Suburbia, Building the American Dream
By Charlotte Stace
The CCCB welcomes its latest exhibition, Suburbia - Building the American Dream.
It asks the question, ‘Who hasn't longed for the American dream?’ A big house with a garden, a swimming pool and a couple of cars in the garage. A quiet, safe place to live as a family, close to nature in a people-friendly neighbourhood. This exhibition aims to trace the cultural history of this lifestyle ideal that has been endlessly reproduced on television, in advertising and in cinema. It analyses the validity and the most controversial aspects of its urban planning model.
What’s more, it draws us into the imagination of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. It goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.