In 1797, the architect Asher Benjamin published Country Builder’s Assistant, making his book the first, but certainly not the last, architectural pattern book written in the United States. Benjamin himself would go on to author several more books of architectural patterns and house plans, competing with the publications of new generation of American architects like Andrew Jackson Downing, a proponent of the idea that homes could reflect the people who lived inside them. The desire to control and polish that reflection guided 100,000 individuals to purchase kit homes from Sears, Roebuck and Company between 1908 and 1940, and it drove the expansion of house planning guides into popular publications like Better Homes and Gardens Since the 1930s, Better Homes and Gardens has provided its readers with floorplans and elevations of new home models which readers may then take to local builders for construction. The Better Homes plans, like Benjamin’s patterns and the Sears kits, were not meant to be dictatorial; consumers could customize the plans and parts to suit their needs and, as Downing would point out, their taste.
[Continue reading this article by Ellen Blackmon at: http://www.jmu.edu/history/Spotlight/blackmon-for-webpage.pdf]
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