A geographical field guide to the American house. Based on an inventory of seventeen thousand homes in twenty sample cities from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Mississippi Valley, this book explores how Americans housed themselves in the 1980s.

Features: Houses are divided into categories based on form, creating five broad families--one room deep, two rooms deep, irregularly massed, bungalow, and ranch.Photographs illustrate such diverse types as the hall and parlour cottage, salt box house, and raised ranch house, and such characteristics as height, roof form, and facade material.Charts and maps plot regional variations, revealing for example the prevalence of pre-World War I housing in the Middle West and of post-World War II ranches in the South.Glossary of structural forms gives more formal definition and description for the sixty-seven specific dwelling types analyzed.