The History of Mid-Century Ranches in Middle America

This week, lets get into the history of mid-century ranches in the midwest. After all, it helps to know where we’re coming from before we plan where to go next.

The main message here is that history happens in a context. The materials, style, choices, and culture that add up to a mid-century ranch all come from somewhere.

We'll cover:

• Why MCM history matters to a Mid Mod Remodeler
• Where the term "Mid-Century Modern" comes from
• How International Modernism and Frank Lloyd Wright set up the style
• The basics of the Post War Building Boom
• The dark side of MCM history (it's racism)
• The culture war of modernist vs traditional designs in the Mid-Century mind
• Cliff May and the California ranch
• The basics of any early Mid Mod home
• How to learn the history of your home and region

Knowing the history, helps us recognize what’s still important about our homes (and what might not be). Knowing what’s important to you will help you streamline decisions about remodeling your house.

Find full show notes and links to resources mentioned at midmod-midwest.com/002.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
We can all use a reminder that history came with
context-- what was important andwhy--before we make informed
choices about what we change,and what we shouldn't.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey there.
Welcome back to another episodeof Mid Mod Remodel.
This is the show about updatingMCM homes, helping you match a
mid- century home to your modernlife.
I'm your host, Della Hansmann,architect and mid- century ranch
enthusiast.
Our last episode was all aboutwhy ranches and other
mid-century homes are so greatand yet also a little extra

(00:33):
difficult to remodel properly.

(00:34):
This week I'll be digging into history.
After all, it helps to knowwhere we're coming from before
we plan where to go next.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
The main message here is that this all happens in a
context.
The materials, style, choices,and culture that add up to a
mid-century ranch all come fromsomewhere.
Knowing the history helps usrecognize what's still important
about our homes and what mightnot be.
Knowing what's important to youwill help you streamline
decisions about remodeling yourhouse.

(01:03):
As always, you can find detailed show notes at my
website.
In this case, they'll be atmidmod-midwest.com/ 002.
Before I get into the history ofmid-century homes, I want to
take a minute to think about whythis even matters.
Now, maybe it's a no brainer.
Maybe you're listening becauseyou are an MCM history buff.
I'm one too, but I think thatthis is a key idea for anyone

(01:26):
planning to update a mid-centuryhome.
We can all use a reminder thathistory came with context, what
was important and why before wemake informed choices about what
we change and what we shouldn't.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
It is also really important to remember regional
specificity.
I just had an amazing example ofthis pop up in my Instagram
community this very week.
I had a great interchange with anumber of my favorite Instagram,
mid-century friends.
Here's what happened.
I posted a few pictures from arecent open house of a house for
sale actually just down theblock from mine.

(01:58):
One of them was a shot of thegarage door of the house, which
was an old-fashioned, wood paneldoor with routed grooves that
had been painted in acontrasting color to match the
house.
It was really cute, and I made acomment, something along the
lines of envying this originalmid-century garage door.
Mine was replaced, and I wish itwasn't.

(02:18):
Before you tune me out;"Garage doors?!?" The garage is a huge
part of how an MCM or a newerhouse faces the street.
It's also a big part of yourdaily experience of your home.
An average American goes in andout their own garage much more
than their front door.
So, let's talk about mid centurygarage doors for a second.
I got a response from@modarchitecture.

(02:38):
That's Darren Bradley, who is anamazing mid-century architecture
photographer.
He chipped in to tell me that hedidn't think that garage door
could be original because midcentury garage doors of that
period would always have been atilt-slab garage door.
I was really fascinated by this.
I'd never heard of the fact thatoriginal mid-century houses
might be tilt-slab.

(03:00):
So I took that back to Instagramand updated my story to say,
looks like I'm wrong.
@modarchitecture says that thishouse w ould had a tilt-slab,
and then I threw it open to crowdsourcing.
Who else knows about this?
I got an amazing set ofresponses from the internet.
People telling me that theirhouse did or did not have an
original tilt- slab, and Ifollowed up on my instinct after

(03:22):
I thought about it for a littlewhile, which was to say that I
didn't think it seemed verypractical for a Midwestern house
to have a tilt-slab garage door.
It would just be a problem if itgot stuck in the snow.
Sure enough, I did a little bitmore research, and I found that
advertisements for contemporaryhouses with that and even
earlier ones in this area didhave sectional roll-up garage
doors.
And while I need to do moreresearch on the subject still,

(03:44):
the bottom line is-- this is aregional variation in
mid-century homes.
It's so important to considerhow the region affects the
history of your house, and it'sreally important to know what
that history IS before you makechoices about what is
hypothetically correct oraesthetically pleasing for you
to consider.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
All right, what do I even mean when I say mid-century
modern because that's not whatthey would've called it back
when they were building myhouse.
The term was actually coined in1984 by Cara Greenberg for her
book, Mid-Century ModernFurniture of the 1950s.
She was an expert in mid-centuryfurniture and the term

(04:24):
mid-century modern has a lot ofbroad definitions.
It can mean different things todifferent interest groups.
If you're interested inindustrial design, furniture,
interior decorating, or homes.
Region by region, MCM faded inand out a t different times.

(04:39):
For myself, speaking for Madison, it's an easy shorthand
to say 1945 to 1965, althougheven that is somewhat incorrect.
Our building boom and Madisondidn't really kick off until
1950.
Moving on from definitions, I'dlike to put this mid-century
postwar building boom into abigger context, big changing
movements that were going on.
Before we talked about the midcentury, we need to talk about

(05:00):
what came before.
Mid-century Modern, as inmodernism, is tied to a style
idea called InternationalModernism, a new idea that came
out of Europe after World WarOne and eventually spread all
over the world.
Big names in this movement youmay have heard include Walter
Gropius, M LA CORBA, CA RichardNeutra, J B AOD, Phillip Johnson

(05:24):
.
No, this podcast isn't a shortcourse on International
Modernism, but in very broadstrokes, these guys were all
interested in renouncinghistoricist architecture that
looked backward and tried toemulate old parts of history.
They wanted to explore thepossibilities of new and newly
improved construction materialslike steel frames and glass used
in curtain walls.

(05:44):
They wanted to strip away extraornament and focus on the beauty
of each material doing the thingit was meant to do.
You might have heard the phraseby Louis Kahn,'What does the
brick want to be?' That tiesright into the same idea.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
They started a school of architecture, but were
basically run out of Germany inthe 1930s for being too
socialist and having too manyJewish members of their design
community.
They ended up in future Israelin South America, in Africa, and
here in America.
Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuercame to the Harvard graduate
school of design and basicallyremade it in their image.
Mies van der Rohe came toChicago and founded a program at

(06:20):
IIT.
Together they trained ageneration of American
architects in modernism; theprevailing style of big
architecture that would beoffice building, schools,
government, etc.
, well into the 1970s.

(06:33):
Now another separate new idea that was coming along around the
same time was the architecturalphilosophy of Frank Lloyd
Wright.
He was tooling along in his ownlane of traffic, Wright was a
dedicated iconoclast who refused to be categorized into
anyone else's idea of modernismor design styles.

Speaker 1 (06:51):
He went through a number of iterations in his own
design career, starting withcreating the Prairie School
style, which was heavilyinfluenced by both regional
specificity to the Midwest, andsome Japanese influences to have
more long, low broad houses withwide overhanging gable roof
lines.

(07:12):
Then he moved forward into aperiod where he spent a lot of
time in Arizona and gotinterested in designing with
sort of Mayan style concreteblocks.
And then he wanted to create anew American suburban landscape
with a house type he calledUsonian, that's U S A-- Usonian.
He designed a handful, I thinkas many as 50, along with his

(07:35):
apprentices-- small houses forindividual homeowners that were
meant to be built in car-accesssuburbs.
Uh, the first of which wasdesigned for the Jacobs family
right here in Madison,Wisconsin, and just got listed
on the UNESCO world heritagesite along with seven other
Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.
He's a big deal, influencingmid-century architecture in this

(07:59):
area because of his Madisonconnection.
But he also was really pushingthe idea of a new kind of
living, a little bit more openplan, and yet not quite as
harshly grid-based, and youshall live in a glass box.
If you think of some of the workof his contemporaries like Mies
van der Rohe, who was designingthe Farnsworth house.

(08:21):
(Again show notes for images.)Wright was designing things that
look a lot more like mid-centuryranches.

(08:31):
But neither Frank Lloyd Wright nor the International Modernists
w ere having a huge influence onwhat the regular American house
looked like before the post-warbuilding boom.
While there were many otherhistorical styles that were
popular, one of the most commonhouse forms basically at any
point in American history, butalso certainly, before the war

(08:51):
was the Cape Cod, a very simplehouse form a plan, one or two
stories under a steep pitchedroof, probably a 12x12, or at a
45 degree angle, which means youcan often fit some extra rooms
in under the attic.
Th is s tyle of house goes allthe way back to settlement of
New England.
It always has the long side ofthe house facing the street so
you don't see the gable edge.

(09:11):
You see the flat angled part ofthe roof and a central door
lined ok ay u p with a c entralhallway and flanked by
symmetrical windows.
If you're interested in thedesign history of Cape Cod
houses, you might want to checkout architect Ro yal Barry W
ills, a Massachusetts designerwho wa s a huge booster of the
style.
(I'll link to a book about himin the show notes) At home in

(09:32):
new England, he was a strongproponent of traditional-looking
houses, updated for modernliving, with slightly modernized
floor plans.
His work was featured in national better homes
competitions and won prizes inthe late twenties and early
thirties.
He continued to practice andpromote traditionalist de sign r
ight up u ntil his death in 1962-- much to the disgust of

(09:53):
architects trained in modernistschools everywhere.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
A 1958 Saturday evening post article called him
the big man in small houses.
But of course we'll come backaround in the mid-century period
to the heavy lifting of bringingthe minimalist Cape Cod to
American consciousness done bydevelopers of mass housing like
William Levitt.
We'll come back to this.

(10:14):
So let's get into our period.
The mid century homestyle wascreated by the postwar building
boom, and it was basically aperfect storm in history.
The great depression and worldwar II had created a huge
housing bottleneck compounded bythe population boom and an
industrial leap forwardpropelled by the war.
We basically had a huge amountof energy resources-- everyone

(10:38):
pulling together, and a muchmore homogenous idea of what it
meant to be an American duringthis period.
It all added up to a giantpressure cooker that as soon as
the war ended released a coupleof things: GI is coming home and
ready to get on with theirdelayed lives and households,
industries desperately lookingfor ways to switch from full
wartime manufacturing mode intosomething they could sell to

(11:00):
peacetime.
And that manifested in thingslike: war nylon supplies being
turned into a wall to wallcarpeting, the float glass
technology that had beendeveloped during the war was
turned into a large-scale windowmanufacturing, and the plastics
that have been created toreplace limited availability of
metal and wood during the warwere recycled into a myriad of

(11:23):
home goods.
Groups and business owners, forexample, the Levitt brothers,
had perfected their mass homemanufacturing techniques while
making fast, temporary-housingfor servicemen during the war,
basically just rolled thatbusiness model over into new
development.
Harvard professor Ba rbaraMiller L ane in her book, Houses

for a New World (11:42):
Builders and Buyers in the American Suburbs,
1945 to 1965, cites four majorevents responsible for the
dramatic shift in housing typesduring this period.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
1

2 (11:55):
the new interstate highway system.

3 (11:58):
the low interest longterm government loans that are

available for veterans, and 4: the rise in the bottom line for (12:01):
undefined
lower and middle incomefamilies.
So the results of all of thesethings was a huge expansion of
urban areas with the new highwayconnections, making it possible
for people to live farther fromwhere they worked.

(12:15):
That combined with the FHA loans, gave us the broad
reaching American suburbs.
Now, it's easy to poke holeswhen we look backwards.
We can sing songs about thehouses all being made of ticky
tacky and complain(as I do)about the damage we've done to
our society by creating a worldbuilt around cars and highways--
when we used to have thisamazing interconnected transit

(12:36):
system of trolley lines andstreet cars that we took out and
threw away.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
But what's important to remember is that these early
suburban ranch neighborhoodswere exactly what middle and
working class families have beenclamoring for-- for a
generation.
The war/depression era had putan unbearable squeeze on new
housing development andcongested cities were becoming
unlivable.
The depression and war had drawnpeople into urban areas from

(13:06):
their origins in small towns,rural areas a nd other
countries.
The cities were packed withdense, out of date housing that
didn't meet modern standards ofl ight, fresh air, privacy, or
even electricity.
People were demanding a change.

Note (13:21):
A lot of emphasis is put on white flight, which is part
of it, but while there were anumber of moves to close the
door behind white families thatwere moving to the suburbs and k
eep black o nes from followingthem, the reason that everyone
was racing to the suburbs wasbecause they thought it was a
better life for their families.
So this is a good time to callout the racism that is baked

(13:43):
into mid-century housinghistory.
The expansions that wereaccelerated by new housing laws
aimed to make home buying moreaffordable, lower down payment
costs and introduced the30-year, fixed-rate mortgage
were available only to whitefamilies.
They made the dream of homeownership possible for some, and
they entrenched historicinequities in our communities

(14:03):
for many other people.
The federal housing authorityloans were not available to
black families.
A policy known as red liningbasically divided up cities into
maps and small neighborhoods tosee which would qualify for the
loans.
A good quality neighborhoodwasn't determined by

(14:26):
infrastructure or any otherfactors.
It was basically, do any blackfamilies live here?
And if so, how many?
And so, basically, you coulddowngrade the federal mortgage
rating for a whole neighborhoodif even a single black household
moved in.
The segregationist lendingpolicies and realtor association
policies(which would basicallyclub together to refuse to even
show families of color a housein a nice, new neighborhood that

(14:51):
was going in) made a hugedifference.
Red lining., that policy ofdowngrading neighborhoods,
wasn't outlawed until the FairHousing Act in 1968, which means
that families of color basicallymissed out on the potential for
home equity-derived prosperityof the entire mid-century era.
Do you want to learn more aboutthis horrifying element of
America's housing history?

(15:12):
I recommend that you start withTa Nehisi Coates' The Case for
Reparations, published inAtlantic.
(I have a link to that in theshow notes.) All right, so back
to our housing boom.
I would cite that there are twobig direct influences on the
middle-American ranch house.

(15:32):
We have to remember that therewas a culture war going on
between modern versustraditional design approaches at
that time.
On both sides of the issue,people were arguing that this
was not just an aestheticdecision, it was a moral one.
Modernism, the kind t hat'sassociated at the low end with
ranches and at the high end withthe kind of classy,
post-and-beam, California-stylearchitecture was a signifier of

(15:55):
wealth, intellectual, artistic,elite and prosperity.
It was being pushed bydesigners, but it was not
necessarily being picked up bythe home buying public.
Regular folks, were oftenlooking f or a very traditional
or normal looking house.
By that, they meant minimalistCape Cod colonial style.
So during the immediate post war, the Cape Cod house was the

(16:16):
most common house type.
But then as it passed into theearly fifties it lost its title
as America's most popular house,and the ranch became the most
popular.
But the Cape Cod was a staple ofAmerican home design all the way
through the period.
When you look back at thereferences, professional
architectural magazines werepublishing only modernist
houses, but popular homemagazines, like Home and Garden

(16:37):
and House Beautiful, wereshowing both modern and colonial
Cape Cod style homes.
In either case, they had thesame kind of guts inside.
The open plan was the definingelement of modern home design,
and it reached America via theranch house.
If you have time to follow up onthe links, I'd love to show you

(16:57):
this image of a speculative homeplan.
The floor plan is exactly thesame, and it has two options for
how you can build it.
You can either build it with alittle peaked roof, like a
little cottage, or you can buildit with a California flat roof.
And it's very modernist andavant guard, and it is exactly
the same house.
So I'm talking about the historyof the ranch in middle America,
not necessarily a Californiastyle ranch.

(17:19):
From our perspective, sitting here in Madison and the Eastern
middle of the U S, we've gotthis idea of the California
ranch coming at us like afreight train from the West.
We also have the very differentinfluence of the traditional
Cape Cod, being massmanufactured, coming at us from
the East.
In either case, a mid centuryranch here is going to look very

(17:40):
different.
It's partly due to climate.
We needed to design homes alittle differently to
accommodate big seasonal weatherswings and snow loads on the
roof.
I think in many ways the mostmodest Midwestern ranches look
like a hybrid-- a cross betweenthe California avant-garde and
the more traditional Cape Codcottage.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
So, let's talk about these two styles.
The California ranch is creditedto a fellow named Cliff May,and
he had this idea pretty early.Hewas already working on it in the
30s.
He was not an architect or eventrained as a designer.
He was a saxophone player turnedfurniture designer who created
the first ranch house as a fancyshowroom to show off his

(18:20):
furniture.
There's an interesting factoid,from Bruce Robertson's essay and
carefree California cliff mayand the romance of the ranch
house.
He points out that May had cuthis teeth on home maintenance
working on his family's suite ofrental properties, and because
his mother was often sick, heand his brother had to do a lot
of traditionally-gendered,female housekeeping duties.

(18:41):
So Robertson speculates that bytaking on those then housewifely
duties, it might've inspired theadult May to embrace the
efficiencies of a modern openplan layout and open kitchen.
For Cliff May, his design of theranch house had three basic

tenants (18:56):
livability, flexibility and unpretentious character.
By livability, he meant openfloor plans that were informal
and created a seamless flowbetween rooms.
He wanted attached garages tointegrate the car into modern
life, and he wanted a friendlyinformal and as he put it, gay
environment within the house.
He wanted flexibility withmultipurpose rooms, sort of

(19:19):
casual family dens rather thanformal living rooms which could
be adapted as children aged, andfamily needs changed.
He also wanted an unpretentiouscharacter.
He wasn't looking at a fancy,highly-embellished type of house
with a formal entry or asymmetrical front on the street.
He was looking for a casualhouse, where you could throw an

(19:41):
informal party or host abarbecue.
So, basically, remember cliff May's idea of the ranch--
livable, flexible, andunpretentious.
The flip side of that coin wasthe mid-century Cape Cod, or as
it's also known, theminimal-traditional house.
The idea behind this kind ofhouse was basically efficiency.

(20:03):
The Levitt brothers at theheight of their era were doing
these incredibly quickly, andthey had an assembly line system
set up in open air.
So basically one truck wouldcome and start pouring the
concrete slab for one house.
It would go on to the nextproperty and to the next
property.
Meanwhile, another truck wouldcome along and deliver all of
the studs, wood framing, andfinish materials in a giant

(20:25):
pile.
Then a crew could come along andstart framing.
A different crew would work onfinishing.
A different crew would work onpainting, and these houses could
be smacked together as quicklyas possible.
He knew what people were askingfor, and so he was giving them
that reference to thetraditional throwback in it's
basically most boiled down form.

(20:44):
But the most urgent factor for postwar home design, whether
ranch or Cape Cod, was low cost.
Right after the war, there wassuch a crunch that houses had to
be very low cost and very small,usually under a thousand square
feet in 1950 and only a third ofnew houses built in 1950 had
five or more rooms-- a threebedroom house, basically.

(21:09):
The more common four room housewas a kitchen, a living room,
and two bedrooms.
These houses did have bathroomsinside, but somehow that didn't
count as a room.
One of the reasons that peoplewere emphasizing the patio as
living space was because therewasn't quite enough living space
inside the house.
Thomas Hubka is a professor ofarchitecture at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School ofArchitecture, and he specializes

(21:31):
in vernacular, or basicallyregular people, housing.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
I was able to interview him for my recent
article, and he pointed out thatthe ranch was such a shocking
departure from everything thathad gone before because up until
that time, going back to likethe 10th century, a double-story
house, two or more floors hadalways been the aspirational
house, the Mark of Gentry.
So the idea that middle-classfamilies were aspiring to single

(21:56):
floor houses, and that evenwealthy people were building
high-end ranch houses, singlefloor- just with a few more
bells and whistles was really adramatic change.
He studied the basic spatialorganization and he sees the
defining qualities of a ranch asbeing divided into separate
areas for car, for living, andfor sleeping- often lined up

right next to each other (22:17):
garage living, kitchen, bedrooms area.
But that on the outside, it'spresented as a unified whole
with little differentiationbetween the three.
The ideas that started outreally big in California back in
the day had been boiled down tosmaller, more modest ideas here
in the Midwest.
But that doesn't mean that wecan't, tie back and forth

(22:39):
between them.
The bottom line is you can nevergo wrong by learning more about
the history of your home.
That might be learning moreabout what was going on in the
year or decade when it was builtgenerally across the country.
What was going on in your regionspecifically?
What was normal?
What was the contemporary bestbuilding practice?
Why designers, builders, andhomeowners did what they did.

(22:58):
I recently heard from someone who just bought and is planning
to remodel their mid-centuryhome.
They have a closed kitchen, andthey're deciding whether or not
they want to open it to the restof the house.
But one of the things theylearned is that the original
architect has been quoted to saythat he wasn't very interested
in kitchens, and he thought ifpeople wanted to eat they could
just eat out.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
So that's one thing to factor in as they consider
how precious his design of akitchen might be to them.
If he didn't care about it,maybe why should they?

(23:25):
It is also really interesting (as with the garage door) to
learn what was going on at thetime of your house in other
regions.
Was there a great idea that wasabsolutely contemporary with
your house but just didn'thappen to be hot in your area at
that time?
Maybe the time has come to crosspollinate your house.
I think one of the bestresources to do your own design

(23:46):
research is to just look aroundyour own neighborhood, to look
at other neighborhoods in yourarea built at the same time but
with different budgets or stylesor different contractors.
One thing you can do is justtalk to your elderly neighbors
and ask them questions about howthe neighborhood has changed.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
You may also be able to find primary sources.

(24:03):
For myself, I am so lucky to have access to the Parade of
Homes.
In Madison, this program startedin 1952, and every year at the
local builders association wouldget together 10 to 20 local
builders who put their best,cool ideas into the most modern
house of the moment.You can goaround and see them built in
neighborhoods across the westside of Madison, or you can go

(24:25):
to the Home Builders Associationoffice and visit their retro ad
literature.
For each one, they've got ablurb, a sketch, a plan, and a
perspective of the house.
They tell the features of thehouse, which is interesting in
two ways.

1 (24:38):
it tells you what was new about this house, and 2
tells you what they thought wasworth mentioning.
The advertising literature forthe 1952 parade of home is so
modest.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
They're saying things like, Hey, come check out this
amazing two bedroom house.
It has a bathroom.
The bathroom has a really nicemirror over the sink.
It's an amazing insight into,was that the coolest thing you
can think to say about thishouse to sell someone on it?
Anyway, looking into the historygives this idea of what people
at the time thought was cool,and what they took for granted,

(25:11):
and then we can make our ownchoices about how we want to
work with that.

(25:16):
Knowing what's important from history will help us place
things into context.
It will help us recognize what'sstill important about our homes
and what isn't, and it'll helpus make important decisions
that'll streamline theremodeling process for each
house we take on.
Thanks for listening while I dugup a little bit of housing
history to help us position theMCM ranch into its broader

(25:38):
context.
I'll continue to weave inhistorical background of
mid-century homes as the seasoncontinues.
In next week's episode, Then and Now, I'll talk a bit about
how life and lifestyles havechanged since the mid-century
era and how that affects the waywe live in homes that were built
for our parents' andgrandparents' lives.
There are some necessary updatesto match mid-century homes to a

(25:59):
modern life.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
If you want to dig a little deeper, I've put together
a list of my favoritemid-century resources, books,
articles, websites, productsuppliers, etc., and you can
find all of that in the blogpost or a downloadable PDF that
is attached to the show notesfor this episode.
Download that and explore atyour own pace.

(26:18):
As always, if you have ideas, comments, or questions about
your mid-century home remodel,drop me a message in the show
notes or hit me up via directmessage on Instagram.
I'm@midmodmidwest.
You can find those detailed shownotes this time with so many
ways to follow up and learn moreabout mid century history plus a
bunch of pictures to illustrateall the buildings and style
ideas I've been talking about onmy website at www.midmod

(26:39):
-midwest.
com/002.
If you liked this podcast helpme spread the word by sharing it
with a friend would also find ituseful.
So long for now.