The ‘American Way of Life’ has spread its ideal of the suburban detached house across the globe. With its lush lawn, blue swimming pool and double garage, it showcases the benefits of living in the affluent suburbs of a major city. A supposedly perfect place to raise children: green, peaceful, quiet and safe. The detached house is the most common form of housing there and the architectural epitome of the American way of life. It hardly matters that the suburbs are inhabited by homogeneous groups, are dependent on constant driving, reinforce social inequalities and protect privileges. The dream of the American suburbs is powerful. Although it has been criticised time and again, it is being reinforced once more by current US politics.
For decades, these residential dreams have appeared both fascinating and alienating in film, literature, television and advertising alike. In Germany, too, around half of the population lives in their own homes.

The exhibition “Suburbia” delves into the visual worlds of the American suburbs and, in parallel, traces the history of the single-family home boom during Germany’s economic miracle years through the magazine *Schöner Wohnen*. A library of issues from the 1960s and 1970s invites visitors to leaf through the domestic worlds of post-war West Germany, exploring their political contexts, family ideologies and consumer cultures. Yet against the backdrop of a housing shortage, the climate crisis and an ageing society, the promise of freedom and prosperity in the suburbs is being called into question. So what does the future hold for the detached house? Often inhabited by just one or two people, the existing stock holds enormous potential. By extending rather than demolishing and through clever transformation, the detached housing stock offers a way out of the housing crisis: through energy-efficient refurbishment and targeted expansion of living space, significant and sorely needed new housing could be created even in the Frankfurt am Main area.

“Suburbia” is an exhibition organised by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) and the German Architecture Museum (DAM) in collaboration with the our.house research cluster at the Technical University of Munich, with a contribution from the “living+/-exhibiting” research group at the Mariann Steegmann Institute for Art & Gender in Bremen. The Wüstenrot Foundation has long been committed to developing future strategies for the detached house. It has made this exhibition at the DAM possible and is presenting here its latest research findings, developed in collaboration with the HFT Stuttgart.

Opening: Friday, 20 March 2026, 7 pm, DAM Auditorium
Exhibition: 21 March–18 October 2026

www.tempo.dam-online.de