began bowing out of large-scale involvement with eldercare. In many
ways, the signing of Medicare and Medicaid into law in 1965 marked the end of substantial
government investment into old age programs. To this day, Medicare, the primary program
serving people 65 and older, does not cover long-term care.211 And while Medicaid does cover
long-term care, commonly in the context of a nursing home, its subsidies are restricted to the
poorest segment of the population. Middle-class older people, on the other hand, are forced to
exhaust their assets in order to qualify for the program. Other government efforts to create a
comprehensive long-term care system at a national level remained unsuccessful, collapsing under
the weight of the costliness and complexity of such an endeavor.
By the early 1970s, critiques of institutional living also reached a fever pitch. Not only
did exposés on nursing homes tarnish public perception of eldercare institutions, but as
government subsidies dwindled the industry grew increasingly consolidated, and multi-state and
209 Thomas H. Carroll, “Interim Report on the Continuing Staff Investigation into Problems of the
Aging,” 9 January 1961, Ford Foundation Economic Development and Administration and aging, box 2,
folder 31, Rockefeller Center Archive, New York.
210 Stacey Widdicombe, “Recommended Planning Budget for Fiscal 1962: Problems of the Aging,”
March 27, 1961, 3. (C572)
211 Instead, it only pays for professional home care for short-term recovery.
221
multi-facility providers overpowered small-scale operators.212 Under the guise of more
affordable and more standardized eldercare, these facilities stripped the act of care to its
constituent parts and delivered the bare minimum of services. Despite, or perhaps precisely
because of this, the for-profit care industry continued to reap the financial benefits of the
growing eldercare market. This imbalance is particularly glaring in today’s assisted-living
industry, where the 31,000 facilities across the United States, four out of five of which are forprofit, have returns of 20 percent or more above their operational costs.213
Of course, the problem of care in old age has not gone away. Census records indicate that
the meteoric rise in elderly populations was not restricted to the mid-century period. On the
contrary, the American population has continued to age, with the most significant increases in
the percentage of the older, more vulnerable contingent of the older population. Medical
advances have added years to the average lifespan by increasing survival rates for many
illnesses, resulting in a population that falls somewhere on the spectrum between needing
intermittent and round-the-clock care. Today, the United States has no coherent system for longterm care, but a patchwork of inadequate solutions that reveal failures in both government and
market solutions.214 Millions of middle-class Americans have found themselves wedged between
212 In a Professional Nursing Home “From the Editor” letter in January 1964, editor Ken Eymann listed
his predictions for the year ahead in the nursing home industry. He speculated that there was “certain to
be one big expose of nursing homes,” in addition to the “concern over the tax-exempt status of some nonprofit homes that may be abusing the privilege or stretching the point beyond reason. In the same letter,
Eymann also predicts an increase in chain operation of nursing homes. Ken Eymann, “From the Editor,”
Professional Nursing Home, January 1964.
213 Jordan Rau, “Extra Fees Drive Assisted-Living Profits,” The New York Times, November 19, 2023.
214 The country also spends less on long-term care as a portion of its gross domestic product than most
other wealthy nations. “Health Expenditures and Financing,” Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, Sengupta et al., Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Providers and Services Users in the
United States, 2017–2018, 47:83.
222
two impossible options, they are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford the
exorbitant costs of private assisted living.215
As a recent article in the New York Times noted, for millions of American the only
remaining option is to “hang in and stay home as long as they can.”216 Undoubtedly, there are
many benefits to remaining in one’s own home in old age. Already in the 1960s, gerontologists
began advocating for what would come to be known as “aging in place,” the extended stay in
one’s home and community over the course of the aging process.217 However, living in the
community did not necessarily mean that the act of care was performed by the community.218
More often, community-based care meant that the elderly remained physically within their house
and neighborhood, with institutional care replaced by a network of services. This form of care
takes the form of what Domenech and Tirado refer as “extitutional arrangements,” services that
retain many of the qualities of institutional care, without the physical structure.219 Over time,
many of these services have become virtual. Older adults receive support through remote
technologies such as phone and video calls, fall monitoring, pill reminders, and health alerts. As
part of this transition towards aging in place, ever larger expectations of physical assistance are
placed on architecture, objects, and technologies of bodily management and care. The domestic
215 In the past several decades, the median annual price of assisted living has increased 31 percent faster
than inflation, nearly doubling from 2004 to 2021. Jordan Rau, “Extra Fees Drive Assisted-Living
Profits.”
216 Reed Abelson, “Desperate Families Search for Affordable Home Care,” The New York Times,
December 2, 2023.
217 Simon Bergman, “Facilitating Living Conditions for Aged in the Community,” The Gerontologist 13,
no. 2 (July 1, 1973): 184–88; Harriette Woodward, Ruby Gingles, and John C. Woodward, “Loneliness
and the Elderly as Related to Housing,” The Gerontologist 14, no. 4 (August 1, 1974): 349–51.
218 Milligan and Wiles, “Landscapes of Care,” 746.
219 Miquel Domenech and Francisco Tirado, “Rethinking Institutions in the Societies of Control,”
International Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies 1 (1), via Milligan and Wiles, 746.
223
begins to take on certain qualities of the institutional in an inversion of the quest for
homelikeness in mid-century nursing homes.
Much like the Life series on aging that opened this project, the New York Times recently
published its own series on housing problems in old age. The series, “Dying Broke,” offered an
updated version of the Mahaffey family story through a collection of interviews with adult
children responsible for the care of their parents. Unlike the Mahaffeys, newer generations are no
longer suspended between two eldercare options: multi-generational living and the nursing home
(the nursing home still presented as an institution to be avoided at all costs, with a mother’s
deathbed request to her son being “Don’t put your father in a nursing home”).
220 Instead, families
now have at their disposal the wide range of architecture of care models that were developed in
the mid-century period. Families maneuver between these options of retirement communities,
independent living, assisted living, continuing care retirement communities, memory care
facilities, and finally the hospice, constantly reevaluating what level of care their family
members need and what level of care the family can afford.221 Yet, even once the spatial decision
is made, much of the responsibility of care still falls on families. As Joseph Gaugler, a
gerontologist at the University of Minnesota observed, “Too often, institutionalization is thought
of as the end of family caregiving. It’s not.”222 Family members, women in particular, still
220 Reed Abelson and Jordan Rau, “I Wish I Had Known That No One Was Going to Help Me,” The New
York Times, November 29, 2023.
221 Abelson and Rau, “I Wish I Had Known That No One Was Going to Help Me.” 222 Paula Span, “When a Spouse Goes to the Nursing Home,” The New York Times, February 3, 2024.
224
perform considerable care work.
223 A recent study by the University of Pennsylvania suggested
that the median direct and indirect costs of caregiving are $180,000 over two years.224
Eldercare housing is another example of the postwar belief in the power of architecture to
solve social issues. It would be easy to blame architects and their architectural designs for the
failures in eldercare. How else could the problems of housing older people be this severe, despite
the decades of investment in studying this issue? The resulting lesson is that architecture cannot
be extracted from its surrounding systems. The physical structure performed the care that it was
designed to do: it supported, protected, eased, and accommodated the human body. And while
individual people have cared, the larger system has not cared enough. The search for profit
cannibalized efforts to provide real aid. In the mid-century period, the United States attempted to
reroute eldercare and engaged architecture to save effort, time, and money. The examples I have
discussed show that while buildings and communities were erected to serve an aging population,
there are no shortcuts to care. Care is labor and time intensive. It requires flexibility and
adaptability. It requires emotion. Architecture of care only exists to the extent that a society of
care exists.
223 Professional caregivers are also overwhelmingly women, two-thirds are people of color, and roughly a
third are immigrants. Direct Care Workers in the United States: Key Facts 2023, PHI, September 11,
2023, Milligan and Wiles, “Landscapes of Care,” 746.
224 Norma B. Coe, Meghan M. Skira, Eric B. Larson, “A Comprehensive Measure of the Costs of Caring
for a Parent: Differences According to Functional Status,” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society,
September 17, 2018.
225
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Appendix: Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 1.1 Life magazine illustration of growth in the over-65 population, July 13, 1959.
Figure 1.2 “In a Dutiful Family, Trials with Mother,” Life, July 13, 1959. Feature on
multigenerational living.
242
Figure 1.3 Life magazine feature on multigenerational living, July 13, 1959
Figure 1.4 Life magazine feature on multigenerational living, July 13, 1959.
243
.
Figure 1.5 Life magazine feature on multigenerational living, July 13, 1959.
Figure 1.6 John Stees, cartoon on the three-generation house in a Federal Housing
Administration publication, 1958.
244
Figure 1.7 Percentage and number of children living in multigenerational households
over time. Data from the 1870–2010 decennial censuses and the 2018 American Community
Survey.
245
Chapter 1) Homelikeness and Dignity: The Architecture of Homes for the Aged
Figure 2.1 Shady Lawn Nursing Home advertising postcard, Walnut Creek, Ohio, 1971.
Figure 2.2 “Fact Versus Fiction,” Aging, October 1962.
246
Figure 2.3 Amedeo Leone, Lutheran Home, 1961.
Figure 2.4 Amedeo Leone, Lutheran Home, cottage apartments, 1961.
247
Figure 2.5 Amedeo Leone, Lutheran Home, community residences, 1961.
Figure 2.6 Advertisement in Nursing Home Administrator buying guide, 1966.
248
Figure 2.7 Advertisement in Nursing Home Administrator buying guide, 1966.
Figure 2.8 Bedside Table-Wardrobe-Dresser by American Sterilizer Company
(AMSCO), 1966.
249
Figure 2.9 Nursing Home Management illustration on self-help hygiene aids, 1959.
Figure 2.10 Vifolka Home for the Aged, Bo Boustedt, 1958.
250
Figure 2.11 Vifolka Home for the Aged, living room within a corridor.
Figure 2.12 Examples of Boustedt’s informal living rooms
251
Figure 2.13 A hallway connects a dining room and living room.
Figure 2.14 Community room.
252
Figure 2.15 Dining nook.
Figure 2.16 Living room.
253
Figure 2.17 The Sequoias community room, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, 1961.
Figure 2.18 Sunset Home, Windom, Minnesota, Thorshov & Cerny, 1956
254
Figure 2.19 Home for the Jewish Aged, Kansas City Missouri, Kivett and Myers, 1950
Figure 2.20 St Vincent’s Retreat for the Aged, Archdiocese of Omaha, Steele, Sandham & Steele
Architects, 1954
255
Chapter 2) Aging in Public: The Architecture of Senior Housing
Figure 3.1 Guild House community room, Venturi and Rauch and Cope and Lippincott,
photograph by George Poll, 1966. | Moosehaven retirement community advertising postcard,
Orange Park, Florida, undated.
Figure 3.2 Sketches by Robert Venturi and photographs of the tiled murals in Guild House
hallways.
256
Figure 3.3 Advertisement for Libbey Owens Ford, as seen in Life, November 3, 1961, 136.
Figure 2.4 The Lutheran Senior City, Columbus, Ohio, 1963 | Harold S. Haaland Home, Rugby,
North Dakota, 1962 | Good Samaritan Home for the Aged, St. Louis, Mo., 1959.
257
Figure 3.5 The Guild House, Venturi and Rauch and Cope and Lippincott, 1962-1966.
Figure 3.6 Guild House community room.
258
Figure 3.7 Opening ceremony at the Guild House, 1966.
Figure 3.8 Guild House outdoor space.
259
Figure 3.9 Guild House outdoor spaces.
260
Figure 3.10 and 3.11 Gaylord White and Union Settlement building, Mayer, Whittlesey & Glass
architects, 1958-1964.
Figure 3.12 Map of East Harlem c. 1965. The red dot indicates the location of Gaylord White.
261
Figure 3.13 DeWitt Clinton Houses plans, Perkins & Will, 1958. The project features five court
buildings containing family units and two ten-story buildings. Senior housing units were found
on the top floors of the ten-story buildings, removing the elderly from both the noise and
socialization provided by the proximity to the courtyard.
Figure 3.14 and 3.15 Benjamin Franklin Co-op Plaza, Mayer, Whittlesey & Glass architects,
1960-1961.
262
Figure 3.16 Gaylord White House, one-bedroom and efficiency units
Figure 3.17 Gaylord White House recreation garden.
263
Figure 3.18 Gaylord White House entrance plazas.
Figure 3.19 The communal backyard and terrace on the roof of the lower building.
264
Figure 3.20 Gaylord White senior center programming, photograph by Paul Parker, undated
(mid-1960s).
Figure 3.21 Settlement Home Care, photograph by David Lee, 1994.
265
Figure 3.22 CHA truck advertising Raymond Hilliard Homes, ca. 1963.
Figure 3.23 Early rendering of Hilliard senior housing, before family housing was added to the
project, Bertrand Goldberg Associates, 1963.
266
Figure 3.24 Updated Hilliard site plan, now including family housing, Bertrand Goldberg
Associates, 1963.
Figure 3.25 Raymond Hilliard Homes senior housing apartment layout
267
Figure 3. 26 Raymond Hilliard Homes floor plan.
Figure 3.27 and 3.28 Raymond Hilliard Homes. Photographs show the spatial relationship
between the family towers and senior housing.
268
Figure 3.29 View from the senior housing rooftop.
Figure 3.30 View from a senior housing living room. Photograph by Orlando R. Cabanban,
1966.
269
Figure 3.31 Unnamed boy at Raymond Hilliard Homes, Chicago. Photograph by Orlando R.
Cabanban, 1966.
270
Chapter 3) Adventures in Group Living: Grey Gables, Sun City, and the Architecture of
Retirement
Figure 4.1 Ethel Percy Andrus and Ruth Lana view the Grey Gables model shown at the 1964
New York World’s Fair.
Figure 4.2 Grey Gables, NRTA Journal, December 1953, page 19.
271
Figure 4.3 Conneaut Hall (North Hall), built in 1948, photograph from 1953.
Figure 4.4 South Hall and North Hall, NRTA Journal, September 1957, 10.
272
Figure 4.5 Preliminary drawings for new construction at Grey Gables, NRTA Journal, December
1956, 20-21.
Figure 4.6 Floor plan of Meadow View building, NRTA Journal, December 1956, 20-21.
273
Figure 4.7 Sycamore Lodge, NRTA Journal, December 1957, 23.
Figure 4.8 Gateway Lodge, Hillside, NRTA Journal, September 1957, 11.
274
Figure 4.9 Meadow View floor plan, with Hillside and Mountain View photographs, NRTA
Journal, December 1957, 24-25.
Figure 4.10 Grey Gables grounds.
275
Figure 4.11 Grey Gables model shown at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
Figure 4.12 Cover of NRTA Journal showing one of the paths winding around Grey Gables, June
1959.
276
Figure 4.13 Grey Gables promotional spread, NRTA Journal, March 1958.
Figure 4.14 Grey Gables, NRTA Journal, June 1958, 24-25.
277
Figure 4.15 Ethel Percy Andrus and Faustine Donnell, NRTA Journal, March 1955, 10.
278
Figure 4.16-4.17 “A Pre-view of Grey Gables,” NRTA Journal, March 1957, 18-21.
Figure 4.18 Photographs of Grey Gables interiors, from “A Pre-view of Grey Gables,” NRTA
Journal, March 1957, 18-21.
279
Figure 4.19 Aldersly Danish Home, San Rafael, California, architect Rex Whitaker Allen, in
Architectural Record, October 1967.
Figure 4.20 The Acacias, NRTA Journal, June 1959, 22.
280
Figure 4.21 Acacias interiors, NRTA Journal, June 1959, 22.
Figure 4.22 “The Story of a Senior Citizen Organization,” Modern Maturity, February-March
1959, 46.
281
Figure 4.23 1960s Sun City Ad. Courtesy of Del Webb Sun Cities Museum.
282
Figure 4.24, 4.25, 4.26 1960s Sun City advertisements.
Figure 4.27 Sun City, 1960s advertising postcard.
283
Figure 4.28 Sun City, 1960s advertising postcard.
Figure 4.29 “Time cannot be stored, it must be Spent,” 1960s advertisement for Sun City.
284
Epilogue: Architecture of Care
Figure 5.1 Illustration from Dorothea J. Lewis's Handle Yourself with Care: Accident Prevention
for Older Americans (1969).
Figure 5.2 Illustration from Dorothea J. Lewis's Handle Yourself with Care: Accident Prevention
for Older Americans (1969).
285
Figure 5.3 Housing for the Elderly: Standards of Design, bedroom and bathroom design, page 4.
Figure 5.4 Housing for the Elderly: Standards of Design, windows, page 15.
286
Figure 5.5 House of Freedom, Robert B. Waring for the Douglas Fir Plywood Association, 1961.
Figure 5.6 House of Freedom, Robert B. Waring for the Douglas Fir Plywood Association, 1961.
287
Figure 5.7 House of Freedom, Robert B. Waring for the Douglas Fir Plywood Association, 1961.
Figure 5.8 President Eisenhower views a scale model of the House of Freedom, Ethel Percy
Andrus is to the right, 1961.
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