| The professionally furnished model home is a primary marketing tool of the contemporary housing industry in America. These on-site, walk-through displays offer narratives of potential lifestyle and as such, stand as key promoters of idealized middle-class values. This study is a consideration of the rhetoric of furnished model homes and how these spaces assist in establishing culturally perceived norms while denying social, cultural, and economic realities. It explores how model homes are used as symbols that market social identity and the ways in which artifacts shape, and are shaped by, communally driven perceptions of middle-class values. This dissertation explores the methods and meanings of the constructed narratives of the model home at the turn of the twenty-first century to articulate how specific values are communicated and received in presentations of domestic space and the process by which the symbolic nature of material goods is enlisted to market a particular style of family life and social interaction. The paper pursues two goals: first, an increased understanding of the methods utilized by the building industry to market idealized values, and second, an interpretation of the model home within this context.; This study begins by locating the origin of the ideals promoted in the furnished model home in order to establish the historical context of the model home in the United States. Drawing on theories of status and symbolism embodied in objects of everyday life, it then looks to specific examples of presentation in order to illuminate the participatory and coercive elements in the design, presentation, and reception of middle-class single family, speculative housing in America. It also examines the hierarchical division of domestic space and considers the gendering of spaces within these constructed domestic environments as presentations of the ideal American family at the turn of the twenty-first century. Most significantly, this study queries the ideological nature of artifacts (buildings, furnishings and decorative details) as agents of social value. |
