Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
song, which became an unlikely hit for Pete Seeger the next year, and ... Figure 1: Daly City hillside houses, the “little boxes” Malvina Reynolds wrote.
Typology: Exercises
1 / 19
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes made of ticky-tacky Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes all the same There’s a pink one and a green one And a blue one and a yellow one And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky And they all look just the same
—Malvina Reynolds, 1962
The story behind this song, as recounted by Reynolds’s daughter, is that Reynolds, a folk singer, political activist and Berkeley resident, was driv- ing down the San Francisco peninsula to La Honda, in the hills behind Palo Alto, to perform at an event supporting nuclear disarmament. As she passed through Daly City, she noticed that the hills were covered with endless rows of new candy-colored tract houses. She pulled over, asked her husband to drive, and immediately wrote “Little Boxes.” song, which became an unlikely hit for Pete Seeger the next year, and^1 The has since been covered by countless other musicians, became the hymn of anti-suburban sentiment. 2
into the ranks of academics and intellectuals who scorned these new^ Reynolds, who had a PhD in English from UC Berkeley, fits neatly suburbs and all they represented. Even if her lyrics seem over-simplified today, a surprising number of contemporary critics of suburbia main- tain a similar social and aesthetic residents. (^3) As historian John Archer has pointed out, their critiques are disdain for suburban houses and their based on two enduring concepts. One is environmental determinism, positing that an architecturally regimented environment equals a reg- imented and homogeneous population, so that identical houses inevi tably produce identical inhabitants. (^4) The other is the expansion of the-
Little Boxes 23
have demonstrated that suburbanization was never limited to the white middle class as Reynolds imagined, but involved large numbers of African-Americans, working class and even poor people. Other scholars, such as Dianne Harris, have revealed that during the civil rights era, racial battles were fought in suburbs as much as in cities. Still others, including John Archer and Robert Bruegmann, have pointed out the elitism often contained in critical judgments largely founded on class- based aesthetics and taste. 7
events undermined its assertions. Daly City’s identical houses and their^ And, in fact, almost as soon as “Little Boxes” was written, actual presumably identical inhabitants began to change. In 1965, as the result of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which encouraged family unification, Daly City began attracting large numbers of immigrants from the Philippines. The 1968 Fair Housing Act opened up new markets in the suburbs to formerly excluded ethnic groups including relatively well-off Filipinos. As a result, they were able to buy affordable houses that embodied their image of a modern American life. As
Figure 1: Daly City hillside houses, the “little boxes” Malvina Reynolds wrote about, today.
24 Margaret Crawford more and more Filipinos settled there, Daly City became the self- proclaimed “Pinoy capital of America,” with the highest concentration of immigrants from the Philippines in the country. Reynolds’s dismissive assessment of their houses as “ticky-tacky”^8 misjudged their potential for transformation. Filipino homebuyers quickly restructured their dwellings to fit their needs. Their lightweight construction allowed easy alterations as immigrants occupied garages and built additions to accommodate large families and, following a pattern of chain migration, newly arrived relatives from the Philippines. Since housing costs in Daly City remain relatively low even today, Filipinos continue to arrive and, along with other Asians, settle there. By 2000, Asians outnumbered Whites in the city, their presence underlined by increasing numbers of Filipino businesses and organizations. The city’s strip malls and aging commercial blocks filled up with restaurants, stores of all kinds, nightclubs, as well as a Filipino TV station and three newspapers, to serve their needs. 9
boom on the San Francisco peninsula. Beginning in the 1950s, the^ Daly City marked the northern boundary of the postwar housing continuing construction of tract houses covered the east side of the San Francisco Bay all the way to San Jose in the south, consuming the orchards and commuter towns of San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. There, houses similar to those in Daly City were attracting young engineers and their families, drawn by employment opportunities in the aerospace and electronics industries that were developing around Stanford University, funded by the Defense department and other government contracts. 10
Peninsula’s topography more visibly mirrored its class structure. Sorted^ Daly^ City’s^ housing^ tracts^ spread^ across^ the^ hills,^ but^ the by elevation, the homes of the wealthy nestled in the foothills while cheaper developments covered the flat land along the east and south
26 Margaret Crawford computers and software, this new paradigm expelled mass-production facilities to lower-wage or off-shore regions. The numbers of production workers declined as the demand for highly-educated employees grew. The built environment reflected these changes, with upscale housing and^12 retail dominating new construction. Priced out of the housing market, low-wage workers moved south and east to cheaper areas. During the late nineties the dot-com boom drove up already high housing prices in key valley locations to astronomical levels. By 2000 a three-bedroom tract house built in the 1950s in Palo Alto was worth more than a million dollars. Owners rented them out as group houses, where international collections of roommates reflected the Valley’s changing demographics. A New York Times Magazine article described such a house, where two Taiwanese computer programmers and an Indian engineer were willing to pay more than a thousand dollars a month to rent a bedroom in an ordinary tract house because “they wanted to be as close to the action and energy of Silicon Valley as possible.” 13
continue to attract highly educated workers from all over the world.^ Although prices have come down, information technology firms There are notable concentrations of Europeans and Israelis but the largest number are immigrants from East Asia and India (a popular local joke claims that Silicon Valley owes its success to ICs, meaning Indians and Chinese, not integrated circuits). 14
arrive with families. As they settle in across the Valley, they reproduce bits^ Employment remains a largely male bastion though many immigrants of their homelands. Like Filipinos in Daly City, Indians in Sunnyvale have made their presence known with a large Hindu temple, shops, and specialized enterprises such as Bollywood Aerobics. They also generate new demands, such as the demand for high quality public schools or the multiple branches of the Asian supermarket chain Ranch 99 that now dot the Valley. 1
Little Boxes 27
Before Silicon Valley existed, another “little box,” the garage, already occupied a central role in the development of the electronic industry in the area. Although historians often cite the Stanford Industrial Park as the key physical site in the development of high-tech industry, a good case can be made that the lowly garage played an equally central role. In 1938, Bill Hewlett and David Packard rented a house in Palo Alto. Hewlett moved into the 12 x 18 foot garage, which they also used as a workshop. There, they invented and produced audio oscillators; the first product of what later became the electronics industry. Now a museum, the preserved shack is listed on the national register of historic places with a plaque reading “Birthplace of Silicon Valley.” new Hewlett Packard Company moved to a shop front in Palo Alto and^16 After this, the then built their own warehouse-style building adjacent to the railroad
Figure 3: Growing Asian and Indian populations in the Silicon Valley, described in the San Jose Mercury News.
Little Boxes 29
Steve Wozniak among other hackers and IT entrepreneurs. The next year, Wozniak built the first microcomputer in the garage of his friend Steve Jobs’ parents’ house in Los Altos. Both garages were attached to “little boxes,” slightly more expensive than those in Daly City but still affordable for a working class family like Jobs’. become so legendary in Silicon Valley mythology that they now serve as^18 These garages have shorthand for the initial stage of a startup. A recent headline in the Jose Mercury News’ SiliconBeat referred to a new company’s expansion San as “taking a startup out of the garage.” Once a new high-tech company moves beyond the start-up phase,^19 they usually rent a space in one of the cheap office and production facilities that have proliferated across the Valley. Developers construct large numbers of one and two story structures, made of tilt-up concrete slabs or prefabricated construction systems like Butler Buildings, as low-cost and expedient ways to occupy promising sites as place holders
Figure 5: Hewlett Packard’s new building in the still unfinished Stanford Indus trial Park, c. 1957. -
30 Margaret Crawford
where they can later build more permanent and remunerative buildings. These parks are collections of unfinished spaces, usually with roll-up doors and plenty of parking. Although somewhat larger, they play a role similar to that of the garage, providing cheap and flexible spaces that can accommodate any combination of research and development, production, warehouse or office functions.
hire an architect or move into a large-scale campus or headquarters^ Only after achieving considerable success can firms afford to building. Like trajectory shared by many upwardly mobile tech firms. In 1977, the Hewlett Packard, Apple followed an architectural new company moved out of Jobs’ garage into a light industrial unit on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino that could accommodate twelve employees. Drive, occupying new spaces nearby as the company grew. These were^20 They later rented a series of adjacent buildings on Bandley all single-story buildings until, during the 1980s, one team moved into
Figure 6: House owned by Steve Jobs’ parents at 11161 Crist Drive, Los Altos. Steve Wozniak invented the personal computer in the garage.
32 Margaret Crawford
costs, all of which reduced low-end real estate available for startups. For a brief time during the dot-com boom, Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park was the most expensive commercial real estate in the world. developers of entry-level office and industrial parks out to cheaper land This pushed in San Jose, a city that has replaced San Francisco as the growth pole of Silicon Valley, and its suburbs. (^21) In nearby towns, such as Fremont and Milpitas, lacking a prestigious Silicon Valley address, lower land costs encourage new office and industrial parks and their low rents continue to attract startups of all kinds.
Silicon Valley’s unparalleled economic and technical successes spawned envy and imitation. Its resident entrepreneurs’ ability to continually in- novate made it a model for aspiring tech industry centers across the
Figure 8: Apple’s first post-garage building at 20863 Stevens Creek Blvd, Cupertino.
Little Boxes 33
globe. High tech outposts can now be found in Bangalore, India, on the outskirts of Beijing near Tsinghua University, and in the numerous Sil- icon Glens, Forests, and Prairies sprouting up around the world. Easily recognizable by their built forms, which have adopted their aesthetics and typologies from the final stage of Silicon Valley evolution, the sleek, high-end research park, surrounded by greenery, they are usually top- down government efforts. Few, if any, have managed to duplicate the original’s dynamic culture of innovation or economic energy.
Valley’s unique achievements to many causal factors: its history of well-^ Observers, attempting to account for this have traced Silicon funded military research, Stanford University’s strong links with tech industries, the Valley’s mild climate, and the availability of risk-tolerant venture capital. lies in its dense communication networks, where continuous personal^22 Annalee Saxenian argues that the Valley’s success
Figure 9: Apple’s first campus at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino.
Little Boxes 35
groups of unrelated high-tech employees, and Chinese and Indian immigrant families. Conversations in roadside bars and restaurants, like the Oasis on El Camino in Menlo Park or the famous Wagon Wheel in Mountain View, where tech employees met after work to share information, produce synergies that generate new solutions, products and startups. (^25) Finally, cheap, easily available workspaces encouraged aspiring entrepreneurs to start new firms with minimal risk. Despite its economic success, Silicon Valley is a complex place with an underside of social and ethnic inequality. However, critiques focused on the Valley’s suburban environment ignore these issues to attack an easier target. Silicon Valley demonstrates that a dispersed landscape predicated on mobility and the continuous construction of banal and repetitive building types is easily adaptable to growth and change. Since both are essential elements of innovation, it is not surprising that
Figure 11: The Oasis, 241 El Camino Real, Menlo Park - one of the valley’s hang outs for inventors and engineers. -
36 Margaret Crawford innovation flourishes here. Silicon Valley’s persistently suburban environment exists as a rebuke to much current thought about urbanism. Its tract housing origins, strip development, and workplace enclaves at both high and low ends of the market are far from the dense urban fabric that many scholars offer as the normative description of a good city. The fact that the Valley’s economic dynamism derives from its rich social networks and exchanges of information challenges urban scholars who believe that productive social interaction can only take place on crowded sidewalks in walkable cities and that sprawling landscapes cannot foster diversity. Now overlaid with an environmental critique, these negative assessments of Silicon Valley are uncomfortably reminiscent of academic approaches to earlier suburban environments. Instead, these “little boxes” should remind scholars of the built environment that we need to understand meaning as well as form, carefully monitor change over time, attend to everyday habitation, and, perhaps most importantly, defer judgment.
[Endnotes] 1. “Little Boxes,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Little_Boxes 2. These are often ironic. Featuring more than 30 versions of Little Boxes as its (accessed April 4, 2013). opening theme song, the television show, Weeds, offers a far more ambiguous reading of suburban lifestyles in the 21st (^) century.
38 Margaret Crawford Landscapes Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011) 170-2; John M. Findlay, (Berkeley: University Magic of California Press)137-40. 18. Jobs’ father was a skilled mechanic and carpenter and his mother worked in a clerical position at high-tech firms like Varian. The family moved from Cupertino to the more upscale suburb of Los Altos in search of better schools for their son. Walter Isaacson, 2011) 159. Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster,
