Hats off to anyone who is ambitious enough to attempt a series of exhibitions, a symposium and a publication on the neglected topic of American domestic vernacular architecture. There is, perhaps, no environmental expression so telling of our society, so indicative of our values, our way of life and our aspirations as is the American home. It is where we spend the bulk of our time, where we have invested great quantities of land resources and where we, individually, devote a significant part of our financial and personal capabilities.

It is not an area, however, of much distinguished scholarship. Although there has been promising recent work on such selected topics as the image of the house or the role of women in the development of the house and domestic communities, the American home is still not a topic that has received the attention it deserves among significant environmental analyses. This loose assembly of essays is a baby step toward ameliorating that deficiency.

Home Sweet Home suffers from the common afflictions of many such volumes of collected articles. The essays are uneven in quality and depth of treatment. They vary from specific and rather thorough pieces such as the essays by Barbara and Arlan Coffman on architectural construction toys and by John Chase and John Beach on “The Stucco Box” to entries that are little more than one-liners such as Gere Kavanaugh’s notes on regional color.

There is also little that binds the essays together. They certainly cannot be viewed as “a cohesive study of the history of American domestic architecture” as the book claims. Despite a clever, if rather forced, attempt in the table of contents to weave their diverse topics together, the essays remain a series of vignettes easily read and digested independent of each other. The breadth of the topic and the decision to include such a wide range of topical studies (from children’s makeshift play environments to William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon) makes this stretch almost inevitable.

It is also a bit disappointing that the essays do not address themselves more directly to a true “vernacular” architecture. As Charles Moore notes in his introduction, this would be” the commonest forms, materials, and decorations of a place, period, or group.” But what is studied and lauded here is not so much what is common but what is exceptional and exaggerated.

But this is quibbling. The book does make a real contribution to understanding a certain sort of American vernacular home in particular the 20th Century Southern California vernacular home. Most of the authors are Californians and the great majority of examples in the book are drawn from that region. These facts place Home Sweet Home alongside a substantial stream of architectural literature spawned, in part, by Arts and Architecture in the 1950s, which has doggedly and admirably charted the architectural development of Los Angeles and Southern California. Several of the authors here-notably Esther McCoy and David Gebhard – have been leading figures in that movement. Any region in America would be fortunate to benefit from the kind of scrutiny which they have consistently applied to their place. It is encouraging to see them joined by a number of new insightful voices in this continuing dialogue.

However, the lessons here are not just for Californians but also for the rest of America that has been so influenced by a post-war “marketed” domestic vernacular. As one author notes, “Californians have not led their lives much differently from the rest of the country; they have just tended… to do it in the extreme.” And, perhaps for that reason, they have been seen as leaders in which Charles Moore calls the “ever-quickening and, let’s admit it, ever-fashionable” field of domestic vernacular building. Home Sweet Home, at its best, leads us to a better understanding of that important building phenomenon.