Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life

Rating:
Summary: incoherent
Review: This book reads like a few (mostly mediocre) magazine articles pasted together- one chapter talks about the history of homes (and how every conceivable domestic arrangement ever invented turned out badly for women), another criticizes suburbia for isolating women (not really true now, since suburban women generally have cars), another talks about experiments in infill housing, another criticizes cities for being hostile to women - but I could never figure out exactly what this book was about, or what Hayden liked other than a few small-scale housing experiments here and there.

Rating:
Summary: redesigning the american dream
Review: This is the best book about architecture that I ever read. Although I am not a feminist, it revealed to me the relationship between a building and the society that produced it -- a revelation that seven years at architecture schools (Yale and Princeton) did not provide. Any designer who want to design for another person needs to understand the hidden cultural codes that influence their creation of a built environment. Reading this book was the best way for me to understand what impact social biases can have in design.