Judge, 1912-09-21 · page 14 of 24
Judge — September 21, 1912 — page 14: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a satirical architectural proposal addressing housing affordability in early 20th-century cities. As land prices soared, average workers struggled to own homes with gardens. The cartoon proposes an absurd solution: a vertically-stacked house built upward on a tiny twenty-foot lot, resembling an inverted ship or fantastical structure, to maximize space for chickens, lawns, and gardens while fitting on minimal urban land. The satire works on two levels: it mocks both the desperation of working people priced out of homeownership AND the impractical architectural "solutions" proposed to solve housing crises. The elaborate, unwieldy design is obviously unlivable, exposing how ludicrous the situation has become—that such schemes must be imagined because normal housing remains unaffordable. Judge presents this ironically as practical advice while acknowledging its impossibility.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
This picture, which at first glance may seem to represent an architec- tural monstrosity, may in reality be a pictorial prophecy. The prices of land are steadily rising in cities, and the dream of the average man, in- volving a sightly and comfortable house in which to live, in conjunction with a little garden, becomes harder AN URBAN POSSIBILITY. and harder to realize from year to year with a modest income. This design shows how a man of compara- tively small means may construct a house of fair size on a twenty-foot lot, and still have ground space for chickens, lawns and a garden that will in season supply his wants. The remote left-hand corner of the lot, obscured in the picture by the house, might be devoted toa neat garage. Here is a design which should give a variety hitherto unknown to home life. Jupce, although copyrighted, waives all practical rights to the construction of a house of this design, and any of its readers who wish to do 80 may experiment with the plans, comicbooks.com