In the beginning, there were seemingly infinite natural resources and the violent consolidation of one-third of a continent under a single flag. In the middle, there was air conditioning.

What separates the history of architecture in the United States from that of Europe is essentially a matter of scale, speed, and spectacle. Europe may have invented the petite bourgeoisie (which America arguably perfected), Art Nouveau, the Bauhaus, and the International Style, but it was also a place of castles and borders, princes and bureaucracy. The US, meanwhile, played fast and loose and big. This is, after all, where Mies van der Rohe—who once designed a memorial to the fallen socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—became a friend of the dynastic family behind the Seagram liquor fortune. It’s the place that made Walter Gropius, stripped by the war of his Weimar-era tenderness, dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.

Why didn’t the British invent the skyscraper? Because for the United States, colonialism was local, while in Europe it was diffuse, relegated to the farthest peripheries of an exploited world. Chicago, where the skyscraper was born, stood between the Western frontier of violence, timber, and gold and the banking capitals of the East Coast. It was at the center of a bridgeable world and the resources that flowed through it, requiring a degree of capital consolidation the likes of which had never been seen before.

This centralization brought us the Fordist assembly line, vertical integration (housing a company’s entire supply chain under one roof), and the postwar multinational corporation (itself made possible by the jet engine and the postwar economic deficits of Europe). The American industrialist Elisha Otis patented a device to improve elevator safety in 1861, and less than 50 years later his countryman Willis Carrier figured out how to cool rather than just heat a building’s interior. These innovations expanded the limits of what was architecturally possible in terms of site, height, and durability beyond all prior comprehension. Windows no longer needed to open, stairs no longer needed to be climbed, and there were no fixed restrictions on a building’s scale. The function of adaptation to the world was removed from the form.

“Form follows function” is itself an Americanism (and a Chicagoism—a maxim of the architect Louis Sullivan). Shortly after it was first uttered in the late 19th century, it became ironic. The function of a building is to regulate the relationship between site and inhabitant. As the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius would have it, a building must serve at the intersection of firmitas, utilitas, and venustras, or firmness, commodity, and delight. (A more contemporary translation of his famous triad might be “durability, utility, and beauty.”) But in America, advances in engineering rendered a building’s site incidental. As anyone who has ever driven through a mountain suburb knows, our architectural ethos treats the land as something meant to be taken from, not worked with. This is what grants American architecture not just its ugliness but its boldness. It is what unifies the bespoke and the ordinary—although it is the ordinary that has always been the true soul (or perhaps the deepest confession) of the American built environment.

Durability, however, is something that the US has never taken as seriously. There are a handful of precious buildings from before the Industrial Revolution scattered around the country’s small towns and historic districts. The hagiography of the American Revolution has led to these structures, with their Georgian fanlights and saltbox roofs, being stereotyped as true or classical “American architecture.” But the base and ugly reality of the American built environment is that the average age of a residential building here is a paltry 46 years.

This happens for a simple reason: a continent-wide superabundance of natural resources. The United States, unlike Britain, never seems to run out of timber. Unlike mainland Europe, it never seems to run out of oil either. Vast swaths of old-growth forests were felled in order to produce the balloon-frame houses that marked the beginning of industrial architectural production. When they were depleted, platform framing (which uses shorter spans of lumber) was born, and it remains the primary system of construction today. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 did not spark a conversation about more durable materials and ways of building, but rather the invention of all kinds of fire-mitigating systems and fireproof materials (most infamously asbestos, which haunts buildings like a ghost, impeding reuse even today). Cheap oil afforded us climate control, the skyscraper, the suburbs, the automobile, asphalt shingles, vinyl siding, wall-to-wall carpeting, Styrofoam insulation, and the majority of materials from which our buildings are fabricated. This bodes poorly for our future.

This ethos of disposability is perhaps best exemplified by the mid-century gutting of some of the most remarkable cities in the world and, along with them, unfathomable amounts of history and culture. We ravaged places like Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, in service of the notion that the ideal way to live is on one’s own in a little house on a puny plot of land—or, to put it in a more politicized parlance, that to own and defend is always better than to share. As quickly as the world, the economy, and the urban core centralized, perhaps what is most indelible to the American way of life is the rapidity with which it decentralized, too. An economy previously predicated on productive capacity reoriented itself, over the past 50 years, around the ownership and appreciation of assets. What the single-family house represented in the 1940s and ’50s—a highly subsidized reification of individuality and success—has been completely remade by this age of scarcity into one of the only ways to accumulate wealth and to maintain base stability in the face of a predatory rentier class. In this we can say that the McMansion is as important to American architectural history as a Louis Sullivan or a Frank Gehry—perhaps, in an age where the architectural dominance of the US has begun to wane (and the Global South’s has begun to rise), even more so.

The sprawling postwar suburbs and the highways that connect them are, whether we like it or not, our cultural legacy. But it’s hard to hate them completely. Built on the back of racist and antisocial economic and social policies were a million childhoods spent among the Googie drive-ins, the postmodern supermarkets, the ersatz urbanism of the shopping malls. Beginning in the 19th century, the suburbs also showcased some of our greatest architectural contributions, from charming Queen Anne houses, California ranches, Craftsman bungalows, and the catalog houses of Sears and Montgomery Ward to minimal, traditional Cape Cods and even the faux old-world Tuscan kitchens and double foyers of the aughts. These would never have come into the world elsewhere, because nowhere else had either the space or the economic capacity for them. And each great suburb was great in its own way. There would be no Frank Lloyd Wright without Oak Park, Chicago’s leafy, diverse suburb. There would be no Julia Morgan (the pioneering civil engineer) without the Bay Area’s hills or Paul Rudolph (the seminal modernist architect) without the low-lying beaches of Sarasota.

Modernism may have been a global project spanning from Chicago to Algiers, but postmodernism (and its computerized kissing cousin, deconstructivism) was perhaps the most quintessentially American architectural movement. Its governing text, 1972’s Learning From Las Vegas (by the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour), would not exist without America’s remarkable diversity of vernacular architecture—and the long-running disdain the architectural establishment held for it. To celebrate buildings as signs, to take the artifice of Hollywood at face value, to embrace irony and image, spectacle and jokes—it really was a helluva time at the end-of-history buffet. Everything became decontextualized; the Georgian segmental pediment could become the crown of a strip-mall grocery store. The Walt Disney Company is not only among the nation’s major media conglomerates but also owns one of the largest collections of works by the last half-century’s most important architects—Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, and Robert A.M. Stern, to name just a few.