Week of September 30

HOME SWEET HOME

Mid Pleasures and palaces though I may roam,

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home;

A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there,

Which, seek thro' the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere. Home.

Home! Sweet, sweet home!

There's no place like home.

An exile from home, spendor dazzles in vain,

Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again;

The birds singing gaily, that come at my call;

Give me them, with that peace of mind, dearer than all.

CHORUS

To thee, I'll return, overburdened with care,

The heart's dearest solace will smile on me there.

No more from that cottage again will I roam,

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.

Words by John Howard Payne,

music by Henry Rowley Bishop.

IT’S ONLY A SHANTY

It’s only a shanty in old shanty town,

The roof is so slanty, it touches the ground,

But my tumble down shack, by an old railroad track,

Like a millionaire’s mansion, is calling me back,

I’d give up a palace, if I were a king,

It’s more than a palace, it’s my ev’rything,

There’s a queen waiting there with a silvery crown,

In a shanty in old shanty town.

Having left the city and begun to understand suburbs as places, we now begin to introduce ourselves to the American Suburban Home, in many ways the core of the American Dream. We’ve seen that whatever the suburban house was, it was not a farm house, no matter how much we romanticized “Home Sweet Home.” Nor was it the humble log cabin, no matter how much we romanticized that, either. We start working in three books at this point, adding Home, a Short History of an Idea to the mix.

During the six years of my architectural education the subject of comfort was mentioned only once . . . it was a curious omission from an otherwise rigorous curriculum; one would have thought that comfort was a crucial issue in preparing for the architectural profession, like justice in law, or health in medicine

This is not a book about interior decoration. It is not so much the reality of the home that is my subject as the idea of the home, and although history is here, it is the present that concerns me.

Witold Rybczynski, Forward, vii-viii

We make a distinction between the ideas house and home, though both describe the same space. Rybczynski's book is quite remarkable, in that the author explores one of our most basic cultural artifacts to explain its origin. As we'll see the ideas which form the basic American home comes from many different places and appear over a long period of time. The modern Western house usually dated to the invention of the chimney, which happens more recently than one might think: only a generation or so before the Pilgrims and Puritans venture to North America in the early 17th century.

We will need to understand something of Rybczynski's writing technique in order to get the most out of him. Unlike most scholarly authors, he doesn't at all hesitate to use the word I in his writings. He is not at all anonymous, and he shares not only his thoughts, but the processes by which he reaches them, as well. This is a rare privilege. I hope you'll enjoy it. I hope you will also use it in the writing you do for me.

Chapter I. Nostalgia

Writing nearly twenty years ago, Witold Rybczynski begins with a most unlikely character, the designer Ralph Lauren. Today, he could still use him to introduce the concept of nostalgia and the concept of comfort, but he would most likely include Martha Stewart in his list of examples. This chapter will introduce you to thinking about the conscious creation of images, and using imagery to "invent" traditions: creating, as it were, pasts which never were. How does one express Americanism in domestic building?

Click on the picture to the right to visit Martha Stewart's online catalogue. The furniture section will give you a good idea of her version of Americanism. Not every American dotes on her, however. Satirist Trystan L. Bass asks, "What if Martha Stewart were a Goth? To find the answer, click on the image below...if you dare.

Chapter II. Intimacy and Privacy.

Language is not just a medium, like a water pipe, it is a reflection of how we think.

Here, we'll learn that "comfort" like many other ideas, is a cultural invention. As Rybczynski will show us, it really has very little to do with questions of temperature or humidity. The distinction between house as place and home as place may actually relate most closely to the invention of the idea of comfort, and the application of this concept to the house

We can talk about some desires or needs we have as being "ends in themselves," and others as being "means to an end.” This will be the case in considering "privacy" and "intimacy." We usually think of privacy as being such a fundamental human need that it is hard to consider that its absence from early houses was not a problem arising from poverty or ignorance. People didn't seek what they didn't need. This may suggest that privacy isn't so much an "end in itself" as a means invented to achieve something else. This other thing is what Rybczynski calls intimacy, and most particularly, a kind of intimacy called stimmung. Make sure you understand the meaning of this word borrowed from the German. How do you create stimmung in your environment? why not write a bit about that in the clog?

Albrecht Deurer's St. Jerome (left) and Antonello da Messina's stimmung-less version of the same saint. (right). Do these pictures show the presence or absence of a sort of intimacy?.

Note, for example each Jerome is pictured reading, Which Jerome is really involved with his text? How can you tell?

I need to get sense of how you're reacting to the third book we're juggling, so I'm not going to add any new readings for today. We'll see how discussion time goes on Monday, and if we run out of time I'll continue it today. If we do get finished, in good order I want to show the video below. The American house doesn't start in America, and the Weald and Downland Museum is a great place to get a sense of what houses were like in England just before the first settlers came to Jamestown or Plimoth.

Poplar Cottage at the Weald and Downland Museum is contemporary with the settling of New England. As late as that, English Houses were being built without chimneys. We'll view a video which will demonstratet the transition from chimney-less to chimneyed houses.

The Weald and Downland Museum, Near Chichester in the south of England, is a wonderful place. Until you get there in the flesh, you can be a cyber-tourist by clicking on the image to the left

We’ve read in Jackson and Stilgoe about the increasing role of women in and around the house in nineteenth century America. But this process began in Europe much earlier. The feminization of the home in seventeenth-century Holland was one of the most important events in the evolution of the domestic interior. This parallels the ideas we encountered in Borderland, suggesting the imprinting of feminine ideas on the suburban environment. You’ll find in Rybczynski that there is a parallel reason that this happens. This should reinforce the idea that parallel cultural experiences evoke parallel responses.

You have this illustration of De Witte's Woman Playing Virginal in your text. I thought you might like to see it in color to understand something of the richness of the composition

This interior shows some signs of feminization, especially if you compare it to the interiors you saw in the video from the Weald and Downland Museum. The grand scale of this rich merchant's house disguises that a bit.

Rybczynski suggests that we get our ideas of Privacy and Intimacy from the Scandinavians, who seem among the first to carve up larger spaces into smaller, more private, ones. If we are to believe him, domesticity--those characteristics which tell us that what we see is "home" not "office" other kinds of space, comes from the Dutch. We will see how the family structure in Holland influences both the rise in status of the kitchen and the use of certain specific types of decorative objects throughout the house. At least one of those visual cues or icons of domesticity appears on the Stonewall dormitories for just this reason.

Rybczynski suggests that part of feminizing the house was accomplished by taking the ordinary domestic objects associated with women's roles in the household, and transforming them from useful to decorative objects.

Associated with the rise of domesticity was the growth in popularity of the still life composition in painting..

Still life raised the stuff of ordinary living, such as food and its preparation, or flowers, into high art. Note how the compositions below glorify things associated with the role of woman as mistress of the house, including such ordinary things as cutlery and china. Click on the images to see larger copies.

Every so often one comes across a book which is coherent in its narrative that it cries out to be read as a full work before one begins to break it down for analysis. Such a book is Tracy Kidder's House, the story of one architect, one family, complete with inlaws, and a small but very interesting construction firm, "Apple Corps". No fiction here, though you may see little exchoes of Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House. The end result you see below. I'd like to have you get started reading it, though we won't discuss it until the end of the semester. You'll see it reads like a novel...aim for finishing it in a month. I'll nudge you from time to time.