Khrushchev, Nixon and the Birth of California Cool

When Nikita and Dicky Inspected an American Home

“Don’t you have a machine,” Khrushchev chuckled, “that puts things into the mouth and pushes it down?” Nixon didn’t respond as the crowd broke into laughter. It was a pleasant summer’s afternoon in Moscow in 1959, and the American Vice-President was heading the delegation for a national exhibition staged in Sokolniki Park.

Richard Nixon had been showing the Soviet Premier the display’s highpoints. If the purpose of their short tour was to stress “peaceful competition”, each statesman was intent on boasting of his economic system’s capacity to deliver high standards of living. But Nikita Krushchev was a master at comic scorn, and their walk became more a vaudeville act á la Abbott and Costello as the tubby Russian teased this tense American straight-man.[1] What a sight the pair made: the dour-faced Nixon with undertaker-like suit and five o’clock shadow, straining to praise unfamiliar products; the short, nearly hairless Khrushchev in pale double-breasted suit, dapper pastel tie and Panama hat, bubbling with cheeky delight.

Take how, extending his arms, the Vice-President tried to show off the colossal geodesic dome. Designed by the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller and manufactured by Kaiser Aluminium, the futuristic dome displayed American creativity mated with engineering skill. Making a display of being unimpressed, Khrushchev beamed at the nearby crowd instead.

Likewise the Soviet leader was unmoved by packets of Birds Eye frozen beans in the food section, and he made a face when sipping Pepsi Cola. Then the two reached the domestic section’s focus—a pre-fabricated “model” home fully kitted out with furniture from Macy’s department store in New York. Nixon bragged that the United States was ahead in housing the average man. Khrushchev would have none of it, scorning the longevity of this flimsy building with fibro walls: “Your American houses are built to last only twenty years,” he growled, “so builders could sell new houses at the end.” Undeterred, Nixon pressed on: “American houses last for more than twenty years,” he assured, “but, even so, after twenty years, many Americans want a new house or a new kitchen. Their kitchen is obsolete by that time. The American system is designed to take advantage of new inventions …”

The Vice-President praised the home’s cheery yellow kitchen. Sponsored by General Electric, this was equipped with the latest cooking range, combination refrigerator-freezer, dishwasher and garbage disposal, along with electrical appliances including a food-mixer, orange squeezer and pop-up toaster. Nixon talked them up. Khrushchev was bemused that the Americans thought these gadgets not only proved their technological mastery, but they enhanced the quality of daily life. Were these people kidding? So “Nikita the Corncob” set to needling “Tricky Dicky” in what news media promptly dubbed the “Kitchen Debate”.[2]

The pair traded tit-for-tat until Nixon boasted that the superiority of the United States was confirmed by colour televisions. Using an earthy Russian euphemism for penis size, the annoyed Premier interjected that the USSR was well ahead in rocket power.[3]

The six-week Moscow exhibition was intended to sell the “American way of life” to the Soviet public. Pressing the idea of a homogeneous affluent nation with a booming economy, the event focused on what were said to be typical household appliances and consumer goods. For a single rouble entry, Muscovites entered the gold anodised aluminium geodesic dome in which seven oversize screens flashed images by the thousand of clean, orderly skyscrapers, commuter suburbs, supermarkets, interstate highways, sports stadiums and new schools. Then visitors could wander through a ten-acre glass pavilion crammed with finned automobiles and new twisting lipsticks, washing machines and colour televisions, vacuum cleaners and clothes driers, lawn mowers and hi-fi systems, sewing machines and amazing Tupperware containers.

Three display kitchens had also been assembled. There was an up-to-date apartment style Westinghouse kitchen; an RCA-Whirlpool electronic kitchen of the future with robotic floor cleaner, automatic meal maker and pushbutton “planning centre”; while, in an all-gas kitchen, Birds Eye and Betty Crocker staff in brightly coloured frocks gave continuous demonstrations of cooking with biscuit, cake and icing mixes, and preparing convenience meals using frozen foods, television dinners, and tins of Campbell’s soup.[4]

Major corporations prevailed, although inclusion did mirror US State Department policy. If the press release said the exhibition’s aim was “to increase understanding by the peoples of the Soviet Union and the American people … and the broad scope of American life”, a confidential US Information Agency memo set the purpose as to “contribute to existing pressures in the long run toward a reorientation of the Soviet system in the direction of greater freedom”.[5]

Advice was taken from the US embassy in Moscow. The ambassador, Llewellyn Thompson, sent a long cable of pointers: “there is a strong emphasis on photographs of people,” he pointed out. “The Soviets have used ad nauseam the technique of showing happy, smiling faces, and I suggest that less be used of this than is apparently contemplated.”[6]

Thompson counselled against anything on consumer research, the advertising industry and product marketing. He pressed for showing an abundance of food items and domestic appliances readily available in the United States. Thompson wondered if it was possible to erect a “model” supermarket in the pavilion, or a least “a typical store specialising in one particular item such as kitchen utensils or hardware”.[7] Besides highlighting kitchenware, on his advice seven tons of food was shipped to fill cupboards and freezer cabinets, comprising 10,000 pounds of frozen food (turkey and chicken dinners, fish fingers, desserts, plus thirty-two vegetable and fruit products) as well as 4500 boxes of food and mixes (cookies, cereals, cakes, icing).[8]

Erecting a real house inside the pavilion came about via Macy’s department store, which had a commercial relationship with the home building company All-State Properties (for a time a similar house was shown on the ninth floor of Macy’s, and two more were featured at the 1964 World’s Fair). With a low-pitched roof, and designed to sit on a concrete slab, this single-storey pre-fab dwelling was split along the central corridor so that swarming crowds of inquisitive Muscovites could scrutinise a self-contained residence that Macy’s was selling for an affordable US$14,000, including appliances, furniture and colour-co-ordinated linen.[9]

That modern-style home, with an open-plan kitchen cum family room, as well as its price, became an instant debating point between the Premier and the Vice-President. It was spacious and lavish by Soviet standards. But Nikita Khrushchev scorned the quality of building materials, mocked the appliances, doubted the price tag, and emphatically declared that the USSR provided all citizens with much superior individual houses. Knowing this was untrue—Moscow alone was thick with severe new apartment buildings, prematurely aged due to negligent design, shoddy construction and hopeless overcrowding—Richard Nixon pointed to the benefits of a free market: “To us, diversity, the right to choose, the fact that we have 1000 builders building 1000 different houses, is the most important thing. We don’t have one decision made at the top by one government official.” Before the gathered Soviet reporters, the Vice-President added that Russians should assess the home’s merits for themselves.

And 2.7 million Russians did just that, flocking en masse to the American exhibition during its six weeks. Visitor responses were generally positive according to the US press, while its Soviet counterparts reported Muscovites were mostly critical. Still, the model house and kitchen became a topical talking point in the news media throughout the USSR, prompting widespread over-heated propaganda about the living standards of America’s industrial workers.[10]

The Kitchen Debate occurred at mid-point in what we now recognise as a profound social transformation in the United States. Americans were migrating as never before to detached houses on grassy plots. National census figures are revealing. Where 20.2 million citizens lived in suburban developments of large cities in 1940, this rose to 35.1 million by 1950, then 54.9 million in 1960, and 75.6 million in 1970.[11] Measuring growth as a percentage of total population, suburban dwellers had more than doubled from 15.3 per cent of Americans in 1940 to 37.2 per cent three decades later. This kept climbing to 49 per cent of the nation, with 101.5 million suburban residents by 1980.[12]

Possessing a house in a pleasant suburb had become the embodiment of a new American dream.[13] It symbolised independence, security and, especially, upward mobility. This was flagged as early as 1956 by William Whyte’s book The Organization Man, which noted a white-collar quest for advancement with the aspirations of new suburbanites seeking to distance themselves from the working class. A suburban home was, for them, instrumental in defining social differences, an attitude in which income supplanted occupation as an indicator of class. “An electrician married to a secretary could live next door to an accountant, dentist or advertising copywriter on fairly equal terms,” the urbanisation historian Kenneth Fox explains, “providing their income was sufficient to afford a similar lifestyle.”[14] Whether from Kansas or Massachusetts or Tennessee, suburban home ownership would signal for a great wave of propertyless Americans that one had joined the respected middle class.[15]

The Organization Man brought to national attention Drexel Brook, a commuter suburb outside Philadelphia, the Park Merced estate near San Francisco, and particularly Park Forest, a 25,000-resident development thirty miles from Chicago.[16] In this work Whyte was joining the cultural commentator Auguste Spectorsky who, besides immortalising the association of advertising and media with Madison Avenue, had sparked (unwanted) curiosity in Westport, a spruce commuter town in Connecticut much favoured by those in publicity and advertising.[17] But when Khrushchev and Nixon were head-to-head in 1959, one housing development represented suburbia and its glowing possibilities for the popular imagination: Levittown.[18]

Levittown was the enterprise of a family company begun by Abraham Levitt, a self-made success in New York’s property market during the 1920s economic boom. With his three sons, he had then ventured into home construction in the 1930s with Strathmore, a 200-unit suburban subdivision on Long Island where they sold house-and-land packages for $9000 to $18,000.[19] The eldest Levitt son, Bill, showed a talent at managing their building crews. Young Levitt adapted Taylorist principles, seeing if he could organise crews to complete the plumbing, electrics, windows or roofing at speed. He analysed the construction process for a house. There were, by his reckoning, twenty-seven separate steps, and it made better sense to have trained separate crews, each specialising in one step.[20] Besides speeding up the process overall, this meant he could use fewer skilled labourers on lower wages.

At the time American builders were typically small businessmen who employed multiple sub-contractors for carpentry, bricklaying and so forth. The average pre-war builder completed fewer than five homes annually.[21] The Levitts were soon producing houses at eight times that rate by hiring only non-union labour and offering cash incentives to meet their targets.

The Second World War sharpened this approach. Bill Levitt joined the Navy’s Construction Battalion—the “Cee Bees”—serving with a unit that assembled instant airfields close to battle zones across the Pacific.[22] He was among other builders and engineers with backgrounds in contracting, and they were constantly brainstorming about what they were doing as a new airfield went in, how to do it faster, for lower cost and less effort. Here was a workshop where Levitt could trial processes.

Bill Levitt was thirty-eight when Japan surrendered, and he transformed the family business upon his return to America. The new GI Bill included a mortgage subsidy, so the firm offered house-and-land packages to former servicemen. The Levitts bought farm land on Long Island, twenty miles from New York, and planned a massive estate, Levittown, at seven blocks to the acre. The company devised a no-frills house, comprising a living room, kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms, and, making a deal with an appliances firm, a washing machine and television. Called the “Cape Cod”, and set on a concrete slab (forgoing the customary basement), together with land it retailed at $7990: an attractive price given that manufacturing sector workers averaged $2400 per annum.[23] Astute advertising, and a flat deposit of $58 for ex-GIs, led to 1400 contracts being drawn up on the first day of sales in March 1949.

By the mid-1950s 82,000 people were living in 17,000 houses in the first Levittown. Using teams of specialised workers, new power tools, fibro walls, and having critical parts assembled elsewhere, Levitt & Sons had been completing thirty-six houses per day on the estate. The firm also had two more Levittowns rapidly rising in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, offered two more house models—a three bedroom “Rancher”, and a two-storey three- or four-bedroom “Colonial”—for higher prices. Bill Levitt, who now headed the company, was being portrayed by Fortune and Time magazines as the Henry Ford of housing.

His unorthodox approach to domestic construction transformed American real estate; in fact, by 1955 Levitt-style subdivisions represented 75 per cent of all housing starts nationally.[24] House-and-land packages with mass-built standardised homes were the new norm. Home ownership seemed within reach of everyone.[25]

Although produced by another company, the pre-fab house which was the impetus for the Moscow exhibition’s Kitchen Debate was an obvious variant of Levitt & Sons’ popular “Rancher” model. Likewise, the housing affordability statistics quoted by Richard Nixon in his exchange with Khrushchev repeated Levittown figures much quoted in the US media. However, a resourceful Russian diplomat, who spent a few hours in the newspaper room of the New York Public Library, could have prepared notes that flattened the Vice-President’s confident talk. Nikita Khrushchev’s nit-picking on the day, and the frosty disapproval of the Soviet media in following weeks, were comparatively flimsy when set against mounting hostility in America to what was called a pattern in “package housing”.

Take racial segregation. Despite their own ethnic background, the Levitts had not accepted Jewish clients for their Strathmore estate. This bar was relaxed for the three Levittowns, although the company recoiled at the prospect of black homeowners. Colour prejudice sprang to media attention in 1957 when William and Daisy Myers, a black couple with a young family, purchased a home from a resident of Levittown, Pennsylvania. The community there undertook a malicious harassment campaign against the Myerses, while the company explored legal means to try to revoke the sale.

Grilled by the press, Bill Levitt was defensive: “I have come to know if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 per cent of our white customers will not buy into the community.”[26] But if the early 1960s did see a Levitt subdivision in Bowie, Maryland, targeted by Civil Rights protesters, exclusion remained rife across new estates. Historically, the exodus of white residents from low-status metropolitan neighbourhoods to bottom-end “package housing” does appear linked with a migration of southern black communities to northern cities.[27]

Segregation was one face of an emerging conformism. New suburbanites appeared to shun variety. With seigneurial swagger, Bill Levitt bossed Levittown residents around. On random weekends he drove around the estates in his Cadillac convertible, taking note of how houses were maintained.[28] If a lawn hadn’t been mown, he sent a workman to do it on Monday and billed the homeowner. If he saw washing hanging on a non-regulation clothes line, fences put up in the fenceless estates, or atypical letterboxes out front, he ordered them removed. New homeowners not only tolerated such pettiness. Believing it assured middle-class values, they embraced uniformity.

Writing for Fortune magazine, William Whyte had alerted readers to this broadly-based conformism across housing estates in 1953; although it was his subsequent book, The Organization Man, which revealed the extent of social uniformity. Such as an impact on religious affiliations—to preach values consistent with new suburban aspirations, the residents of Park Forest estate instigated their own United Protestant Church, a synthesis of several evangelical denominations. Whyte stingingly dubbed it the “Church of Suburbia”.[29]

Suburban conformism probably attracted its most articulate and knowledgeable adversary in Lewis Mumford, the New Yorker’s architecture and urban planning critic. He saw nothing to redeem Levittown and its escalating clones:

A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances on uniform roads, in a treeless command waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same incomes, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in ever outward and inward respect to a common mould manufactured in the same metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.[30]

Mumford was sceptical about the style of life fostered in “package housing”. And, using perceptions of social change raised in The Organization Man as well as David Reismann’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), C. Wright Mills’s White Collar (1951), and, later, J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958), he had the resources to nurture doubt. So his much-read columns argued the new suburban culture smothered the individual, and stifled independent thinking.

An irate Bill Levitt tried to deflect mounting criticism when he launched a New Jersey estate, announcing the firm would now offer three house models. “We are ending once and for all the old bugaboo of uniformity,” he bragged, explaining, “In the new Levittown we build all the different houses right next to each other within the same section,” before adding, “Now Lewis Mumford can’t criticise us any more.’[31]

Of course, producing a narrow range of models—called in marketing the “deception of variety”—was thoroughly in line with the ethos of consumerism. Mumford was quick to point this out, although the most effective rejoinder was penned by Malvina Reynolds. She was moved to write an acerbic folk song on package housing, “Little Boxes”, which shot to national fame when recorded by Pete Seeger:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.

There’s a green one and a pink 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 …

Tom and Betsy Rath bought their house on Greentree Avenue in 1946, not long after Tom was demobbed from the army. It was in a petite suburban development outside Westport, the aforementioned charming town favoured by young families of Madison Avenue advertising men. That house appeared perfect when the Raths were ready to start a family. But, as Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit begins, it has become a millstone weighing down Tom’s weary neck when he commutes by rail, for an hour and fifteen minutes each way, between home in Connecticut and a white-collar job in Manhattan.

Published in 1955, Wilson’s novel of dashed suburban aspirations was a publishing success. Marketed as a story that spoke for former servicemen who were struggling in civilian life—the author wrote from his experiences—the book shot up best-seller lists. The very title became a popular slogan, prompted chiefly by a much repeated joke in the television show The Honeymooners. Art Carney, having climbed out of a sewer in filthy overalls, asked Jackie Gleeson, “So who were you expecting, the man in the gray flannel suit?”[32] By now a Hollywood producer had seized the option, and a movie, starring Gregory Peck in the prescribed business suit and matching fedora, was in cinemas the following year. After that crowd-drawing film the book was translated into twenty-six foreign languages, although it was banned in the Soviet Union.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit portrayed an emerging American lifestyle where, for hopeful young couples like the Raths, home ownership in a commuter suburb has required them to join the newly termed “rat race”. Tellingly, when Betsy Rath ruminates over the monotony of the neighbourhood, she admits to herself it is really “tense and frantic”:

Almost all the houses were occupied by couples with young children, and few people considered Greentree Avenue a permanent stop—the place was just the crossroads where families waited until they could afford to move on to something better … the public celebration of increases in salary were common. The biggest parties of all were moving-out parties, given by those who were able finally to buy a bigger house. Of course there were a few men in the area who had given up hope of rising in the world, and a few who had moved from worse surroundings and considered Greentree Avenue a desirable end of the road, but they and their families suffered a kind of social ostracism. Contentment was an object of contempt.[33]

Even if she perceives this, Betsy shares these neighbours’ values. She wants to shift to a higher-status suburb, and see the children in a better school. No wonder the Raths privately loathe their home, a constant reminder of their failure to ascend: “the house had a kind of evil genius for displaying proof of their weaknesses and wiping out all traces of their strengths”.[34]

Then Tom Rath lands a lucrative job in public relations at the United Broadcasting Corporation, a national television and radio network. His family can now enjoy a better style of life. However, sacrifices must be made. Having leapt several rungs up the management ladder, Rath must put in long hours of high-pressure work and has no time for family.[35]

Having squeezed Tom and Betsy Rath into an anxious corner with no way out, the novel fizzles into an implausible end. A sudden inheritance sees the couple not only move into an old family mansion, but their financial woes are lifted. By getting re-zoned extensive land holdings attached to the mansion, they subdivide it into a desirable housing estate overlooking Long Island Sound. Free to quit the United Broadcasting Corporation, Rath himself becomes a property developer—this from the man who formerly thought of his suburban house as the “trap”.[36]

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit marked a shift for post-war American fiction. Authors such as John Cheever and Richard Yates further dissected new suburbs and their disaffected residents, indeed, Yates set the benchmark with his novel Revolutionary Road (1961).

The story follows another young couple, former GI Frank Wheeler and his wife April, who have purchased a house in a similar development in Connecticut, the fictitious “Revolutionary Hill Estates”. Like the Raths, the Wheelers see suburbia as monotonous routine. Again this is typified by socialising and parties. Frank recoils when the men start by talking politics (Robert Oppenheimer, Joe McCarthy, Ed Murrow are usual) then move into “the elusive but endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity, of The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today”.[37] Conversation will be peppered with anecdotes on the “extreme suburban smugness” of others not present, because the community disparages the very conformism it observes.[38]

Frank and April Wheeler are members of what the cultural critic Harold Rosenberg had called “the herd of independent minds”. Viewing other suburbanites as empty souls immersed in domestic and corporate drudgery, the couple think themselves special, talented, intended for greater things. But they are not. And Revolutionary Road follows their marriage as, stuck in a groove, they lash out in the hothouse privacy of home (“I don’t happen to fit the role of dumb, insensitive suburban husband,” Frank rehearses before a quarrel, “you’ve been trying to hang that one on me since we moved out here.”[39]).

While the self-absorbed Frank Wheeler simmers, the novel charts his wife’s floundering and self-destructive depression. The problems are there at the book’s start: April feels humiliated after making a hash of her role in amateur theatre. Instead of comforting her, Frank is fuming. He considers his inept wife has embarrassed him before the community. We soon learn April raced into early marriage craving love, but several years later she is trapped in the role of homemaker. Lacking meaningful work, her self-esteem is non-existent.

The fictional April Wheeler was a corrective to popular images of the happy suburban housewife. Life magazine often publicised this post-war ideal, devoting an issue in 1956 to the “new” American woman while it warned of the dangers of career women (“that fatal error feminism propagated”[40]). This mind-set also ensured the extraordinary success of The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe’s seamy 1958 romance about young innocents looking for “Mr Right” in Manhattan. Devised as a simultaneously-released novel and feature film—Joan Crawford and Hope Lange were cast as unfulfilled career women marooned in big-city lifestyles—again the lesson was pressed that feminine contentment was the preserve of suburban homemakers.[41]

Nikita Khrushchev challenged the wisdom of this American outlook early in the Kitchen Debate. Standing before the display home’s open-plan kitchen, and pointing to the numerous appliances, Richard Nixon said it contained all the modern woman required.

“Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under communism,” came the Russian’s response much quoted by newsmen. Nixon brushed aside this caustic remark. “I think that this attitude towards women is universal,” he continued, “what we want to do is make life more easy for our housewives …” There was no Russian word for “housewife”, so translators strained to explain what the Vice-President was chatting about—although all knew the Soviet Premier habitually bragged of having a higher proportion of women in his nation’s workforce, some with professional careers.

Mind you, the cosy term “housewife” and what it had come to mean in post-war America was about to be dissected by Betty Friedan’s study The Feminine Mystique (1963). The ground-breaking feminist covered much territory, with domestic clichés used by Richard Nixon at the Moscow exhibition coming in for impressive analysis. Take consumerism and marketing, which Friedan called insidious. She showed how since the Second World War it had driven a dumbing-down of women’s magazines as advertisers influenced content.[42] Commercial features displaced quality fiction: “These articles lavished the artistry of a poet,” she wrote, “and the honesty of a crusading reporter on baking chiffon pies, or buying washing machines, or the miracles paint can do for a living room, or diets, drugs, clothes and cosmetics.”[43]

Then there were those splendid modern appliances intended to lighten the load on homemakers. Women who used them complained housework was increasing! Friedan had an entire chapter on how, in keeping with Parkinson’s Law, the more labour-saving machines a home had, the greater number of things needed to be done.[44] Meanwhile advertisers cunningly denied the drudgery of housework by portraying menial tasks as a way for women to “express” themselves and be “creative” (artistic claims still commonly used on television cooking shows).

Friedan’s most acid assessments were levelled at suburban estates. Besides their smothering conformism, and how they isolated women geographically, she diagnosed flaws in home design. Worst offenders were the single-storey and split-level houses built by the millions in post-war estates from Roslyn Heights on the East Coast to Long Beach on the West. Far from helping modern women, architects had engineered a “domestic trap” with the open-plan. Houses were changed into “what is basically one free-flowing room” extending from a “convenience kitchen”: the suburban wife never left her workspace.[45] Nearly forty years after Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, Betty Friedan interviewed numerous younger American women yearning for that coveted room where they might be themselves:

Among women I talked to [a] moment of personal truth was more likely to be marked by adding a room with a door to their open-plan house, or simply by putting a door on one room in the house, “so I can have some place to myself, just a door to shut between me and the children when I want to think”—or work, study, be alone.[46]

The Feminine Mystique transformed the way people understood suburbia. Its author was soon in demand for speaking engagements, much like this appearance noted in the newspaper of an American backwater:

Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, addressed members of the Stepford Women’s Club on Tuesday evening in the Fairview Lane home of Mrs Herbert Sundersen, the club’s president. Over fifty women applauded Mrs Friedan as she cited the inequities and frustrations besetting the modern-day housewife.[47]

The meeting, recorded in an old yellowing news-clipping found by a new resident after moving to a commuter suburb, is fictitious. It appears in The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin’s dystopian novel about an idyllic estate unaffected by social change. Of course, as readers familiar with this modern classic will know, things are seriously amiss with the women of Stepford, Connecticut. One by one they have been suddenly robotised and made into mindless appliances which care for the modern family and maintain its suburban home.

There was another significant presence at the Moscow exhibition in 1959, although it passed unnoticed by the noisy swarm of American journalists—and unrecognised by historians ever since. The husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames attended the gala opening, and had stood observing when Richard Nixon escorted Nikita Khrushchev through the geodesic dome. The Soviet Premier halted before their contribution, “A Day in the Life of America”, and was momentarily fascinated.

The Californian couple had been contracted by the US State Department to design a foyer display using the interior surface of Buckminster Fuller’s dome. So the first thing Muscovites encountered upon entering the exhibition was a striking visual presentation by the firm Eames Office. For this seven large oblong screens had been positioned in an array larger than a drive-in-movie screen inside the geometrically patterned aluminium dome. Initially seven tray slide projectors, each loaded with a different sequence of photographs, were to be aimed at the screens and set to run through on automatic; although as the number of still images increased, the couple had them made into seven films. The eye-catching presentation comprised 2205 photographs flashed across the screens, taking twelve minutes to complete a cycle.[48] (A composite of these multi-screen films can be viewed on YouTube.)

Eames Office was not merely a firm expert in display design and commercial presentations. Charles and Ray Eames had been at the forefront of domestic design since war’s end, in fact, art history now positions them among an elite cluster of Los Angeles innovators who shaped the post-war American home.

Driving this change was Arts and Architecture, a West Coast journal that championed progressive design and architecture under the editorship of John Entenza, an unflagging supporter of modernism. It was through this monthly magazine that designers and architects around the world came to understand a clean, elegant style dubbed “California Cool”.

Entenza had an immeasurable impact on domestic architecture through his “Case Study House” project. He foresaw an imminent building boom as victory neared. So, after costing the options, Entenza announced in the magazine’s February 1945 number an experimental project for low-cost housing in the modern idiom:

Because most opinion, both profound and light-headed, in terms of post-war housing is nothing but speculation in the form of talk and reams of paper, it occurs to us that it might be a good idea to get down to cases and at least make a beginning …[49]

Entenza bought cheap plots on semi-rural edges dotted around Los Angeles, and invited a circle of modern architects each to design a family home which could be quickly and easily built on a low budget.

Perspective drawings with ground plans, longitudinal sections and specifications were published in issues of Arts and Architecture. Economy of form mated with family-friendly design was a guiding outlook, all homes being conceived as prototypes for mass production. Everything about the program was daring. Besides using modular, standardised parts, the designs introduced into residential houses off-the-shelf components intended for commercial and industrial uses.[50] Some manufacturers donated materials in exchange for advertising, although financially the project was driven by a small pool of clients. Entenza commissioned the compact Case Study House 9 for himself, for instance, while the graphic designer Saul Bass commissioned the eloquent, airy Case Study House 20.

The Case Study Houses fell into two groups. There were steel and glass homes by Eero Saarinen, Craig Elwood, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Raphael Soriano, and the firm of Buff, Staub & Hensman. Less austere, post-and-beam wood-frame houses were designed by Julius Davidson, Richard Neutra, Rodney Walker and Thornton Abell. Besides observing the clean geometric spirit of “International Style” modernism, nearly all homes featured a concrete floor slab, flat roofs, open plan kitchen-lounge areas, tiled floors, ceiling-to-floor windows throughout, and sliding glass doors opening onto exterior patios.

The designs captured instant attention. Davidson’s Case Study House 11, the first completed home, was finished only fourteen months after the program was announced. Built near Santa Monica, it drew 55,000 visitors on public viewings in the summer of 1946. Attention was stirred by the Los Angeles Times, whose enthusiasm for the case study project hastened an impact on like-minded house construction throughout California.[51] Awareness created demand.

Joseph Eichler was first off the rank. Eichler Homes started a small estate near San Francisco in 1949—the same season Levittown was launched—and likewise offered favourable terms for ex-GIs, yet the firm’s approach to suburbia seemed visionary in comparison. Eichler, who lived with his family in a home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, appreciated modern architecture. So he commissioned the architect Robert Anshen, and the Case Study House participants Soriano, and A.Q. Jones & F.E. Emmons, to design a range of affordable modern-style houses.[52] The typical geometric-looking and flat-roofed Eichler home would be filled with light and comfortable, with open-plan living areas, floor-to-ceiling windows, outdoor patios, and attractive timber interior panelling.

Joseph Eichler also warmed to the view of urban critics like Lewis Mumford that suburbs should be designed. He had his residential estates “planned” as communities, including green belts of parklands, areas for sports and community centres, while the housing blocks on tree-lined streets were neither densely clustered nor small—there was sufficient space for a future swimming pool. And Eichler was an outspoken opponent of segregation, resigning from the National Association of Home Builders when it refused to adopt an anti-discrimination policy.

Eichler Homes built 10,000 residences on suburban estates in the San Francisco Bay area in the decade from 1949, with further developments around Los Angeles from the late 1950s. This was not at the same level as Bill Levitt, and Eichler had neither the financial turnover nor the media attention of the East Coast leviathan. Still, by this time criticism of package housing was spreading nationally—even the New York Times sagely observed, “Levittown houses [are] social creations more than architectural ones.”[53] So the contrast between humdrum builder-devised houses of the plain Levitt variety and architect-designed residences in progressive West Coast estates was stark. Already termed “California Modern”, they offered an alternative direction for the mass-constructed family home.

Seven decades on, buyers compete when an intact “classic Eichler” comes onto the property market.

Eames Office was in the thick of domestic design when the American national exhibition took place in Moscow. Charles and Ray Eames had produced two Case Study Houses which broke ground in housing construction immediately after the war. Their roomy modernist homes used prefabricated industrial materials, with steel frames assembled quickly then fibro-sheeting walls inserted on a modular system. But their commercial studio was mostly known for its furniture design, in fact, Eames chairs were being hailed as modern classics. The Museum of Modern Art had their furniture in its collection.

This chair design branched out of wartime work with plywood. The British RAF put in service the de Havilland Mosquito, a high-speed high-altitude combat aeroplane made from birch-and-balsa ply, and American military designers were likewise looking to utilise strong, light materials. The difficulty lay in moulding complex test forms. Charles Eames, a young architect working in scenery design at MGM, experimented at moulding cross-layered wood into curvilinear forms. He concocted an odd contraption in his Los Angeles apartment, a clamped form and water machine that allowed convex bending. Making contact with the aeronautics industries at nearby Long Beach and Santa Monica, Eames and the sculptor Harry Bertoia moulded sections for experimental aeroplanes. But sustained work came from another avenue. The US Navy put in an immediate order for 5000 form-fitting leg splints for trial at field hospitals. The plywood splints proved so effective that the Navy had purchased 150,000 of them by war’s end. Eames Office came into existence on the proceeds of that lucrative job.

With ambitions to move into furniture design, Charles Eames used new materials from aeronautics to rethink bentwood chairs. Working with his wife Ray, Bertoia and the designer Greg Ain, he tried to define a low-cost, high-quality modernist chair of moulded ply that could be mass-produced with ease: “The idea was to do a piece of furniture that would be simple and yet comfortable,” he recalled.[54] In December 1945, with a blaze of publicity, the company launched two dining chairs and a lounge chair. Eames Office did not look back. The group had devised the much imitated pattern for those curved wood modernist chairs that swept the world in the 1950s.[55] Licensing out production, the Los Angeles studio also proceeded to trial form-fitting shell chairs in fibreglass and experimental plastics, as well as branching into wire mesh chairs. Their smart domestic designs, which revolutionised the application of new plastics and stamped-metal, likewise quickly went into mass production. The archetypal wooden kitchen chair with its carved back and lathe-turned legs was finished, Eames introducing American consumers to moulded plywood, plastics and steel frames.

The ideas and products didn’t stop there. Looking to high-use foyers and public halls, Eames Office invented those banks of tandem sling seats which became standard at transport s in the 1960s (Sydney’s Mascot and Melbourne’s Essendon airports had row upon row of them). And the mid-1950s saw Eames Office develop leather upholstered aluminium office and lounge chairs still in demand today. One such chair would even spark Soviet alarm in the summer of 1972. Sitting in an Eames executive chair, the New Yorker Bobby Fischer kept beating Russia’s champion Boris Spassky at an international chess tournament.[56] The Soviets alleged subterfuge, claiming there was a secret device designed into the American chair. When scientific examination proved fruitless, the KGB obtained an identical Eames Office “winning” chair for the Soviet player’s use.[57] Spassky still lost.

Nixon and Khrushchev had walked past Charles and Ray Eames in the foyer to the Moscow exhibition. There was no introduction. No conversation. The political leaders watched part of the visual presentation, then moved on. They worked through the massed exhibits at a relaxed pace, although the American ambassador’s suggestion of replicating a supermarket within the pavilion had been deemed impractical (an inspection of a well-stocked suburban supermarket would be on the itinerary for Khrushchev’s forthcoming visit to the United States in September).[58]

Then, roughly thirty minutes after their walking tour began, Nixon uttered the decisive sentences, “I want to show you this kitchen. It is like those of our houses in California.” The Soviet leader weighed into the display home, jeering at the materials used to construct it, running down American design. The Vice-President was unable to defend the exhibit in similar technical terms.

Would it have changed the Kitchen Debate if Richard Nixon had known that two originators behind the house’s construction methods, at that time common across America, were standing in the exhibition’s foyer? That the display home on show, if poorly conceived in architectural terms, used design values and materials their Californian circle had introduced to domestic building? That it was furnished, too, with diluted variants of their own chairs, couches and tables? What if Charles and Ray Eames had been invited to respond to Khrushchev when he derided design, manufacturing and construction; if, in front of the gathered media, these leading designer-architects had defended American ingenuity? What would Soviet journalists have made of the husband-and-wife designers who had already revolutionised house construction and furniture manufacture?

Having vented his scorn, Nikita Khrushchev smiled at the attendant in the model home and said to his interpreter: “Thank the woman for letting us use her kitchen for our argument.”[59]