Living the Dream – Rethinking the Housing Crisis

The “American Way of Life” ideal of a detached home somewhere in suburbia spread to other countries. With a verdant lawn, a blue pool, and a twin car port it symbolized the benefits of life in the affluent green belt on the big city limits. A purportedly perfect place to raise the children: green, peaceful, calm and safe. The detached house is the most popular form of housing in the US and the architectural epitome of the US way of life. The fact that the suburbs are inhabited by homogeneous groups hardly plays a role, let alone that they depend on constant use of a car, strengthen social inequalities, and protect privileges. The suburban dream has a powerful influence. Although it has been criticized for decades, it is being reinforced by the current US politics.

For decades, these residential dreams tended to capture the imagination of film, literature, TV, and advertising alike, but were likewise somehow disconcerting. Today, in Germany about half the inhabitants also live in detached houses. Suburbia immerses itself in the (visual) worlds of US suburbs and parallel to that tells the story of the boom in detached houses in the post-war years of German economic reconstruction – through the agency of the magazine Schöner Wohnen. The collection of issues from the 1960s and 1970s invites viewers to leaf their way through the home interiors of post-war West Germany, explore its political backgrounds, ideologies of the family, and consumer worlds.

Against the background of a lack of housing, the climate crisis, and an aging society, the promise of freedom and prosperity in the suburbs is starting to be questioned. What, then, is the future of the detached house? Frequently only inhabited by one or two persons, the existing houses afford immense potential. A way-out of the housing crisis lies in wait, requiring us to build on the single-family dwellings rather than tearing them down and intelligently transform them: By modernizing their energy consumption requirements and carefully expanding the amount of living space they provide, even in the suburbs around Frankfurt considerable urgently needed new housing could be created.

Suburbia is an exhibition by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona and Deutsches Architekturmuseum in cooperation with TUM Munich as well as with a contribution by the wohnen+/-ausstellen research group      at the Mariann Steegmann Institut, Kunst & Gender, Bremen.

The Wüstenrot Stiftung has for many years now supported the development of future strategies for detached houses. It has kindly enabled the exhibition at DAM and is presenting its current research findings there, which it has made together with Stuttgart Technical University of Applied Sciences.

Press tour: Thur, March 19, 2026, 11 a.m.
Opening: Fr, March 20, 2026, 7 p.m., DAM Auditorium
Exhibition:  March, 21 – October 18, 2026

The press images shown here as previews are available to download in print quality via the button below:

Press images – available free of charge for one-off, purely editorial use in the immediate context of the exhibition and for the duration of the SUBURBIA exhibition until 18 October 2026, provided the copyright holder is credited.