Housing and Dwelling

Perspectives on Modern Domestic Architecture

Barbara Miller Lane, Barbara Miller Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134279265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

Housing and Dwelling collects the best in recent scholarly and philosophical writings that bear upon the history of domestic architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lane combines exemplary readings that focus on and examine the issues involved in the study of domestic architecture, taken from an innovative and informed combination of philosophy, history, social science, art, literature and architectural writings. Uniquely, the readings underline the point of view of the user of a dwelling and assess the impact of varying uses on the evolution of domestic architecture.

This book is a valuable asset for students, scholars, and designers alike, exploring the extraordinary variety of methods, interpretations and source materials now available in this important field. For students, it opens windows on the many aspects of domestic architecture. For scholars, it introduces new, interdisciplinary points of view and suggests directions for further research. It acquaints practising architects in the field of housing design with history and methods and offers directions for future design possibilities.

1
Introduction

This collection of scholarly writings and source materials attempts to lay the basis for new kinds of discussion and research in the history of domestic architecture. For a long time, historians of architecture paid attention only to a few of the buildings where people lived. These were the great palaces and villas of the wealthy, together with the houses designed in the modern period by a few recognized “great architects”. Most writers were convinced by Nikolaus Pevsner’s famous dictum that while cathedrals (and other major public buildings) are “architecture”, the “bicycle shed” (and all other utilitarian structures) is merely “building”.¹ In other words, to merit the attention of architectural historians, a structure had to be large, expensive, and beautiful.

Any glance at an aerial view of city, town, or countryside shows that such buildings are few and far between. The vast majority of built structures are (and have been at all periods) dwellings: detached houses, row houses, apartment blocks of various heights (Figs. 1–4). Today, new generations of scholars have begun to look at the history of these “ordinary” dwellings of the modern period. Stimulated by the pioneering work of Gwendolyn Wright, Alan Gowans, Anthony King, Dell Upton, and other writers of the 1980s,² new histories of builders’ houses, apartment dwellings, working-class housing, mass housing of all types, and the housing of marginal populations and slaves, now diverge from Pevsner’s restrictive formula. Not only the major turning points of “high-style” architectural design – the large houses of the Victorian era, the modernist villas of the 1920s and 1930s – are being analyzed, but also buildings previously thought to be particularly unbeautiful: farmhouses, builders’ houses of the later nineteenth century, “tract houses” of the 1950s, mobile and manufactured homes, high-rise housing towers of the later twentieth century. These latter kinds of buildings are now often described as “vernacular architecture”.³

The terms of analysis have also changed: scholars are now looking not only at the façade composition and the geometry of the plan, but also at issues such as the organization within and around the dwelling of public and private space, the importance of work and household structure, the gendered character of interior and exterior spaces, the influence of consumption patterns on spaces and decoration, the ways that lines of sight organize perceptions of space, and many other aspects of the inhabitants’ experiences. The part played by politics in shaping building form and location is often discussed, as are the effects of population pressure and technological development on the creation of mass housing.

Scholars now pay considerable attention to the users of buildings, whose creative impulses are reflected in their dwellings. To a degree that has seldom been recognized in the past, the users, whether we mean the owner of the dwelling or the family group that resides there, shape their dwellings. Sometimes they design them themselves, and build with their own hands. Sometimes they design them, and hire a carpenter or builder or architect. Sometimes they influence the design by choosing from among a series of patterns, as in the case of the builders’ houses and “tract” houses of the last two centuries. But always the users make and remake their spaces – by rebuilding, remodeling, decorating, furnishing, landscaping, or simply by dwelling within the forms and spaces of domestic architecture. Thus the places where people dwell are now understood to demonstrate their ideas of individuality, privacy, family, politics and society; to create, in other words, the general cultural patterns of an era. But there is little agreement as to how ideals and aspirations are formed – do the ideals of those who select and remodel their dwellings come from the “great minds” of the era, or is the reverse true? Do the great minds (or leading architects) simply reflect the taste of their times? And is “taste” a set of preferences created by advertising, or do the mass media simply respond to the wishes and demands of the public? Some historians have turned fruitfully to the study of popular media – to domestic advice writings, advertisements, plan books – and for recent periods, to film and television, to answer these questions.⁴ Such materials, though, entail their own problems – how does one decide who decides the content of films, television programs, advertisements? In any case, the growing fields of media studies, and the history of consumption patterns have much to offer the historian of modern domestic architecture.

A number of these issues and questions have a long history in the traditional humanistic and social science disciplines. But their appearance in the study of domestic architecture is relatively new. To a considerable extent the emergence of new perspectives and emphases in this field is a consequence of the writings of feminist scholars, who have themselves drawn upon a variety of disciplines. This is surely not surprising: the role of women within the so-called domestic sphere in the modern period is an important subject within the history of women more generally. As the selections included here demonstrate, feminist scholarship has been decisive in bringing to bear new viewpoints upon the development of domestic architecture. Not only have feminist writers helped to overturn traditional approaches, but they have also mobilized insights from archaeology, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, film studies, economic and social history, politics and government, oral history, social psychology, literary theory, art-historical theory, landscape history, and the history of technology, in the study of the history of domestic architecture.

Of course, many of these perspectives themselves are relatively new, and have influenced a variety of scholars, not just feminist scholars. A number of new “disciplines” have formed out of older ones in the last fifteen to twenty years: anthropological archaeology, landscape history (sometimes called history of the built environment, sometimes environmental history, depending on its emphasis), literary theory and studies, film studies, and the various fields normally grouped together as “cultural studies”: popular culture, material culture, visual culture. Behind these new scholarly clusters are often new philosophical positions: structuralism and post-structuralism, neo-Marxism, and what we tend now to call the philosophy of “the Everyday”.⁵

Feminist scholarship itself has changed significantly over the last twenty-five years. In the field of domestic architecture, early feminist writers focused on the exploitation of women within the “separate” domestic sphere, by a male “patriarchal” structure. Hence, feminist writers initially wrote extensively about the plan of the upper-middle-class Victorian house, with its segregated and specialized spaces, which were seen as the result of male domination, and about the separation of male “work” and female “home”. Within the separate domestic sphere, the wife and mother was said to preside over a “cult of domesticity” (or “cult of true womanhood”), caring for her nuclear family and decorating the interior of her home. Starting from the same point of view, feminist writers identified the utterly different tract houses of the 1950s suburbs, with their small lots, open plans, high-tech appliances, mass-media-inspired decoration, as yet another patriarchal creation – one that isolated women from community and work.⁶

Despite the importance of these insights, such evaluations of the domestic architecture of the Victorian and modern periods have now been extensively amended. Our definitions of “private” and “public”, for decades inappropriately derived from the writings of Jürgen Habermas, are now undergoing careful redefinition by sophisticated political philosophers like Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar.⁷ Thus current writers, including feminist scholars, have begun to see an interpenetration of public and private “spheres” even in the Victorian dwelling and have modified the view of the suburban “tract house” to include an understanding of its appeal to rural, individualistic, and populist strains within modern thought.

Our older definitions of what is meant by “domesticity”, along with what has been meant by “home” in recent centuries, are also under review. For a while, historians equated these notions with the “rise” of the nuclear family, and sought the origins of this type of family structure in a specific turning point in the past.⁸ Others saw modern ideas of home and domesticity as resulting from the institutions of “patriarchy” and attempted to trace these institutions back through western history at least as far as antiquity.⁹ Philippe Ariès and his followers argued that modern attitudes to childhood arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries among the upper classes and then spread gradually to all classes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹⁰ Simon Schama and Witold Rybczynski located the origins of a modern sense of “family, intimacy, and a devotion to the home” in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century.¹¹

But now, with the writings of Steven Ozment, both on the family and on the history of the notion of privacy, together with the massive new Yale History of the European Family (2001–4),¹² we can be relatively sure of the following: the nuclear family is not new, but it is better studied as a part of the household; middle-class family and household size increased rather than decreased in the nineteenth century, decreasing only in the twentieth; our views of children have not changed very much over time; the legal situation of middle-class women was worse in the latter half of the nineteenth century than ever before or after; the separation between work and home has varied dramatically among countries in the modern era; middle-class and working-class families have been thoroughly different in their attitudes to work and privacy throughout history.

Writers such as Elizabeth Cromley and Elizabeth Blackmar now argue that the emotional attachment to “home” usually equated with domesticity was a modern invention, a by-product of the experiences of transience and uprooting that characterized the industrial revolution.¹³ As art historian Heidi De Mare has written, “Not till the nineteenth century did the inner emotional world become extended, taking over the space within the four walls of the house and dominating concepts of the ‘home’ until far into the twentieth century”.¹⁴ Still other authors are questioning the domestic roles of both women and men during the modern period by looking at gender relations in domestic settings, while economic historians like M. J. Daunton point to the importance of class in influencing ideas of home and domesticity.¹⁵

Other factors that have contributed to new perspectives in the history of domestic architecture include recent developments in urban and city planning history; the population explosion of the last three decades throughout the world; the development of modern communication systems and the concomitant growth of rootlessness and transience among large populations; and the urgent issues created by “homelessness” almost everywhere. The British “Planning History Group”, founded in 1974 by Gordon Cherry and others at the University of Birmingham, originally focused to a considerable extent on British town planning issues, including housing history. That organization has transformed itself over the last ten years into the International Planning History Society, holds international conferences, and publishes its own journal.¹⁶ One result of this evolution is that almost every new planning history text includes a consideration of housing history, often drawn from a background of politics and economics. Works with important implications for the history of domestic architecture have resulted, including the writings and compilations by Anthony Sutcliffe on urbanization, and the comprehensive Cambridge Urban History of Britain, a model for national histories elsewhere.¹⁷

Experiences of extraordinary population growth and of homelessness (a result of political laissez-faire in the United States, of geopolitical upheavals elsewhere, and of hyper-urbanization in non-Western countries) have deeply affected the recent history of domestic architecture. An emphasis on the importance of participation in housing design, especially for the poor, has been apparent in the lives and writings of architects and planners since the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁸ The technological challenges of housing large numbers of people, a focus of early modern architecture, have come to the fore again in widespread discussions of high-rise housing, prefabrication, and the features necessary to the “minimal dwelling”.¹⁹ Issues of privacy and individual preference inevitably arise in discussions of mass housing, giving further stimulus to the study of participatory design.

It can be argued that the issue of individual preference, and the desire by some for a demonstrative form of self-expression, has been a continuing thread in European and American domestic architecture. The practice of building a dwelling for purposes of self-display (or, more often, display of the importance of one’s household) has been obvious among the rich and powerful in western history at least since the early Middle Ages. But the desire to represent one’s own eccentricity and subjectivity through the creation of a new kind of dwelling, like modern ideas of home and domesticity, probably begins with the industrial revolution and with Romanticism.²⁰ As Amos Rapoport remarks in House Form and Culture, “our culture puts a premium on originality, often striving for it for its own sake”.²¹ On the other hand, most people throughout history have chosen (as a result of personal preference, religion, or politics), or been compelled (by available building materials and housing stock), to live in dwellings that appear quite similar to one another on the outside. Gwendolyn Wright was one of the first to consider this issue,²² but new studies of apartment dwellings and row housing touch upon it as well. Recent work in social psychology, anthropology, vernacular architecture, and visual culture shows that the desire for individual expression in such contexts has often found an outlet in interior decoration, renovation, and interior and exterior remodeling.²³

With the help of these perspectives, it should soon be possible to integrate our understanding of all the formal aspects of dwellings with their cultural, social, political, and individual underpinnings, at least for the modern period. The newest work by architectural historians (especially those who practice the study of “vernacular” architecture) begins to take into account these points of view. But there are as yet no overarching works that have been able to accomplish this goal. Norbert Schoenauer’s large history of house forms (like that of Ettore Camesasca before him) is useful but narrow in focus.²⁴ Julienne Hanson’s Decoding Homes and Houses, an interesting attempt to map zones of use (“space syntax”) in examples drawn from all periods and places, never proceeds beyond the issue of the uses of space, and is in fact too encyclopedic as to time and place to shed light on particular periods.²⁵ Paul Oliver’s Dwellings: The House Across the World (University of Texas, 1987) is broader in focus but says little about Europe or the United States, and was written too early to take ...