Alice Constance Austin’s City Plan to Reduce Domestic Drudgery
Alice Constance Austin (1862 – 1955) was born in Chicago and moved with her family to Santa Barbara, California. The family traveled extensively around the US and Europe. On her travels, Austin took note of geological formations, tunnels, and towns; her paper “Chalk and Chalk Towns” was published in the Proceedings of the Santa Barbara Society of Natural History in 1902. It is not known how Austin acquired her design skills, but in 1888 she designed a home in Santa Barbara for her parents and herself.
Austin was a feminist and socialist as well as a designer. Around 1914, she had the opportunity to pitch her design for a socialist city to socialist attorney and politician Job Harriman and several hundred like-minded people. They had left Los Angeles to develop their own community in the nearby Antelope Valley, living in tents and a few rough buildings on the site while the planning the construction of Llano del Rio, a Utopian community.
Elevations and sections submitted with Austin’s patent application. (Paul Kagan Utopian Communities Collection. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.)
“Austin’s designs emphasized economy of labor, materials, and space,” writes Dolores Hayden, a scholar who has studied Austin’s work and writings extensively. Austin also explained in her presentation to the cooperative how her proposed design emphasized beauty, solidarity, and equality. She organized housing for ten thousand in a radial plan on a square mile of area, leaving room for plenty of agricultural and park land.
From about 1915 to 1917, Austin developed her design for the Llano del Rio community. So as to relieve every woman in the community from making nearly 1,100 meals a year and cleaning up after each one, her city had just one kitchen per 1,000 residents, each operated by hired staff. Austin anticipated the savings from omitting individual kitchens could pay for a tunnel system that would be used to transport meals from a central kitchen to the patio dining area of each low-maintenance concrete home.
In addition to centralized kitchens to free women from “hatefully monotonous” domestic work, Austin designed the community with centralized laundry. The centers were also planned to house kindergartens for the neighborhood’s children. The homes designed for Llano del Rio included built-in furniture and carpet-less floors with heated tiles to prevent dust from collecting in hard-to-clean places. The idea of collective housekeeping did not originate with Austin; she had studied the writings of British urban planner Ebenezer Howard and American social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among others.
There were many roadblocks on the path to realizing the plans for the Llano del Rio community including an unscrupulous land speculator, a failed irrigation system, and financial difficulties. Austin’s housing development was never built. Austin applied for a patent for her design, and in 1935 she published a 84-page booklet documenting her ideas. It was called The Next Step: How to Plan for Beauty, Comfort, and Peace with Great Savings Effected by the Reduction of Waste. The Public Works Administration referenced Austin’s publication in its index of current thought on housing problems.
No records of other design work by Austin have been found. She died in Los Angeles in 1955 at age 93.
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Sources:
Alice Constance Austin, “Chalk and Chalk Towns.” Proceedings of the Santa Barbara Society of Natural History, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1902: 21 – 30.
Dolores Hayden, "Pioneering Women of American Architecture: Alice Constance Austin."
Dolores Hayden, “Two Utopian Feminists and Their Campaigns for Kitchenless Houses.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 274–90.
T.M. Van Bueren, “Between Vision and Practice: Archaeological Perspectives on the Llano del Rio Cooperative.” Hist Arch 40, 133–151 (2006). https://doi-org.ccsu.idm.oclc.org/10.1007/BF03376719
Public Works Administration Housing Division Research and Information Branch, “Housing Digest,” November 1935: 71 and January 1936: 6.