IIT Graduate Design Studio: Arch 544-2     Prof. Ben  Nicholson     "Unlike its unruly counterpart, the suburban body has been wholly domesticated, and one can say that the suburbs constitute a huge petting zoo, with resident's bodies providing the stock of furry animals." J.G. Ballard 1992   Polemic The American suburban lifestyle has become the role model for La Dolce Vita across the world - from Shanghai to West London. Yet, beneath the veneer of order, normalcy and the Eurocentric vernacular that gives form to the houses, there is a wholly different world of subtle intrigue and a potential for ecstatic outburst. Grounded by readings in contemporary fiction and architectural theory, the Studio will embark on a journey to rediscover the suburban house, with the same sort of vigor with which the Modernists rejected, and then reinvented, the Victorian Home in the 1920s. The Studio might consider Modernist ideology to have the same tepid difficulties for us now that our counterparts, the 1920's Modernists, had with those ideals that gave form to the Gingerbread Victorian House of the 1880's.