Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
Painting on book cover:
“Interior with a Woman Playing the Virginals” , circa 1660, Emanuel de Witte
Emanuel de Witte
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Emanuel de Witte (1617–1692) was a Dutch perspective painter.
In contrast to Pieter Jansz Saenredam, who emphasized architectural
accuracy, De Witte was more concerned with the atmosphere of his
interiors.
De Witte initially painted portraits as well as mythological and religious
scenes.
After his move from Delft to Amsterdam in 1651 de Witte specialized
more and more in representing church interiors, and he painted the old
church in Amsterdam from almost every corner.
He sometimes combined aspects of different churches to depict
interiors of ideal churches, populating them with churchgoers,
sometimes accompanied by a dog.
De Witte's excellent sense of composition combined with his use of light
created atmospheres which seem honest and real.
His theme may have been light and how it creates livable space.
Paintings by Emanuel de Witte
Choir of the New Church in Amsterdam, 1683
Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, 1657
Market in the Hague, 1660
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
• This book is essentially one long essay dedicated to opening up and
trying to understand what is meant by the term ‘comfort’ as it relates
to domestic environments in the Western world.
• Focused largely on Northern Europe in the 16th through 19th
centuries because of the influence of that time and that place upon
American domestic practices today.
• The essay is a sometimes rambling, wide ranging, exploration that
touches on physical design, economics, culture and sociology.
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
Chapter 10, pagers 216 - 232
• This chapter opens with a reproduction of a Norman Rockwell
painting titled ““Willie Gillis in College”, 1946.
• This painting is typical of Norman Rockwell in that it depicts a warm
and comforting scene.
Norman Rockwell painting, “Willie Gillis in College”, 1946.
Norman Rockwell paintings
Norman Rockwell
Norman Rockwell
• Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8,
1978) was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator.
• His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States, where
Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life
scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine for
more than four decades.
• Among the best-known of Rockwell's works are the Willie Gillis
series Rosie the Riveter, Saying Grace (1951), The Problem We All
Live With, and the Four Freedoms series.
• He is also noted for his work for the Boy Scouts of America (BSA);
producing covers for their publication Boys' Life, calendars, and
other illustrations.
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
Chapter 10
Pages 217 - 232
• In Chapter 10, the author provides an overview of his analysis
of the concept of comfort.
• He discusses décor and visual style in relationship to actual
human behaviors; what a space looks like versus what people
do in the space.
• He discusses some reasons why styles of décor from the past
are copied, and how they are copied (mostly in limited, and
piecemeal selections of individual elements)
• He contends that to understand comfort what is needed is to
study social traditions and patterns; of what people do, rather
than to study the visual décor of what spaces have been
made to look like.
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
• He concludes the chapter, and the book, by asking
• “What is comfort?”
• Is comfort ‘objective’ and measureable, or is it ‘subjective’ and
immeasurable?
• As an example of an attempt to measure comfort he discusses
criteria used to assess the comfort of a workplace, using the drug
company, Merck, and their office environment, as an example.
• The point of this discussion is to demonstrate that there are different
ways of thinking about comfort, such as the temperature and
humidity of a space, to the sense of intimacy in a space.
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
• He proposes that the scientific definition of comfort – namely one
that is based upon quantitative and objective measurements - is
flawed because it only considers those aspects that can be
measured, which does not include many of the human and
qualitative characteristics that clearly make people comfortable.
• In other words, the realities of human experience, like feeling good,
happy, content, calm, et cetera, cannot be quantified.
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
Chapter 10
Pages 217 - 232
“…lately I have been thinking how comfort is perhaps the ultimate
luxury.” Billy Baldwin (as quoted in the New York Times)
• Billy Baldwin:
• The dean of indigenous decorators (he abhorred the term interior
designer), Billy Baldwin was at once a classicist and a modernist.
• Though his aesthetic emotions were from time to time stirred by
things Continental, in general he disdained the florid, baroque and
rococo in favor of the clean-cut, hard-edged and pared-down.
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Among his early influences were Frances Elkins, perhaps the most
sophisticated decorator of her day, and Jean-Michel Frank, whom he
described categorically as “the last genius of French furniture.
Billy Baldwin
Decorator
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
chapter 10
• For Baldwin, who was partial to plump deep-seated sofas and
chairs, the ultimate luxury was comfort. “First and foremost,
furniture must be comfortable,” he decreed.
• “That is the original purpose of it, after all.”
• He usually had it upholstered straight to the floor, believing
that too many naked chair legs left a room looking “restless.”
• This point of view is one that we may agree, or disagree, with.
Within the world of design ideas, there are overarching
positions, or sensibilities, that each individual must decide
upon for themselves.
The New York Times:
• The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and
continuously published in New York City since 1851.
• The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any
news organization. Its website is the most popular American online
newspaper website, receiving more than 30 million unique visitors
per month.
The New York Times
Although the print version of the paper remains both the largest local
metropolitan newspaper in the United States, as well the third largest
newspaper overall, behind The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, its
weekday circulation has fallen since 1990 (not unlike other
newspapers) to fewer than one million copies daily, for the first time
since the 1980s.
Nicknamed "the Gray Lady”, and long regarded within the industry as a
national "newspaper of record”, The New York Times is owned by The
New York Times Company, which also publishes 18 other newspapers
including the International Herald Tribune and The Boston Globe.
The company's chairman is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., whose family
has controlled the paper since 1896.
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
“Domestic well being is a fundamental human need that is deeply rooted in
us, and that must be satisfied.”
“If this need is not met in the present, it is not unnatural to look for comfort
in tradition.”
“In doing so, however, we should not confuse the idea of comfort with
décor – the external appearance of rooms – nor with behavior – how
These rooms were used.”
Décor, the ‘style’ in which a room is visually outfitted, is usually short lived,
whereas social patterns, such as men retiring to a room to smoke, may last
generations.
The SS Normandie was an ocean liner built in Saint-Nazaire, France for the French Line Compagnie
Générale Transatlantique.
She entered service in 1935 as the largest and fastest passenger ship afloat; she is still the most
powerful steam turbo-electric-propelled passenger ship ever built.
Her novel design and lavish interiors led many to consider her the greatest of ocean liners.
• The steamship Normandie
Queen Anne style
• The Queen Anne Style in Britain means either the English Baroque
architectural style roughly of the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14), or
a revived form that was popular in the last quarter of the 19th
century and the early decades of the 20th century.
• The historic reference in the name should not be taken too literally,
as buildings in the Queen Anne style can bear as little resemblance
to English buildings of the 18th century as those of any revival style
to the original.
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What is called the "Queen Anne style" in other parts of the Englishspeaking world, especially the United States and Australia, is
completely different.
Queen Anne style
Art Nouveau
• Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art,
architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that
were most popular during 1890–1910.
• The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art".
• It is known also as Jugendstil, German for "youth style", named for
the magazine Jugend, which promoted it, and in Italy, Stile Liberty
from the department store in London, Liberty & Co., which
popularised the style.
• A reaction to academic art of the 19th century, it was inspired by
natural forms and structures, not only in flowers and plants, but also
in curved lines.
• Architects tried to harmonize with the natural environment. It is also
considered a philosophy of design of furniture, which was designed
according to the whole building and made part of ordinary life.
Art Nouveau Design
Art Deco
• Art deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris
in the 1920’s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s,
into the World War II era.
• The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and
interior design, industrial design, fashion and jewelry, as well as the
visual arts such as painting, graphic arts and film.
• The term "art deco" was first used widely in 1926, after an exhibition
in Paris, 'Les Années 25' sub-titled Art Deco, celebrating the 1925
Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes
(International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts)
that was the culmination of style moderne in Paris.
• At its best, art deco represented elegance, glamour, functionality
and modernity.
Art Deco Design
Japanese hot tub
Post Modernism
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Postmodernism is a philosophical movement away from the viewpoint of
modernism.
More specifically it is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the
problem of objective truth and inherent suspicion towards global cultural
narrative or meta-narrative.
It involves the belief that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social
constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place.
It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in
particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female,
straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial.
Rather, it holds realities to be plural and relative, and dependent on who the
interested parties are and what their interests consist of.
It upholds the belief that there is no absolute truth and the way in which
different people perceive the world is subjective.
It attempts to problematise modernist overconfidence, by drawing into sharp
contrast the difference between how confident speakers are of their positions
versus how confident they need to be to serve their supposed purposes.
Post Modernism
• Postmodernism has influenced many cultural fields, including
religion, literary criticism, sociology, linguistics, architecture, history,
anthropology, visual arts, and music.
• Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from modernist
approaches that had previously been dominant.
• The term "postmodernism" comes from its critique of the "modernist"
scientific mentality of objectivity and progress associated with the
Enlightenment.
• These movements, modernism and postmodernism, are understood
as cultural projects or as a set of perspectives.
Post Modernism
• "Postmodernism" is used in critical theory to refer to a point of
departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema,
journalism, and design, as well as in marketing and business and in
the interpretation of law, culture, and religion in the late 20th and
early 21st centuries.
• Indeed, postmodernism, particularly as an academic movement, can
be understood as a reaction to modernism in the Humanities.
• Whereas modernism was primarily concerned with principles such
as identity, unity, authority, and certainty, postmodernism is often
associated with difference, plurality, textuality, and skepticism.
Lillian Gilbreth
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& Christine Frederick
Lillian Gilbreth combined the perspectives of an engineer, a
psychologist, a wife, and a mother; she helped industrial engineers see
the importance of the psychological dimensions of work.
She became the first American engineer ever to create a synthesis of
psychology and scientific management.
Christine Isobel McGaffey Frederick (February 6, 1883 – April 6,
1970) was an American home economist and early 20th century
exponent of Taylorism as applied to the domestic sphere.
She conducted experiments aimed at improving household efficiency,
as well as arguing for women's vital role as consumers in a massproduction economy.
She wrote books on these subjects, the best-known of which is
probably Selling Mrs. Consumer, which offers an early justification for
planned obsolescence as a necessary feature of the industrial
economy.
Lillian Gilbreth
& Christine Frederick
• We’ve come discover that meal planning can save money, time and
foster great family relationships here in the 21st century. The time is
the very early 1920′s.
• Famous Home Economist Christine Frederick author of several
homemaking books and magazine articles not to mention a
homemaking correspondence course gives the following advice on
meal planning …
• “Many women admit that while cleaning takes a great deal of time,
still it is one of the tasks of the home which can be glossed over, or
quite neglected in extreme need.
Christine Frederick, Household engineering
• But the three-meals-a-day problem seems the one from which there
is no escape.
• We can leave the windows unwashed if we don’t get time or are too
tired, but no matter what the circumstances or how the homemaker
feels, the family must eat and so food must be prepared regularly.
• Nothing wastes time more or is more inefficient than to let the
choosing of a meal go until an hour or two hours before it is to be
served.
• If left in this way until the last moment it is quite sure not to be a
“balanced” meal, but one hastily put together, of anything that
happens to be in the house or that can be obtained quickly.
Taylorism
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Taylorism, was a theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows.
Its main objective was improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity.
While working as a lathe operator and foreman at Midvale Steel, Frederick Winslow
Taylor noticed the natural differences in productivity between workers, which were
driven by various causes, including differences in talent, intelligence, or motivations.
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He was one of the first people to try to apply science to this application, that is,
understanding why and how these differences existed and how best practices could
be analyzed and synthesized, then propagated to the other workers via
standardization of process steps.
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He believed that decisions based upon tradition and rules of thumb should be
replaced by precise procedures developed after careful study of an individual at work,
including via time and motion studies, which would tend to discover or synthesize the
"one best way" to do any given task.
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The goal and promise was both an increase in productivity and reduction of effort.
“A house is a machine for living in.”
Le Corbusier
Shodan House, Ahmedabad, India, 1956
Maison Jaoul,1954, by Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier
born Charles Eduard Jenneret
“Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in
light”
Le Corbusier:
Villa Savoye, Chapel of Notre Dame, Ronchamps
LC2 Petite Armchair, LC4Chaise
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
chapter 10
• “Changes in fashion occur more frequently than changes in
behavior.” page 218
• Spaces that try to recapture the comfort of the past by making them
look like the past, are missing the essential ingredient of comfort:
the behavior of the people was a result of large cultural conditions
that caused the spaces to result in a certain ‘look’, not the other way
around.
• A Colonial living room was comfortable for people of that time,
whereas a Colonial looking living room today is merely an image of
a time gone by. Our contemporary definition of comfort does not
really fit into a ‘Colonial’ package.
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
Chapter 10
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Comfort in the contemporary world is tough to imagine without:
Central heat
Central air conditioning
Electric lighting
Refrigerators
Hot and cold running water
Elevators
“As John Lukacs reminds us, although the home of 1930 would be
familiar to us, it would have been unrecognizable to the citizen of
1885.”
John Lukacs
• John Adalbert Lukacs (born Lukács János Albert on 31 January
1924) is a Hungarian-born American historian who has written more
than thirty books, including Five Days in London, May 1940 and A
New Republic.
• He was a professor of history at Chestnut Hill College (where he
succeeded Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn) from 1947 to 1994, and the
chair of that history department from 1947 to 1974.
• He has served as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University,
Columbia University, Princeton University, La Salle
University,Regional College in British Columbia and the University of
Budapest, and Hanover College.
• A self-proclaimed reactionary, Lukacs often holds views that many
consider idiosyncratic
Early Electric Lighting in Homes
http://www.rexophone.com/?p=1175
Nikola Tesla
• Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a SerbianAmerican inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer.
• He was an important contributor to the birth of commercial electricity,
and is best known for his many revolutionary developments in the
field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern
alternating current (AC) electric power systems, including the
polyphase system of electrical distribution and the AC motor.
• This work helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.
Nikola Tesla
• Because of his eccentric personality and his seemingly unbelievable
and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and
technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and
regarded as a mad scientist by many late in his life.
• Tesla died with little money at the age of 86 in a hotel suite in New
York City.
Nikola Tesla
• Nikola Tesla developed polyphase alternating current system of
generators, motors and transformers and held 40 basic U.S. patents
on the system, which George Westinghouse bought, determined to
supply America with the Tesla system.
• Edison did not want to lose his DC empire, and a bitter war ensued.
This was the war of the currents between AC and DC. Tesla Westinghouse ultimately emerged the victor because AC was a
superior technology.
• It was a war won for the progress of both America and the world.
Nikola Tesla
• Tesla introduced his motors and electrical systems in a classic
paper, “A New System of Alternating Current Motors and
Transformers” which he delivered before the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers in 1888.
• One of the most impressed was the industrialist and inventor
George Westinghouse. One day he visited Tesla’s laboratory and
was amazed at what he saw.
• Tesla had constructed a model polyphase system consisting of an
alternating current dynamo, step-up and step-down transformers
and A.C. motor at the other end.
• The perfect partnership between Tesla and Westinghouse for the
nationwide use of electricity in America had begun.
Nikola Tesla
• In February 1882, Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field, a
fundamental principle in physics and the basis of nearly all devices
that use alternating current.
• Tesla brilliantly adapted the principle of rotating magnetic field for
the construction of alternating current induction motor and the
polyphase system for the generation, transmission, distribution and
use of electrical power.
• He designed the first hydroelectric powerplant in Niagara Falls in
1895, which was the final victory of alternating current.
• The achievement was covered widely in the world press, and Tesla
was praised as a hero world wide.
Nikola Tesla
• Nikola Tesla patented the basic system of radio in 1896.
• His published schematic diagrams describing all the basic elements
of the radio transmitter which was later used by Marconi.
• The United States Supreme Court, in 1943 held Marconi's most
important patent invalid, recognizing Tesla's more significant
contribution as the inventor of radio technology.
Christopher Alexander
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Christopher Wolfgang Alexander (born October 4, 1936 in Vienna,
Austria) is an architect noted for his theories about design, and for more
than 200 building projects in California, Japan, Mexico and around the
world.
Reasoning that users know more about the buildings they need than
any architect could, he produced and validated (in collaboration with
Sarah Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein) a "pattern language" designed
to empower anyone to design and build at any scale.
Alexander is often overlooked by texts in the history and theory of
Architecture because his work intentionally disregarded contemporary
Architecture discourse, appealing more through methods consistent
with his theories than through established practices.
As such, Alexander is widely considered to occupy a place outside the
discipline, the discourse, and the practice of Architecture.
In 1958 he moved from England to the United States, living and
teaching in Berkeley, California from 1963.
While searching for Christopher Alexander, I bumped into
MRGD Architects, and their Urban Lobby project
MRGD Architects cites Christopher Alexander as an
influence in their exploration of these ideas
• “According to Christopher Alexander, compartmentalization and the
dissociation of internal elements are potential signs of anarchy and
schizophrenia.”
• “Fuzzy logic thinking is another step of helping human thought to
recognize our environment less as a world of crisp boundaries and
disconnections and more as a field of swarming agents with blurred
borders.”
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
Chapter 10
• “After 1920, especially in America (somewhat later in Europe),
physical comfort in the home was no longer the privilege of a part of
society, it was accessible to all.” page 220
• The author observes that the contemporary, ‘open plan’ home offers
as little privacy as a home environment in the Middle Ages. Page 222
• He proposes that what would create a better domestic comfort
would be more small rooms rather than a large open space.
• Furniture too, he observes, should be designed and manufactured
with practical rather than aesthetic goals.
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
Chapter 10
• Convenience, as practicality, not aesthetics should, in his view, be
the basis for the design of the physical home environment.
• Kitchens, for example, should not consist of cabinets that hide their
contents, but rather should keep all of the working ‘tools’ of the
kitchen out in the open, where they can easily be seen and gotten
hold of.
• The author observes also that kitchens are generally too small
today. The actual tasks done in cooking require more room to work
than usually provided.
• Similarly, the layout of bathrooms is not based upon patterns of use,
and space needed to do what is desired.
Home: A Short History Of An Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
Chapter 10
• He concludes by saying that comfort is a complex, multidimensional, concept, and that like an onion, it may initially appear
to be simple, but it is not.
• “We must discover for ourselves the mystery of comfort, for without
it, our dwellings will indeed be machines instead of homes.”
• The author concludes the book by proposing that domestic comfort
involves “a range of attributes – convenience, intimacy, and privacy
– all of which contribute to the experience; common sense will do
the rest.” page 231
So what does domestic comfort look like to us?
• What do you think is the relationship between visual beauty, and
comfort?
• Is your physical comfort impacted by visual beauty, or lack thereof?
• Is visual beauty impacted by physical comfort or a lack of physical
comfort?
• If a chair is comfortable does it therefore look good?
• If a chair is uncomfortable does it therefore look bad?
So what does domestic comfort look like to us?
• If your house interior is neat and clean does that have an effect on
your sense of comfort?
• If your house interior is messy, and dirty, does that have an effect on
your sense of comfort?
• Does your sense of comfort go more with you than with the physical
environment you are in, or do you respond to, and change in,
different physical environments?
• Is domestic comfort a design issue and something for designers to
address in their work, or is it something that the occupants must
bring to an environment?
• Does it require attention by both designers and occupants?
Google ‘Comfortable Room’
and these images come up
Too precious; a stage set that looks ‘comfy’ but is actually too small of a
space to support any activity, including sleeping.
The sense of a view out, and light coming in, create a
comfortable ambience.
This space looks ‘noisy’. All hard surfaces will be cold in
winter, and acoustically clattery.
A pleasant looking bath space, but the ceiling seems to
loom close above the tub and above the sinks.
The windows add a good amount of daylight but the room
feels hard, clattery, and piecemeal.
Pleasant in many regards. The window plays a big role in
creating the overall comfortable ambience.
This space and its furnishings speak of a particular sensibility, a
particular time: 1950’s Modern. For a design knowledgeable
person, this room is unified in expression.
For design oriented people, any sacrifice in physical comfort
demanded by these furnishings and the décor are amply paid
back in cognitive, conceptual, affirmation and contentment.
Feels like a generic hotel room.
Uniformity becomes stifling. The window is just right for a
burglar!
White does set off the ‘pops’ of color, and for a small-ish
apartment space, there is a good range of visual texture.
The view makes the room. The seating almost ruins it.
The art makes the room.
This looks comfortable and appealing, but what can you
actually ‘do’ in here?
Yeah Baby!
Home at last!