An Imagined Conversation Between a Levittown House and a Story About Levittown from a 1952 Issue of Architectural Digest

Levittown House: Hey, Angela! I’m the primary source you want for your paper! Well, maybe photographs of me since I’ve changed a lot since I was first constructed. Anyway, I’m the basis for everything people have to say about suburbia. I mean, Lewis Mumford snidely called me “mechanically well done” (way more passive aggressive than it sounds, I assure you), which I still feel a little slighted about considering Le Corbusier’s (just because I live in Levittown doesn’t mean I don’t speak French, Angela) whole ‘machine for living’ thing really became a catchphrase for people who “love design”, or buy the Michael Graves silverware at Target or whatever.

1952 Story from Architectural Digest: It’s seductive to think of the home as your primary source, isn’t it? Have you read Bachelard? You seem like you’d be into his ‘dwelling’ thing [Ed. note: I AM]. I’m what you really want, Angela. You think that haphazardly thrown-together pile of concrete and the tears of Italian grandmas whose sons went to fight the Fascists and came back and suddenly decided the Old Neighborhood wasn’t good enough anymore and also that maybe it wasn’t so bad to marry an Irish girl after all can give you the cultural context I can give you? Angela, I’m an architectural magazine. I make cultural context! You want to write about my influence on how we [Ed. note: can a magazine use the royal we in this sentence?] as a nation look at early suburbs and how those views became oppressively prevalent in all discussion of the modern landscape! I am your primary source!

Levittown House: Bullshit! You only exist because I was built and then you wrote about me!

1954 Story from Architectural Digest: You only ‘exist’ because you were built and then I wrote about you.

TO BE CONTINUED, sometime between now and my abstract presentation on Tuesday night.