Living Over the Store

Architecture and Local Urban Life

Howard Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136619106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The shop/house – the building combining commercial/retail uses and dwellings – appears over many periods of history in most cities in the world. This book combines architectural history, cross-cultural understandings and accounts of contemporary policy and building practice to provide a comprehensive account of this common but overlooked building.

The merchant's house in northern European cities, the Asian shophouse, the apartment building on New York avenues, typical apartment buildings in Rome and in Paris – this variety of shop/houses along with the commonality of attributes that form them, mean that the hybrid phenomenon is as much a social and economic one as it is an architectural one.

Professionals, city officials and developers are taking a new look at buildings that allow for higher densities and mixed-use. Describing exemplary contemporary projects and issues pertaining to their implementation as well as the background, cultural variety and urban attributes, this book will benefit designers dealing with mixed-use buildings as well as academics and students.

Part I

THE SHOP/HOUSE AS
A GLOBAL PHENOMENON

Part I: THE SHOP/HOUSE AS A GLOBAL PHENOMENON

The shop/house is probably as old as commerce and cities themselves. Because the basic economic conditions of living and working in the same place are so fundamental, it is likely that commercial/residential buildings did not have a common origin, but instead arose independently in different places – and historic evidence confirms the early existence of the shop/house in numerous cultures.

At the same time, shop/house types – like most vernacular buildings – are partly the result of cultural migrations, and represent an amalgam of local practice and non-local ideas. They are part of a continuously dynamic process of cultural diffusion and adjustment, and bring together different influences – the overall plan type from one source, details of the plan from another source, construction details from another, ornamental motifs from yet another. New York buildings were influenced by the Dutch and the English. Jakarta buildings were influenced by the Dutch and the Chinese. The Chinese influenced buildings not only in the East Indies, but all over southeast Asia, and in America. There is a web of influences, and these influences may affect different attributes of buildings in different ways, leading to recombinations and typological complexity.¹

Although shop/houses exist in most cities of the world,² important trading cities are particularly important in their evolution because of the way these cities helped to hybridize different cultures. Trading cities of south China such as Guangzhou (formerly Canton), of the Chinese diaspora such as Bangkok and Singapore, of the Hanseatic League such as Lübeck, of the Dutch empire such as Amsterdam and Batavia (now Jakarta), of the Mediterranean trade such as Venice, of England and America such as NewYork, were all places in which new types developed and evolved out of combinations of imported and local practice. The colonial enterprise that brought new populations to the Americas, Africa and Asia was fueled partly by active commerce, supported by resilient building types.

Many individual shop/house types were originally variations of dwelling houses. Until the proliferation of new building types in the Industrial Revolution – railroad sheds, large factories, department stores – many functions that today occupy unique buildings were accommodated in houses. Specialized buildings existed – churches of course, town halls, barns, theaters – but apart from those buildings most daily life happened in houses or in variations of them.

In fact, the word house did not necessarily imply “dwelling” and in many documents of the eighteenth century and before, the word had to be qualified: dwelling house, counting house, etc. We still sometimes do that, with the term “school house.” Moreover, the word “house” has a broader meaning than just a physical building. Publishing companies and fine-art auction businesses are “houses;” the House of Windsor is a family; the White House makes public announcements.

Many of the buildings described in the following four chapters evolved out of dwelling-house types. The ease with which a business could be accommodated in a house before the Industrial Revolution had to do as much with the small size of businesses as with the fact that houses were designed in ways that were not as functionally determined as houses are today. The distinction between family life and the life of the shop was not a firm one.

This ambiguity means that the combination of shop and dwelling in the same building is sometimes visible in the building’s architecture, and sometimes not. It is possible to look at the ruins of some houses in ancient Pompeii and make a clear inference that a certain room was a shop. It is not possible to do so by looking at most houses built in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Nevertheless, this combination existed in both places and in many others, where before the nineteenth century the shop represented an adaptation of rooms of the dwelling house for sales or manufacture.

The historical close relationship between the shop/house and the dwelling house has emerged because of spatial/organizational attributes that have allowed for an easy transformation of functions back and forth between different uses. This often occurs because the ground-floor front room of the house can be connected to rooms behind it, or can be bypassed so that the house can be accessed without going through this room. Change of use may happen on a daily basis, as it does in the Japanese machiya, where bedding is put away every morning and brought out again at night, or gradually over time, as in the American row house where the front room may be converted into a shop, or as the result of an architectural transformation, as with London houses on commercial streets where the front is extended toward the street for a shop.

This fluid attitude toward building use is essential to the lives of people who inhabit shop/houses, for whom the building’s flexibility allows them to develop businesses in their houses with a minimum of financial investment, and to expand and contract the space devoted to the business as necessary. It is also important to larger buildings, in which dwellings and business spaces may be occupied by different people, but where the building owner may optimize rent by not restricting use.

From one point of view, the shop/house is a product of urban morphological conditions that result in the two functions of dwelling and commerce each being optimized for the same location. As will be described in more detail in Chapter 6, it is the attempt to maximize the financial return on a particular piece of land that leads to mixed use. Since commerce and industry often take place at or near the street – for visibility and ease of moving goods and supplies – this leaves upper floors or areas away from the street available for other functions, typically dwellings.

Location is also affected by the particular non-dwelling function that is included in the house. Functions such as retail that may require pedestrian traffic will put shop/houses on busy streets that are at the edge of otherwise residential districts that may “collect” pedestrians from smaller, quieter streets.³ Shop/houses that include workshops may be on back streets, indicating the lower social status of the artisan as well as a lesser need for visibility. And wholesale houses may have been on streets leading to and from places of trans-shipment, such as docks – as they were in Lübeck, and originally along the canals of Amsterdam.

Chapters 1–4 deal with shop/houses of Asia, of southern and northern Europe, and of England and North America. These chapters are not intended as a catalog or comprehensive description of shop/house types, but instead as an attempt to explain the variety of types, their origins and their commonalities. Those descriptions will in turn provide part of the basis for Part II, which will describe the common features of the design and location of shop/houses

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¹ The study of vernacular architecture is, to a large extent, an examination of the question of cultural diffusion, and the literature contains hundreds of works that deal with the question. Two seminal works, the first by a cultural geographer and the other by an art historian/sociologist are Kniffen, “Folk Housing,” and King, The Bungalow.

² Cities of North Africa and the Middle East, during times of Islamic influence, represent something of an exception. In many of these cities there was a strict separation between commercial districts and residential districts, with little commerce inside the gates of residential neighborhoods that housed permanent residents of the city.

³ In the West, this locational attribute – and the functional zoning that ultimately emerged – became more important, beginning in the eighteenth century, when the marketing and display of goods and the development of shop windows through which goods could be displayed, emerged along with largescale industrial production.

1.01 Shophouses in Guangzhou, China.

Photograph by author.

1

SHOPHOUSES OF ASIA

Nguan Tong, his wife, and their two daughters live in a store. That is, except for the kitchen and their bedrooms upstairs, every inch of the house is devoted to the storage of incoming merchandise. Their store stands in the center of a row of wooden houses; in every one, a family shares space with a business of one kind or another. The front of each store is open to the street, so that during the day all the neighborhood opens onto the busy life of Sampaeng Lane and is absorbed by it. Then, there is little sense o...