Literary Dose #13

"Particularly after the war, FHA's endorsement of prebuilt subdivisions paved the way for developments like Levittown that did not adopt the assembly-line house but rather turned the entire site into a giant assembly line. Holes were dug, slabs poured, and framing hoisted simultaneously in a stepwise sequence across the whole of the site within a huge choreographed machine that was several thousand acres large and produced fourty [sic] houses a day. Earth-moving equipment lined up and dug the holes for several buildings at once or planted a uniform number of shrubs on the lot. Even appliances were delivered to several houses at once. The balance sheet for this kind of subdivision was restructured as well. The bottom line did not only correspond to an individual address but to a process applied to hundreds or even thousands of homes. Thus, a developer might evaluate the costs of pouring a thousand concrete slabs, and as a consequence of this new tabulation of costs, find new ways to economize in the building process. Reducing the thickness of a slab or of structural members on an individual home would provide negligible savings, but within a summation process, alterations to several thousand slabs or beams provided significant savings. From prefinancing, prebuilding, and prefabrication evolved an entirely new residential fabric in which all the negotiations among the pieces occurred all at once and would be undifferentiated by iterative growth over time. In return for more predictable resale value, the home buyer bought the house lot together as well as accepting simultaneous development of a very similar fabric throughout with more predictable resale value."

- Keller Easterling, from Organization Space (1999).