Immaterial Architecture

Jonathan Hill

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134228300
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Arquitectura
• Categoria: Arquitectura general

This fascinating argument from Jonathan Hill presents the case for the significance and importance of the immaterial in architecture.

Architecture is generally perceived as the solid, physical matter that it unarguably creates, but what of the spaces it creates? This issue drives Hill's explorative look at the immaterial aspects of architecture. The book discusses the pressures on architecture and the architectural profession to be respectively solid matter and solid practice and considers concepts that align architecture with the immaterial, such as the superiority of ideas over matter, command of drawing and design of spaces and surfaces.

Focusing on immaterial architecture as the perceived absence of matter, Hill devises new means to explore the creativity of both the user and the architect, advocating an architecture that fuses the immaterial and the material and considers its consequences, challenging preconceptions about architecture, its practice, purpose, matter and use.

This is a useful and innovative read that encourages architects and students to think beyond established theory and practice.

House and Home

DOI: 10.4324/9780203013618-1

The Home of Architecture

The Home of the Home

A recurring theme in architectural discourse states that the house is the origin and archetype of architecture, the manifestation of its important attributes. The most noted example is the primitive hut, for which the Roman architect Vitruvius is ‘the source of all the later speculation’.¹ According to Vitruvius the first shelter was a frame of timber branches finished in mud.² But a more familiar and idyllic image of the primitive hut appears in the frontispiece to Marc-Antoine Laugier’s An Essay on Architecture,³ 1753, depicting four tree-trunks supporting a pediment of branches.⁴

1 Rykwert, p. 105. 2 Vitruvius, pp. 38–39. 3 In Immaterial Architecture book titles are given in English even if a book was first published in another language. 4 Laugier.

Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l'Architecture, 1753. Frontispiece.

Courtesy of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Extending Simon Schama’s thesis in The Embarrassment of Riches, Philip Tabor concludes, however, that seventeenth-century Netherlands is crucial to the development of ideas and images relevant to the contemporary home:

As far as the idea of home is concerned, the home of the home is the Netherlands. This idea’s crystallisation might be dated to the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, when the Dutch Netherlands amassed an unprecedented and unrivalled accumulation of capital, and emptied their purses into domestic space.⁵

5 Tabor, p. 218.

Seventeenth-century Dutch society promoted a significant transformation in domestic architecture from public to private. A home unfamiliar to us today, the medieval house was public in that it accommodated numerous functions of business and domestic life and numerous people – family, relatives, employees, servants and guests – in shared spaces.⁶ Even sleeping was a communal activity, with many people sharing a bed and many beds sharing a room. Later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Italian Renaissance palazzo was occupied as a permeable matrix of rooms. Each room had no specific use and as many as four doors,⁷ an arrangement suitable to a society ‘in which gregariousness is habitual’.⁸ Robin Evans concludes that ‘Such was the typical arrangement of household space in Europe until challenged in the seventeenth century.’⁹ Increasingly, the matrix of rooms common in ‘hovel and mansion’ was believed to have two features that ‘rendered them unfit as moral dwellings’.¹⁰ First, they offered little privacy as people could roam from one space to another without being easily monitored.¹¹ Second, they encouraged overcrowding and close contact between occupants.¹²

6 Riley, p. 11. 7 Even the lavatories might provide routes through the house, as in Andrea Palladio’s design for the Palazzo Antonini, Udine, 1556. See Evans, ‘Figures, Doors and Passages’, p. 63. 8 Evans, ‘Figures, Doors and Passages’, p. 88. Evans notes that a house represents and produces domesticity, and is indicative of a way of life at the time of its construction. The matrix of rooms allows alternative, and potentially private, routes between rooms. Privacy could also be achieved by monitoring entry to a sequence of antechambers, which suggests either that Evans overstates somewhat the gregariousness of sixteenth-century society or that, like all building arrangements, a house can be occupied in unintended ways. 9 Evans, ‘Figures, Doors and Passages’, p. 88. 10 Evans, ‘Rookeries and Model Dwellings’, p. 101. 11 Evans, ‘Rookeries and Model Dwellings’, p. 102. 12 Evans, ‘Rookeries and Model Dwellings’, p. 104.

Increasingly, spaces and functions were segregated. By the middle of the seventeenth century ‘the subdivision of the house into day and night uses, and into formal and informal areas, had begun’, writes Witold Rybczynski.¹³ The corridor plan, and privacy in the home, reached fruition in the nineteenth century. However, Raffaella Sarti notes that the Netherlands ‘developed architectural elements similar to “modern” corridors very early’, as was the case in England where they were introduced in the seventeenth century.¹⁴ The corridor enables a room to have a single use and a single entrance, defending privacy and discouraging entry to anyone without a specific purpose.

13 Rybczynski, p. 56. 14 Sarti, p. 269.

With its emphasis on cosy comfort and the accumulation of personal possessions, the contemporary home is aesthetically similar to one in seventeenth-century Netherlands. Other similarities are the number of people accommodated, the value given to privacy, and the separation of domestic and working life. A Dutch seventeenth-century town house was smaller and had fewer occupants – four or five – than houses in other countries, where as many as twenty-five people per house was possible.¹⁵ Employees and apprentices lodged elsewhere. As self-reliance was valued, servants were rare and the subject of taxation charged to the employer.¹⁶ Occupied by a family and synonymous with family life, the Dutch seventeenth-century house was separate and private. According to Schama:

15 Rybczynski, p. 59. 16 Zumthor, pp. 45–46.

The well-kept home was the place where the soiling world subjected to tireless exercises in moral as well as physical ablution … That threshold, moreover, need not be literal. Very many, if not most, businesses and trades were still carried on within the physical precincts of the house, but the division between living and working space in middle-class households was nonetheless clearly demarcated and jealously guarded.¹⁷

17 Schama, p. 391.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century work was fully removed from the house. This remained the model in future centuries and was further enforced by the industrial revolution, which increased large-scale factory production and reduced the small-scale craft manufacture that had once occurred alongside domestic life. Today, the house is once again a place of work, in part due to the proliferation of electronic communications. But the desire to separate working and living remains apparent. In seventeenth-century Dutch society, the house became private and personal, and a home familiar to us today.

Managing the Home

There was a commonplace analogy in seventeenth-century literature that compared a man’s soul to a privy chamber, but it is hard to tell now which became private first, the room or the soul. Certainly, their histories are entwined.¹⁸

18 Evans, ‘Figures, Doors and Passages’, p. 75

Home is the one place that is considered to be truly personal. Home always belongs to someone. It is supposedly the most secure and stable of environments, a vessel for the identity of its occupant(s), a container for, and mirror of, the self. Associated with all that is solidly comforting, the home is synonymous with the material.

However, the concept of home is also a response to the excluded, unknown and unpredictable. Home must appear solid and stable because social norms and personal identity are shifting and slippery. It is a metaphor for a threatened society and a threatened individual. The safety of the home is also the sign of its opposite, a certain nervousness, a fear of the tangible or intangible dangers outside and inside. The purpose of the home is to keep the inside inside and the outside outside.

Traditionally, threats from outside come in a number of guises, notably inclement weather and undesirable people. Both are associated with the formless, fluid, unstable and unpredictable. Banister Fletcher writes that ‘Architecture … must have had a simple origin in the primitive efforts of mankind to provide protection against inclement weather, wild beasts and human enemies.’¹⁹

19 Fletcher, p. 1.

A defining purpose of the home is to provide shelter from the weather. In contrast to the unpredictable weather outside, the home provides a controlled climate inside. Attempting to control the relationship between the two environments, the home introduces desirable external conditions, such as daylight, while creating and retaining comfortable internal conditions, such as warmth in winter. For psychological as well as physical comfort, the threshold between inside and outside must be clear. A threat to the home is considered a threat to the self. Discussing the projection of such fears onto the home, Mark Cousins writes:

people … ask nothing of the house in architectural terms, except that it be sealed away absolutely successfully from any natural process … There is no reason why the window cannot be fixed the next day, or the next week. But it simply follows from the degree of psychic investment which people have made in respect of the building’s integrity, that it must be fixed at four in the morning.²⁰

20 Cousins, ‘The First House’, p. 37.

Unwanted people may pose an equal external threat to the home. Schama writes that in seventeenth-century Netherlands ‘Criminals, beggars, vagabonds, men without occupation or abode then, were by definition outsiders against whom the community had to defend itself.’²¹ For an outsider to pretend to be an insider was a crime. But there were two types of outsider. Insiders’ outsiders, such as licensed tradespeople and street musicians, were allowed to inhabit the public domain but not the private one.²²

21 Schama, p. 587. 22 Schama, pp. 57–572.

David Sibley notes that ‘Nature has a long historical association with the other.’²³ Sometimes the threat of the outside merges with...