Consuming Care: The Americana Corporation and the Advent of the Modern Nursing Home

Abstract The Americana Corporation was an early example of a centralized nursing home chain in the United States. The business deployed replicable building strategies, iterating similar siting, style, and space planning throughout its Midwestern “nursing centers.” Taking the Americana as its case study, this article uses reportage, marketing ephemera, and internal business documentation to pursue three goals. The first is to conduct a foundational exploration into the architectural and urban history of an understudied building type and its evolution from an unregulated, mom-and-pop model to a professionalized and growth-oriented form of medical bureaucracy. The second goal is to interrogate the ambivalent material and spatial impacts of welfare policies such as Social Security and Medicare on older adults. The third is to offer another architectural datum of American political economy at midcentury, whereby a mixed economic solution to social safety net initiatives reinforced the logics of profit and medicalization within the design of eldercare.