Bungalow

Though we may say so of the American ranch house, the bungalow serves as the archetypal style of American housing. As ideas of homemaking and house planning took shape around the turn of the twentieth century, designers sought a single style that embodied the evolving American ideals in a form that could be dispersed widely. While the sensibility of home design may have seemed modern, it in fact grew out of a regressive tradition known as the Arts and Crafts movement. The bungalow—meaning "in the Bengali style"—with its simplicity of design and functionality of layout, proved to be the enduring product of modernist thought combined with traditional application.

In the late nineteenth century, massive industrial growth centered Americans in cities and often in less than desirable abodes. The arts and crafts movement argued for society to change its priorities and put control back in human hands. One of the most prominent popularizers of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States was Gustav Stickley. Inspired by William Morris and others, Stickley began publishing The Craftsman in 1901 in hopes of initiating a social and artistic revolution. Reacting against industrialization and all of its trappings (from tenement squalor to the dehumanization of labor), Stickley offered readers designs for his well-known furniture and other materials—all handmade. The plans in The Craftsman led naturally to model houses, featuring both interior and exterior plans. The Stickley home, wrote the designer-writer, was a "result not of elaborating, but of elimination." Striking a Jeffersonian chord, Stickley sought a design that would fulfill what he called "democratic architecture": a way of living for all people. The design for this unpretentious, small house—usually one-storied with a sloping roof—became known as bungalow and would make it possible for the vast majority of Americans to own their own home.

The homes of such designs played directly into a growing interest in home management, often referred to as home economics. At the turn of the twentieth century, American women began to perceive of the home as a laboratory in which one could promote better health, families, and more satisfied individuals with better management and design. The leaders of the domestic science movement endorsed simplifying the dwelling in both its structure and its amenities. Criticizing Victorian ornamentation, they sought something clean, new, and sensible. The bungalow fulfilled many of these needs perfectly.

While popular literature disseminated such ideals, great American architects also attached the term to the greatest designs of the early 1900s. Specifically, brothers Charles and Henry Green of California and the incomparable Frank Lloyd Wright each designed palatial homes called bungalows. Often, this terminology derived from shared traits with Stickley's simple homes: accentuated horizontality, natural materials, and restraint of the influence of technological innovation. Such homes, though, were not "democratic" in their intent.

The most familiar use of "bungalow" arrived as city and village centers sprawled into the first suburbs for middle-class Americans, who elected to leave urban centers yet lacked the means to reside in country estates. Their singular homes were often modeled after the original Stickley homes or similar designs from Ladies' Home Journal. Housing the masses would evolve into the suburban revolution on the landscape; however, the change in the vision of the home can be traced to a specific type: the unassuming bungalow.

—Brian Black

Further Reading:

Clark, Clifford Edward, Jr. The American Family Home. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992.

bungalow. Corruption of the Hindustani bangla, meaning ‘belonging to Bengal’, applied to one-storey lightly built detached dwellings, often with thatched roofs and surrounded by a verandah. The word appears as Bungales as early as 1676 in relation to housing for servants of the East India Company, but as bungalow certainly by 1711. The word was later applied to describe single-storey houses throughout the British Empire and in the USA, and became usual to indicate any single-storey detached house (often a second home by the seaside or, more usually, a first house in a suburb, especially immediately after the 1914–18 war). Some large isolated bungalows were erected on land owned by J. P. Seddon at Birchington, North-East Kent, from the late 1860s, to designs by John Taylor and Seddon himself: the Indian idiom was preserved, with broad overhanging roofs and side verandahs, in Tower Bungalows (1880s—which also had sgraffito decoration between the applied timber decorations).

Bibliography

A. King (1982);
Lancaster (1985)

bun·ga·low / ˈbənggəˌlō/ • n. a low house, with a broad front porch, having either no upper floor or upper rooms set in the roof, typically with dormer windows.

bungalow XVII (bungale). — Gujarati bangalo — Hind. banglā belonging to Bengal.