1. Wright, Gwendolyn, Building the Dream. A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), p. 75.Google Scholar

2. Hayden, Delores, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), pp. 14, 101.Google Scholar

3. Thoreau, Henry D., Journal, Volume 1:1837–1844 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 277–278.Google Scholar

4. Very useful is Joel Nydahl's introduction to The Collected Works of John Adolphus Etzler (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars', Facsimiles & Reprints, 1977)Google Scholar; also see Linstromberger, Robin and Ballowe, James, “Thoreau and Etzler: Alternative Views of Economic Reform,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal, 11, No. 1 (Spring, 1970), pp. 20–29Google Scholar. For a broader study of Fourier's influence on American architecture, see Hayden, Delores, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976).Google Scholar

5. Etzler, as quoted by Thoreau, , “Paradise (to be) Regained,” Reform Papers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 41.Google Scholar

6. Thoreau, ibid., pp. 45–46.

7. Ibid., p. 42.

8. Etzler, , Collected Works, p. 75.Google Scholar

9. Thoreau, Henry D., “The Landlord,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 13, No. 64 (10, 1843), pp. 427–430Google Scholar. This sketch was actually printed in the Democratic Review a month before “Paradise (to be) Regained.” The publication of the latter was delayed when O'Sullivan balked at its criticism of the communitarians, though he finally let the review stand as it was written. See The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Harding, Walter and Bode, Carl (New York: NYU Press, 1958), pp. 88, 130–134, 142Google Scholar, for relevant material.

10. Ibid., p. 427.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 428.

13. Ibid.

14. Etzler, as quoted in “Paradise (to be) Regained,” p. 37.Google Scholar

15. Thoreau, , “The Landlord,” p. 428.Google Scholar

16. Hayden, , Redesigning the American Dream, p. 99.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., p. 101.

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21. As Amos Rapoport has noted, “Very early in recorded time, the house became more than shelter for primitive man, and almost from the beginning, ‘function’ was much more than a physical or utilitarian concept. … If provision of shelter is the passive function of the house, then its positive purpose is the creation of an environment best suited to the way of life of a people — in other words, a social unit of space.” House Form and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 40.Google Scholar

22. Downing (1815–1852), who began as a landscape architect, became the most popular and influential writer on domestic architecture in his time, primarily through two books: Cottage Residences, Rural Architecture and Landscape Gardening (1842; rpt. New York: Library of Victorian Culture, 1967)Google Scholar, and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850; rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1968).Google Scholar

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24. Cleaveland, Henry W., Backus, William, and Backus, Samuel D., Village and Farm Cottages (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1856), pp. iii, 2Google Scholar. For similar expressions of this widely held view, see Wheeler, Gervase, Rural Homes (New York: Charles Scribner, 1852), pp. 274–276Google Scholar; and, a decade later, in Holly, Henry Hudson, Country Seats (New York: D. Appleton, 1863; rpt. Watkins Glen, N.Y.: Library of Victorian Culture, 1977), pp. 38–39Google Scholar. Both of these acknowledge the influence of Downing.

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26. Ibid., p. 38.

27. Downing, , Cottage Residences, p. 2Google Scholar; see also Country Houses, pp. 1–39.Google Scholar

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30. Ibid., pp. 23–24.

31. Ibid., p. 1. See also Vaux, Calvert, “Hints for Country House Builders,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 11, No. 66 (11, 1855), pp. 763–768Google Scholar; Vaux, who became Downing's partner in 1850 (and, after Downing's death, the partner of Frederick Law Olmsted), echoes Downing's argument, saying, “The lack of taste perceptible all over the country, in small buildings, is a decided bar to healthy social enjoyment; it is a weakness that affects the whole bone and muscle of the body politic.” See also Holly, Henry Hudson, Country Seats, pp. 29–30.Google Scholar

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34. Ibid., pp. 35, 36.

35. Downing, , Cottage Residences, p. 12Google Scholar. See also Country Houses, pp. 46–47.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., pp. 29–30.

37. By the time Downing wrote Country Houses (1850)Google Scholar, he had learned to make claims for the “republican” spirit of his aesthetics; in the earlier Cottage Residences (1842)Google Scholar, however, he is less guarded about revealing the social implications of his associationalism, as in this description of his design for “A Cottage in the Pointed or Tudor Style”: “The exterior of this dwelling is designed after the old English architecture of the tudor era, a style replete with interesting associations, as it is the genuine and most characteristic mode of building long ago prevalent in the finest country-houses of England, associated by ‘lay and legend ten times told’ with all that is brightest and noblest in the history of our mother country” (p. 51).

38. Downing, , Cottage Residences, pp. 13–14Google Scholar. Downing quotes Uvedale Price's strictures against the use of white: “An object of a sober tint, unexpectedly gilded by the sun, is like a serious countenance suddenly lighted up by a smile; a whitened object like the eternal grin of a fool.” Calvert Vaux compares the impression created by the popular combination of white siding and green shutters to the effects of tobacco-chewing on the palate! (“Hints for Country Houses,” pp. 773–775Google Scholar). For related strictures against the use of red, see Henry Cleaveland, who calls it “an abomination to the eye” (Village and Farm Cottages, p. 58Google Scholar), and Allen, Lewis F., who, in Rural Architecture (New York: C. M. Saxon, 1853)Google Scholar, calls red exteriors “a monstrous perversion of good taste” (p. 47).

39. Thoreau, , Walden, p. 48.Google Scholar

40. Thoreau, , The Journal of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1906), X, 315–16Google Scholar (March 20, 1858); see also vol. II, 343; vol. XII, 192–3, 203.

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44. Thoreau, , The Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906), III, 181–83Google Scholar. See Wright, Nathalia, Horatio Greenough, The First American Sculptor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), pp. 265–269CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a concise account of Greenough's connections with Emerson and the Transcendentalists. See also Metzger, Charles R., Emerson and Greenough: Transcendental Pioneers of an American Esthetic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954)Google Scholar, and Matthiessen, F. O., “The Organic Principle,” chapter IV of American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941; 1974), pp. 133–175Google Scholar. Greenough's first, and perhaps most important, statement of his organic theory of architecture was an essay on “American Architecture” which was printed in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review for August, 1843, just two months before Thoreau's “The Landlord” and three months before “Paradise (to be) Regained” were printed in the same periodical. Thoreau was in New York and negotiating with O'Sullivan when Greenough's essay appeared, but when Emerson introduced Greenough's work to Thoreau in 1851, Thoreau left no record of remembering either the man or his writing from eight years earlier.

45. Greenough, Horatio, “American Architecture,” in Form and function, ed. Small, Harold A. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), pp. 61–62.Google Scholar

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50. Ibid., pp. 45–46.

51. Ibid., p. 3.

52. Vaux, Calvert, Villas and Cottages (New York: Harper & Bros., 1857; rpt. New York: De Capo Press, 1968), pp. 111–116Google Scholar. Much of the material in this book, including this vignette, had appeared in his essay “Hints for Country House Builders,” cited earlier.

53. Ibid., pp. 42–43.

54. Thoreau, , Walden, pp. 242–243.Google Scholar

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56. In Redesigning the American Dream, Delores Hayden observes, “The dream house is a uniquely American form, because for the first time in history, a civilization has created a Utopian ideal based on the house rather than the city or the nation” (p. 18).

57. Thoreau, , Walden, pp. 243–244.Google Scholar

58. Ibid., p. 243.

59. Ibid., pp. 244–245.

60. Ibid., p. 141.

61. Ibid., p. 85.

62. Wright, Gwendolyn, Building the Dream, p. 88.Google Scholar

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70. Ibid., p. 39.

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77. Ibid., p. 187.

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