Made In America - The Arts In Modern Civilization

Hand tools, ships, locomotives and jazz: Made in America looks for a country's truest art not in its galleries but in the ordinary things it built in order to work.

Against the settled habit of measuring American painting and architecture against European standards and finding them thin, Kouwenhoven set out a second tradition running beneath the cultivated one and called it the vernacular: the unselfconscious work of ordinary people shaping what they actually needed, whether that was a working tool, a building or a tune.

Its 10 chapters carry the case from 'Art in America' and 'What Is Vernacular?' through the quarrel between the two traditions to 'Stone, Steel, and Jazz'. Because the country grew up as a technological civilisation without Europe's inherited habits, Kouwenhoven argued, its work shows the shape of modern life more plainly than anyone else's. The book became a founding text of American Studies and still sits behind the way design historians talk about the machine-made object.