Presentation 6.4 - History of Interior Design

Evolution of Residence Typology History of Home

IR 2613: HISTORY OF INTERIOR DESIGN

Tutor: Amal Shah | Sem 3 | Monsoon 2020 Faculty of Design, CEPT University

HOME What is a home?

HISTORY OF Residential Spaces?

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House Typology

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Transient Dwellings

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Episodic or irregular temporary dwellings

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Periodic or regular temporary dwellings

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Seasonal dwellings

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Semi permanent dwellings

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Permanent dwellings

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Ancient Civilizations

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The Traditional Islamic City

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The Traditional Urban House In India

Houses by Typology •

Ephemeral or transient dwellings

the dwellings of nomadic band-type societies whose existence depends on a simple hunting/ food gathering economy.

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Episodic or irregular temporary dwellings

The dwellings of nomadic band type societies whose existence depends on either advanced hunting or advanced food gathering practices; the former is a stepping-stone to pastoralism and the latter to rudimentary agriculture.

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Periodic or regular temporary dwellings

African Bushmen Skerm 1

Inuit Igloo 2

Yanomami Communal dwelling 2

Bedouin Tent 3

The dwellings of nomadic tribal societies with a pastoral economy.

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Seasonal dwellings

the dwellings of tribal societies with a semi nomadic way of life based on both pastoral and marginal agricultural pursuits.

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Semi permanent dwellings

the dwellings of sedentary folk societies or hoe peasants practicing subsistence agriculture.

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Permanent dwellings

the dwellings of sedentary agricultural societies that have a political social organization as a nation and a surplus agricultural economy.

Only at the sixth stage of socioeconomic development are the basic prerequisites provided to foster urban settlement.

Houses by Typology The geographic distribution of these six dwelling forms reveals a general pattern congruous with the particular stage of socioeconomic development of their respective societies.

Predictably, simple societies are found in the least desirable regions, and more complex societies claim the more favourable regions. • Temporary and episodic dwellings, for example, are indigenous to arid tropical deserts, humid equatorial jungles, or arctic and subarctic barrens.

Navajo House 4

• Periodic and seasonal dwellings are predominantly found in arid marginal areas of the subtropical and temperate zones. • Subtropical and temperate regions that have adequate water for cultivation contain semi permanent or permanent dwellings.

It must be emphasized that the evolution of these six categories of dwelling prototypes rarely follows our model sequence. Intermediate stages are frequently bypassed.

Masaai Boma 4

Houses by Typology This is particularly true of stages three and four, of which both have a pastoral economy at their base; accordingly, a purely agricultural sequence model is simply stages 1-2-5-6, namely, food gathering and hunting, followed by slash and burn primitive cultivation, followed by hoe-peasant cultivation, and ending with surplus agriculture.

Study of the hierarchy of pre-urban dwelling types based on anthropo-geographic and socioeconomic criteria reveals many new insights into architectural form.

Dogon House 5

For example, the study indicates that circular dwellings are primordial, and predate the rectangular shape of indigenous shelters.

Moreover, gradual increase in dwelling size or even complexity does not necessarily signify socioeconomic development; indeed, several very large collective dwellings are built by members of simple social organizations. These are some of the unexpected observations that emerged from research.

Pueblo Village 5

Slovakian Farm House 6

Bernese Farm House 5

Cappadocia cave dwellings 6

Houses by Typology Transient Dwellings BaMbuti Pygmy Hut

An example of an ephemeral dwelling type is the BaMbuti Pygmy beehive hut. The BaMbuti are forest people who inhabit Africa's lturi Forest, a vast expanse of dense, dark, damp, and inhospitable jungle. They call the forest Ndura, a word that also means the entire world.

The BaMbuti are small people, averaging less than 4 1/~ ft (1.3 m) in height; they are powerful and tough and have the ability to run swiftly and silently, essential characteristics for survival in a primitive hunting existence. The BaMbuti hunt the animals of their region and gather wild fruit, roots, and mushrooms. They roam the forest in hunting bands of at least six to seven individual families, each with its own hunting net; only in this way can they have an eďŹƒcient net hunt.

Houses by Typology Transient Dwellings BaMbuti Pygmy Hut The women construct the shelter. In a squatting position, they drive young saplings into the ground with sharp thrusts, each time in exactly the same place, until the saplings are ďŹ rm in the ground. When a circle of straight saplings surrounds them, the women stand up and skilfully bend the saplings over their heads, twisting and BaMbuti hut twining smaller saplings across until a lattice framework is formed.

After the framework is completed, the women gather the large, heart-shaped leaves collected by the men and slit the stalks toward the end (like clothespins), then hook two or three of them together and hang them on the framework like roof tiles, overlapping each other to form a waterproof covering.

Sometimes as many as four women work on thatching a hut. Some hang leaves from the outside, working upward; others work from the inside, pushing the leaves through the lattice frame and fastening leaves from the top down.

At ďŹ rst this covering leaks when it rains, but once the leaves have settled down, not even the hardest rain can penetrate it, and it remains watertight until the leaves dry out and begin to curl. The entrance is simply a gap in the framework of the shelter.

Houses by Typology Irregular Temporary Dwellings Plains Indian Tents There is little doubt that the best known example of episodic dwellings are the tepees of the North American Plains Indians. These tribes followed the trek of the immense bison (bualo) herd roaming the plains or prairies of the continent.

Two prototype tepees can be distinguished by whether their relative basic skeletal structure consists of either three or four poles. Of the two types, the three-pole tepee was inherently more stable. This was used by the Cheyenne, Sioux, and Cree nations, while the Crow, Shoshone, Blackfoot, and Comanche used the four-pole tepee.

Houses by Typology Irregular Temporary Dwellings Plains Indian Tents The skeletal structure of the Plains Indian tepee was made by tying the top ends of the supporting poles (either three or four poles) together and standing them up; then additional poles, up to about twenty, were placed against the tripod or tetrapod.

A tailored buffalo -hide cover was placed Comp on the on the pole skeleton and was staked or weighted down with stones all around the bottom edge. A hole was left at the crossing of the poles to allow smoke from the interior fire to escape.

All tepees were slightly tilted so that the smoke hole was off centre toward the front side, thereby facilitating the closing of the hole in wet weather. The two flaps, or "ears," of the smoke hole were each fastened to a separate pole enabling the adjustment of the aperture in accordance with the prevailing wind or to close it so that the tepee could be weathertight.

The fire was built directly below the smoke hole, and the bedsteads were placed on the ground around the circumference except at the doorway, which habitually faced the rising sun.

Houses by Typology Temporary Dwellings In fact, many nomads are so accustomed to the temporary nature of their dwellings that they feel uncomfortable in solid buildings and often suer claustrophobia; moreover, they dread to enter multi-storeyed buildings.

This fear, in the past, was exploited in the building forms developed by sedentary peoples subjected to frequent incursions by tent-living nomads.

For example, tower like stone dwellings were adopted by sedentary farmers in the Caucasian mountain valleys and they were habitually subjected to harassment by raiding nomads.

The usual household in pastoral tribes includes two or more married couples and their children and extended family. If the polygynous family is the rule, a man's sons ordinarily break away upon marriage and establish a new or neolocal residence.

Houses by Typology Temporary Dwellings The pastoral nomad's dwelling is generically a portable tent consisting of a tensile felt or skin membrane stretched over a wooden framework.

The materials are lightweight so that they are easily transported from one periodic settlement to another. Periodic dwellings are indigenous to continental steppes and deserts. Climatic forces and the nomadic life of tribal societies are the predominant forces determining the shape, structure, and construction method of the dwellings.

In some instances the intense cold in winter inuences the shape of the dwelling, dictating that it have a minimum of exposed surface and maximum stability in order to withstand high winds.

Houses by Typology Temporary Dwellings Naturally, a dome shaped structure consisting of a skeleton and membrane cover lends additional strength to the shelter.

Lightweight building materials possess a low heat-storage capacity, which is advantageous in winter when a quick heat response to the ďŹ re is required.

The steppes are intensely and continuously cold in winter; there are high winds and negligible solar heat. In summer there are long warm days and cool night.

The deserts have little or no seasonal variations, little precipitation, very low humidity, and intense solar radiation, resulting in very hot days and cold nights.

Nevertheless, the architectural response to both the continental steppe and desert climate is similar because it is dictated by the need for portability of the dwelling.

Houses by Typology Seasonal Dwellings Barabaig Gheid The Barabaig of Tanzania are another of the few surviving "cattle complex" people. These semi nomads also inhabit seasonal dwellings. They must migrate with their herds in response to climate and vegetational changes. Although they do cultivate small plots of maize, the Barabaig are primarily cattle breeders.

A Barabaig kraal or homestead is called gheid and consists of a thorn -bush enclosure built in the shape of a ďŹ gure eight. The fence is about 8 to 10 ft. (~.6 to 3 m) in height and is usually uninterrupted except by an opening at the tangential point of the two circles of the ďŹ gure eight.

One circular enclosure is called samod and contains the dwellings of the Barabaig, while the other, the muhaled is a cattle corral. Both people and cattle enter and leave the kraal through a joint gateway that provides access to both enclosures.

Houses by Typology Semi permanent Dwellings Mesakin Quisar The Mesakin Quisar, a Nuba people of the Sudan, live in round -hut clusters that typify the multi unit semi permanent dwelling pattern. The chief activity of the Mesakin is the cultivation of fields for their staple food, durra, a variety of millet resembling maize. Sowing commences in April, when the rainy season begins, and is completed by the end of May. The fields are tended during the long growing season until November when the harvest starts.

The harvest is a community endeavour.

Neighbours and relatives join in reaping a man's crop and then move on to another’s. Men wield knives or iron spearheads to cut the grain bearing ears from the stalks and flail the ears of millet with flat clubs to thresh out the grain.

Women clean the grain by lifting filled calabashes in the air and trickling their contents into baskets while the wind carries off the chaff. The women then transport the baskets to the granaries of their homes.

Houses by Typology Semi permanent Dwellings Mesakin Quisar A typical Mesakin dwelling consists of five or six windowless round huts constructed on stone foundations around a courtyard. The base is carefully prepared to allow rain water from the inner courtyard to drain off easily.

The huts, as well as the walls closing off the spaces between them, are built of adobe, 1~ in (30 cm) at the base and thinner above. The walls are mud-plastered smoothly inside and out; wooden pegs are set into the wall for hanging calabashes and working tools.

The huts, which may be from 11 to 13 ft. (3.3 to 3.9 m) in diameter, enclose a private courtyard. The centre of it is the family cooking area. A conical grass roof covers each round hut, giving it a turret effect. A roof of loosely woven grass and boughs shades the inner courtyard.

Houses by Typology Permanent Dwellings Italian Trullo The trullo is the traditional permanent building form of the inhabitants of the Murgia in the region of Apulia in south eastern Italy. Adaptations of this form of dwelling are found in both villages and towns of this region of ltaly.

Farming is still the main occupation in the rural districts of Apulia. Grapes and olives are the primary crops, and wheat, beans, tomatoes, and other small crops are planted among the olive trees. The ďŹ elds are usually small and enclosed with thick, dry stone walls. The land is tillable only through great expenditure of labour. The limestone bedrock was originally covered with but a few inches of organic soil.

Houses by Typology Permanent Dwellings Italian Trullo Very rocky areas in the district serve as pasture land, most often for sheep. Rabbits and chickens are raised in the yards, and small game is hunted in the countryside. The trulli are mostly constructed with stones from the fields. Another source is the stone quarried in the process of providing large rainwater cisterns or wine tanks beneath the dwelling being built.

Bare bedrock serves as the foundation for the trullo. The rectangular rooms are enclosed by thick stone walls that are hollowed in places to make alcoves and niches. The walls support a conical stone dome covered with overlapping flat stones.

Similar flat stones are used for finishing the floor of the house. The tiny windows are spanned with stone lintels, and door openings are arched. The walls are invariably whitewashed and so is the capstone of the dome. Rainwater is collected from the roofs in a cistern.

Houses by Typology Permanent Dwellings Italian Trullo In a typical multiroom farmhouse the largest dome spans the main living space; the kitchen has a large open hearth whose dome ends in a chimney; bread-baking ovens are either built outside the house or adjacent to the kitchen; other rooms serve as bedrooms.

During the warm season the stone trulli are comfortably cool. In winter they are cold and damp; therefore, the doors are kept open during the day to keep the interior dry.

Women sit just outside the doorway to do such tasks as mending and knitting; as modesty demands, they face the house as they work.

One structural unit is attached to the next so that the roof plan of a cluster is characterized by a graceful transition from one building to the next.

Ancient Civilizations Urban Houses The Urban House In Mesopotamia The typical urban house in Ur consisted of several rooms around a central court. A staircase, usually near the entrance, led either to the roof or to the upper floor. A reception room, kitchen, and other ancillary household rooms faced the courtyard at ground level. In two-story structures bedrooms and private family rooms were located on the upper floor, also facing the courtyard. The roof of single story houses was often used as a sleeping platform, but in humbler dwellings the reception room had to serve also as a bedroom.

The essential features of the Ur house survived a life span of over 6,000 years; the traditional Baghdad house in Iraq today retains all the intrinsic elements of the Ur house.

This similarity prompted Cantacuzino to state, “The plan [of the Ur house] is a lasting solution to urban life. The house is insulated against the bustle of the street, defended against marauders, and protected against the fierce climate.”

Ancient Civilizations Urban Houses Indus Civilization The Indus civilization possessed a very advanced building technology. The builders of Mohenjo Daro used burnt brick for their massive battered walls, with the inner face invariably vertical and finished in clay plaster. The exterior surface of the walls appears to have been unfinished, and only larger buildings appear to have been battered. The foundations were carried to a considerable depth and were built with great care.

Floors were usually paved with brick, laid flat in most rooms but on edge in areas of excessive wear, such as bathrooms.

The true arch was probably unknown. While the corbeled arch was used for recesses in the massive walls (and infrequently for spanning wall openings), the masonry above door and window openings was usually supported by wooden lintels.

Wood construction was also used for upper floors and flat roofs. These consisted of beams and planking. In addition, the roofs were probably covered by beaten earth and a protective layer of brick. Fireplaces were rarely built, but portable braziers may have served for cooking and heating. Since most dwellings had an upper story, stairways were common elements and were rather steep compared to today.

Islamic Houses The medieval Islamic urban house had its roots in the ancient urban dwellings of Mesopotamia. There was indeed an aďŹƒnity between the ancient and Islamic concepts of the urban house. Both cultures believed in maximum privacy, in protection from strangers, and in the humble appearance of the exterior of the home; moreover, climatic conditions being virtually the same throughout the world of Islam.

They elicited similar physical responses in dwellings. These conditions were best met by the courtyard concept. Of course, in many respects the Islamic house is more sophisticated than its precursor.

Islamic Houses To enhance the privacy and security of the family, the Islamic urban house (as indeed was the case with most large rural homes) was frequently divided into two sections: the salamlik and the haramlik. The former served as the public part of the house, where male visitors and friends were received, while the latter was a private and secluded sanctuary reserved for the family.

In larger homes these two parts were separate and their respective rooms grouped around their own separate courtyards.

In smaller houses the separation was vertical, the salamlik occupying the ground oor and the haramlik the upper level of the house around a single courtyard.

Here, too, considerations of privacy governed the design of the entrance, which was protected by a privacy wall to inhibit a direct view from the street. In addition, the whole disposition of the house was designed to preclude the possible visual intrusion by neighbours or strangers.

When window openings were placed in the haramlik either facing the street or central open space, trellised bay windows, or mashrabiyyahs, protected them. These trellised apertures enabled the occupants of the haramlik to satisfy their curiosity about the outside world without being seen.

The North African Dar

The Traditional Urban House In India The courtyard or court-garden house is the indigenous urban dwelling of the Indian subcontinent. If stone is unavailable or economically out of reach, urban dwellings are built of brick and the upper stories of timber frame with adobe or brick infill panels. The roof is either flat and covered with mud or sloping and tiled, depending on the region.

In humble dwellings floors are beaten earth at ground level and paved only in the open court, passages, and washrooms. The toilet is frequently located next to the entrance and consists of no more than a hole in the paved floor with a basket below, which is emptied at night by the official sweeper, an arrangement that resembles the ancient sanitation practices of the Mohenjo-Daro dwellers.

The Traditional Urban House In India In Hindu homes, where the preparation of food is a religious ritual, the kitchen is placed next to the family shrine. It is a chimneyless room with one or more earthen fireplaces raised above the floor.

Otherwise, most Indian homes have multifunctional interior spaces with little furniture: mats are used for sitting, quilts for sleeping, and chests for storage. Unlike those of the historical examples discussed earlier, the facades of many urban dwellings are frequently austere and anonymous; they rarely reflect the class distinction of the occupants. Colour is reserved for religious buildings.

The Traditional Urban House In India Dwellings bordering on major streets, or bazaars, traditionally have shops on the ground oor that open out into the street during the day, but the privacy of the home behind or above the shops is inviolate.

The house itself is a private shelter for home life, but it represents only one aspect of city life. Another aspect, namely the street life within the community, is an important corollary to home life in India.

In general, the traditional cities of the Indian subcontinent have a cellular structure composed of residential neighbourhoods or precincts.

Jaisalmer Jaisalmer is a fortress city founded in A.D. 1156 by Rao Jaisalji as a military fort and trading post for the east-west caravan route crossing the Thar Desert. It owed its wealth to the fact that it was the capital of a princely state as well as a trade centre for wool, camels, cattle, and sheep.

The Jaisalmer region is arid with only sparse vegetation and saline ground water.

The city's site has an irregular polygon shape within which is a hill surrounded by a second fortiďŹ cation wall. This city within a city is triangular in shape and contains the royal palace in addition to numerous common dwellings.

A winding path leads from the lower city to the only gateway of the upper city.

Street Plan & Citadel, Jaisalmer

Urban Dwelling, Jaisalmer

Jaipur The foundation of the new capital city of Jaipur could be justiďŹ ed by two plausible factors - the political dominance which the State of Amber had already acquired in erstwhile Rajputana under the patronage of the Mughal rulers, and the need for an environment that would be suitable as the new capital of the State.

The foundation of Jaipur was too an outcome of new economic dimensions.

Economic shift from agriculture to trading and commerce compelled the Kachhwaha Ruler to establish a new capital city having conducive commercial atmosphere.

Jaipur The typical dwelling unit is similar in principle to that of Jaisalmer and is basically an attached multi-storeyed townhouse built of stone with one or several interior courtyards.

Whatever the size of the dwelling, the courts never exceed a certain optimum size in order to afford protection from the sun. "The privacy-oriented house is totally closed to the street at ground floor level in order to block any view from the street. Only the entry door opens on the street. This door is also blocked by a baffle wall within a few feet of the entry; this space is called modh, the turn“.

Originally Jaipur was a white city and only after some experimentation in the colourings of buildings along the various streets-green, yellow, and pink, among others-did Ram Singh adopt pink as the trademark of Jaipur. He had all buildings along the main thoroughfares painted pink on the occasion of a royal visit. From that time Jaipur became known as the Pink City.

Ahmedabad Founded in A.D. 1411 by the Muslim ruler of Gujarat, Sultan Ahmed Shah, Ahmadabad was also a fortiďŹ ed city and an important trade centre. In contrast to the desert cities described above, Ahmadabad is located in a fertile agricultural region along the Sabarmati River.

The residential quarters of the city were located on both sides of a main thoroughfare (now called Gandhi Road) that linked the city's administrative centre, the royal palace, with its religious and commercial centre comprising the ‘Jami’ mosque and the adjacent marketplace.

Ahmedabad The subsequent occupation of Ahmadabad by the Mogul emperor Akbar also left its imprint upon the city. The Mogul practice of settling the generals and troops with their respective families near the gateways of the city brought about a cellular urban structure.

These cells were further divided into puras inhabited by a speciďŹ c guild, caste, or religious group.

Each Pura in turn had a spinal street, or pol, with small blind alleys or lanes branching from it; gates at both ends of the pol barred entry into the Pura to strangers at night.

Each Pura usually had a small chowk, or square (often not more than a widening of the street), where public activities of these close-knit communities took place.

Ahmedabad The heart of the Ahmadabad house is its central courtyard, which is smaller than that of its Udaipur counterpart in response to climatic forces.

Thus, the narrow and deep courtyards (also called chowks) of Ahmadabad seldom receive sunshine at the ground-oor level; a favourable microclimate is created in these outdoor spaces where most household activities occur.

The ground-oor level has an open plan with the entrance hall (the khadaki), the courtyard, the shaded open verandah (parsal), and the staircase leading to the upper oors. Adjacent to the parsal is the kitchen area and a large storage room for food supply and household utilities.

Medieval European Houses Of course, fortification walls were used in antiquity, but the medieval burghers perfected city defence and enriched the oriental and Greco Roman vocabulary of defensive building forms and their constituent elements.

Moreover, they developed an organization that delegated the responsibility of building, maintaining, and manning specific sections of the fortifications to particular guilds. The walls were usually fortified and built with a covered walk, behind the parapet. Numerous loopholes and embrasures enabled the defenders to shoot at attackers in relative safety.

Medieval European Houses Rothenberg stopped growing and thereby retained its medieval form and size. Thus today it is a picturesque reminder of the scale, cohesion, and beauty that were once the hallmarks of medieval cities. Not only did the churches, fortiďŹ cations. And general city plan of Rothenberg survive, but so did many medieval homes.

The plan of a large house reveals the three construction phases of its development, the earliest phase a dwelling tower dating from the thirteenth century. The tower, three stories high, was built of ďŹ eldstone, while the corners and window and door frames were of dressed stone.

Medieval European Houses Each oor was a single room; the basement and ground oor had vaulted ceilings while the upper oors were of timber with the two lateral supporting beams resting on stone brackets. The second phase of construction added a large hall-type dwelling to the tower structure. The middle supporting beam of the hall was itself supported in the centre by a large oak column.

A staircase led to the upper stories, which contained more private accommodations and presumably also storage rooms. The third stage of development consisted of a two-story household building with stables at ground level. These buildings, as well as subsequent ones, provide proof that many medieval city dwellers had agricultural landholdings outside the city and that their families complemented their city-based enterprises with cultivation.

Renaissance Residential Squares And Crescents At the beginning of the seventeenth century Henri VI of France planned the earliest of the residential squares in France, the Place Royale (now Place des Vosges). This enterprise was an eort to join the homes of the aristocracy with that of the king, and to recreate the great spectacle of the court in the heart of Paris. 38 three-storied buildings united at the ground level by an arcade, but articulated at the top by steeply hipped roofs, surrounded the square.

It was envisaged that this square as providing the setting of "cosmopolitan living in the otherwise cramped city“. The architectural treatment of the fa9ades of these buildings was uniform; they were built of red brick masonry walls with pale stone quoins, and windows and dormers were arranged symmetrically.

Two taller buildings straddled gateways in the centre of the north and south side of the

Renaissance Residential Squares And Crescents This circular "square" surrounded by thirty three attached town houses has three regularly placed entrances with a view towards a concave facade. The facades of the three-storied town houses deďŹ ning the circus were articulated by three rows of classical columns, one above the other. King's Circus has a diameter of about 320 ft (97 m) and its facade "resembles the facade of a Roman amphitheatre which has been turned outside in and made concave instead of convex"

The Nineteenth Century Industrialism And Urbanism Workers' urban houses were very similar to those of the earlier agricultural society. Workers lived in small cottages not unlike those of farm workers, while their employers occupied so-called villas that imitated (on a smaller scale) the manors of the landed gentry.

In one respect, however, the working man experienced a considerable change in his domestic setting during the Industrial Revolution with his removal from the countryside to the city, the worker no longer had a garden to provide him with food, which meant that he was entirely dependent upon his wages for subsistence.

The Nineteenth Century Industrialism And Urbanism During the middle of the nineteenth century multi-storeyed model tenements for worker families ďŹ rst appeared in the city of London.

The building, completed in 1850, consisted of a series of ats accessible from an open gallery in the rear. The ďŹ ve story high building was U-shaped and enclosed a large courtyard, or drying ground.

The open galleries overlooked the courtyard and linked to each other and the street entrance by a wide staircase. A typical dwelling was entered through a narrow hall, which led to the living room; a scullery, a toilet, and a small bedroom had window openings toward the gallery, while the living room and a large bedroom were A tenement is a multi-occupancy building of any sort. However in the lit and ventilated from the street side.

United States it has come to mean a run-down apartment building, a slum.

The Nineteenth Century Industrialism And Urbanism Since the late 18th century is a style of housing where (generally) identical individual houses are conjoined into rows a line of houses which abut directly on to each other built with shared party walls between dwellings whose uniform fronts and uniform height created an ensemble that was more stylish than a "rowhouse".

However this is also the UK term for a "rowhouse" regardless of whether the houses are identical or not.

In architecture and city planning, a terraced or terrace house (UK) or townhouse (US) exhibits a style of medium-density housing that originated in Europe in the 16th century, where a row of identical or mirror-image houses share side walls. They are also known in some areas as row houses in US and India.

The Nineteenth Century Industrialism And Urbanism Although there has been apartment-type housing in cities, from the time of ancient Rome with its tenements to the age of Dickens and the slums of London, it was the rapid expansion of industrialised cities in the nineteenth century that made the at and the purpose-built apartment building increasingly common currency in the housing market.

The apartment's early popularity owed much to two factors: it provided spatially compact housing in cities with rapidly increasing populations and it made it possible for the burgeoning industrial middle classes to buy into the urban explosion.

Today the term 'apartment' is very loose, and may simply mean a at in a converted house.

As with current trends in transforming town and suburban houses, the tendency in apartment conversion has been to break down the formal hierarchy of rooms and incorporate the area once given over to circulation and corridors into more exible living spaces.

The Nineteenth Century Industrialism And Urbanism In the past hundred or so years, the purpose-built apartment has emerged as a kind of consumer home product tailored to the housing needs of urban families at dierent social and income levels. This quest to design model apartments that provide a framework for basic human needs has generated progressive visions of how we can live that have more universal relevance.

Usually lacking either the scale of the loft or the possibility to separate activities by level that is characteristic of the house, the densely structured and served spaces of the apartment have been especially fruitful in propagating new ideas of how we can inhabit our living spaces.

Pioneering modern architects used the model apartment as a domestic example: model dwellings for the model modern family, and all sorts of spatial and functional arrangements that originated in experimental apartment design have ďŹ ltered through to inuence how we organise our living spaces.

The 20th Century Among the most inuential Modern Movement apartments was the domestic cell designed by Le Corbusier for the Unite d'Habitation in Marseilles, 1949-52, which the architect hoped would become a prototype for low-cost housing.

Drawing on ideas that had existed as early as the 1920s, the Unite apartment combined a double-height living room with a glazed wall on one side and a single-height bedroom zone on the other. The dual orientation maximised natural light and allowed for cross-ventilation.

Reecting the new domestic role of the woman in the servant less home, the kitchen was integrated into the living space. While the design rejected the formality of the bourgeois apartment, it made reference to other building forms, such as the purpose-built, nineteenth-century artist's atelier.

The inuence of Le Corbusier's apartment can still be seen in such recent housing projects as Jean Nouvel's Nemausus in Nimes, where split-level apartments have dual orientation and a double- or triple-height living space.

The Nineteenth Century Industrialism And Urbanism If early Modernism was driven by an optimistic view of an ever- better society, in the post-war period that vision was slowly dismantled. And as utopian housing schemes degenerated into high-rise horror, a new spirit of social freedom and the increasing acceptance of a plurality of lifestyles emerged. Architects and Designers began to explore approaches that allowed the user to take control, shaping and altering living spaces according to individual, unpredictable and changing needs.

As the walls of the conventional apartment were removed, so the whole concept and function of the wall has been re-invented. Gio Ponti's 'Single Space Housing for Four People', published in Domus magazine in 1956, was described as a 'movable labyrinth'.

Kitchen and bathroom and certain pieces of furniture were built into the perimeter walls, while the internal walls had folding movable panels that made it possible to isolate or connect dierent spaces.

The Nineteenth Century Industrialism And Urbanism Such ideas reveal the continual conflict especially in the design of small apartments between how to accommodate services, equipment and storage and how to retain a sense of unencumbered space. A recent design by Dante Donegani and Giovanni Lauda for a model living space, where services and storage are incorporated in heavily equipped 'thick walls', reflects current design directions.

Here, the apartment first appears as a long, rectangular, empty white space. It can be transformed by a series of 'custom-made fully equipped boxes' that are pulled out of the walls. Some incorporate storage and others are actually habitable 'rooms', like the mini-gym, the office incorporating a desk unit, or the children's play area enclosed in a wigwam. As the designers have observed, 'love of empty space does not preclude a customer's pleasure'.

In this project for a model apartment by Dante Donegani and Giovanni Lauda, 1997, the blank, open, white living space is activated by boxes which pull out of the walls for dierent uses, and can be customised according to the owner's needs.

Berm-house, Detroit,

Goetsch-Winckler House, Okemos,

Goetsch-Winckler House, Okemos, Michigan

The 20th Century Modernism + Adaptive Reuse One of the problems we face in designing living spaces today may be less to do with how we want to live and more to do with how we negotiate a way between what exists and the kind of space we want to inhabit.

In many densely populated cities, where the built, heritage far outweighs the possibilities of new building, we are less likely to live in a home purpose built to suit a contemporary way of life than to be forced to work cleverly within the constraints of existing buildings, subverting and reinventing them to meet new needs and desires.

The 20th Century Modernism Behind the strict uniformity of a terrace we find the niceties of dining room and front parlour have been replaced by loft-scaled living rooms. Inside industrial buildings, instead of grimy sweat-stained workshops, we find bleached white interiors on the scale of hotel lobbies. Sometimes all that is left of the original building is its facade.

Of course this isn't an altogether new phenomenon. It could be argued that house interiors through history have been modified to keep up with new trends in decoration and convenience. Yet increasingly, refurbishing domestic interiors is becoming not just about updating decoration but about radical spatial reorganisation.

All sorts of social, economic and cultural conditions are behind this, as housing struggles to keep up to date with dynamic changes in society.

In the catalogue accompanying a recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 'The Un-Private House', curator Terence Riley observes: 'The social conditions and structures that drove the development of the private house - privacy, the separation of living and work; the family, domesticity have all changed drastically, perhaps more so in the last fifty years than in the preceding four centuries.'

The 20th Century Modernism The design of the majority of homes could once be securely based on the structure and needs of the nuclear family, but housing is increasingly forced to adapt to suit the multiplicity of society and more, transitory lifestyles.

At the same time, new communications and information technologies are altering the relationship between the home and the outside world and between private and working lives. This state of uncertainty is reected in the shift towards homes that, rather than reinforcing a particular way of life, are designed to accommodate change.

Just how far out of sync the contemporary way of inhabiting the home is with the residential structures we have inherited is revealed by the problems we encounter in giving names to the rooms we live in.

A hundred years ago, rooms could safely be named by function - parlour, dining room, even drawing room - and the number and complexity of the subdivisions reected the wealth of the household.

In less structured living spaces, such labels have become increasingly redundant and the popularity of loft living has helped make talk of living spaces, areas and even zones common currency - but this can easily slip into pretension.

The 20th Century Modernism Beginning in the seventeenth century, the rising economic fortunes of the bourgeoisie were inversely reflected in the declining presence of the public in the home. By the early nineteenth century, the distinction between the private house and the public world had become so refined that it was thought to reflect various broader dualities as well, among them suburb and city, craft and industry, and nature and artifice.

The literary critic Walter Benjamin came to see the nineteenth-century private house as not only separate from the public world but, more significantly, as a retreat from it.

In his essay "Louis-Philippe, or the Interior," he wrote, "For the private person, living space becomes, for the first time, antithetical to the place of 10 work."

Larsson documented the interiors of the house in a series of watercolours published in 1899 as A Home. Coupled with Larsson's own words, an example of the illustrations, Cosy Corner, epitomizes the transformed role of the private house: "Here I experienced that unspeakably sweet feeling of seclusion from 11 the noise of the world."

The 20th Century Modernism Today, the private house has become a permeable structure, receiving and transmitting images, sounds, text, and data.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger made particular note of the fundamental dierence between the presence of the newer, electronic media and the more traditional media, which had been present in the house over the centuries.

In his essay "The Thing," Heidegger expressed concern over the way in which the electronic broadcasting of words and images alters our fundamental relationship, that is, our distance, from events and things: "What is this uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near—is, as it were, without distance?

Carl Larsson (1853–1919) The Kitchen Everything gets lumped together into uniform distance-lessness. How? Is not this merging of everything into the distance less more unearthly than every 12 thing bursting apart?"

The 20th Century Modernism What Heidegger called distance-lessness has been instrumental in the pro found transformation of, among other things, the relationship between the private house and the media in the second half of the 20th century. The extent of this transformation might be evident in comparing Larsson's Lilla Hyttnas, where he found that "sweet feeling of seclusion," and Takahide Nozawa's 1991 design for a house entitled TV Garden.

Taking its oor plan from Ryoan-ji, the walled rock garden in Kyoto that has become an international icon of contemplation and serenity, TV Garden is essentially a gravelled living space that is enclosed on all four sides by 245 television screens mounted in a steel frame.

"Rocks" interspersed in the gravelled area contain bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen. The then twenty-ďŹ ve-year-old architect explained that the relationship between the inhabitants of the house and the 15 media would equal that found "among natural elements in the garden."

Getting Ready for a Game by Carl Larsson

At the end of the twentieth century, the new kind of relationship to the world of events and things that Heidegger could not visualize, a new kind of distance in daily life with its own parameters and deďŹ nitions, is clearly evident in the ascendancy of digital technologies throughout everyday life.

In both theory and practice, the media's potential eect on space has become a catalyst for contemporary architectural innovation and experimentation.

While it is more and more common to ďŹ nd a "media room" in newer houses, such as the unbuilt Millbrook Residence by Winka Dubbeldam.

Architect Zaha Hadid 'Walled off rooms with strictly defined functions will not be able to accommodate a society where gender-defined roles and forms of parenting dissolve and become more fluid.

The future home will be a more integrated, inclusive space which will ease the free flow from work to child-care to meals, etc.

Instead of separation, there will be differentiated terrain where furniture takes on the role of defining elements.’

Many of the homes featured here illustrate this layering - even interweaving - of different territories, The communal and the private, the open and the intimate, the shared and the personal, depending on the make-up of the household.

The 20th Century Modernism The generalised shift towards increasingly open-plan living spaces took shape with the pioneering Modernists' radical re-examination of the home. Writing on 'The Dwelling as a Problem', in 1930, Finnish architect Alvar Aalto railed against the tyranny of the room: 'A dwelling is an area which should offer protected areas for meals, sleep, work and play. These biodynamic functions should be taken as points of departure for the dwelling's internal division, not any outdated symmetrical axis or “standard room” dictated by facade architecture.'

Lofts have also done a lot to popularise flexible multi-purpose living spaces, shifting in fifty years from the radical Avantgarde fringe to become a mainstream housing option.

Ironically, developers even build new loft buildings, erecting mock factory- or warehouse-style buildings for domestic use.

Alvar Aalto’s House and Studio

Alvar Aalto’s House and Studio

Alvar Aalto’s House and Studio

The 20th Century Modernism By the mid-nineteenth century, the home was established as a private world, a counterpoint to public life. This, it could be argued, is the structure we are in the process of dismantling today.

How and where we prepare food and eat have changed dramatically. Not only has the dining room almost disappeared from the daily domestic vocabulary in all but the most formal houses, but the preparation of food is once again associated with eating, and the kitchen has shifted from being a service adjunct to become the sociable epicentre of many contemporary homes.

Given the growth in pre-prepared and takeaway foods and eating out, this symbolic elevation of the kitchen is rather ironic, but perhaps no more odd than 4 x 4 vehicles designed for forging rivers and scaling clis being used on the school run.

In Manhattan in the 1980s, at the height of the yuppie boom, one developer observed the lifestyle of urban professionals who even ordered in breakfast rather than brew coee at home, and in response designed apartments without kitchens. Rather like the open hearth in a centrally heated home, the kitchen may be as much a symbolic emblem of warmth and nourishment as an actual place of food preparation.

The 20th Century Modernism French designer Andree Putman rates the kitchen and bathroom together in terms of their importance in satisfying our spiritual and emotional needs and bringing an elemental presence to the home that is often lacking in modern urban lives.

'I believe the closest attention should always be paid to the bathroom and the kitchen, the seat of ďŹ re and water, where the ancient and laughable drama of human life is played out, combined by the repeated actions of using water for washing and ďŹ re for cooking. This would ensure that these rooms oer the vital level of physical comfort essential for our spiritual ease.'

The 21th Century Certainly though, with new digital media, the home is becoming less like a retreat and more like a giant communications console that can receive and transmit information and images, sound and data from and to the entire world. Yet the real shifts may be as much psychological and behavioural as physical.

Potentially one of the most far-reaching effects of this on the home is ·on the work front. The vision of a society of knowledge workers tapping away at home in their pyjamas while linked to the world via new communications has failed to materialise as surely as the confident prediction that technology would liberate us from the 40-hour working week and deliver us into a leisure society.

Instead, IT is increasingly blurring the boundaries between our home and work lives, eroding the nine-to-five working day and making work a presence in many homes, although not necessarily in the home office. As technology finally begins to make the 'work anywhere any time ' mantra of the 1990s feasible, it is possible for many of us to work in more informal and nomadic ways, inside and outside the home, discreetly supported by technology rather than tied to a conventional office environment.

As cyberspace becomes a powerful alternative to the real world and homes adjust to this, Californian architect Wes Jones proposes that the digital revolution will have far-reaching social effects. Cyberspace will challenge the cohesiveness of the family as children become self-sufficient citizens of the virtual world.

Adaptive Reuse Over the past half century or so, the shift to living in former industrial and commercial buildings has helped precipitate a new way of urban living and also a new urban domestic typology. As well as reshaping the maps of cities, so-called loft-living has been enormously inuential on our perception of urban life.

From downtown Manhattan or Los Angeles, to London's East End and Docklands or Sydney's waterfront, the texture of inner-city life has changed, as whole districts that were once occupied by workshops, sweatshops, warehouses and manufacturing are now colonised for residential use and spiced with industrial-scaled art galleries, bars and restaurants.

Adaptive Reuse The extent to which the loft has been embraced is reected in the fact that now, not only do we convert pretty much any building into a so-called 'loft' but, more perversely still, we build new 'lofts' for the well-o which masquerade as warehousing or manufacturing buildings for industries that have long since vacated the city centre, if not the planet.

In Loft Living, a critical study of the loft market, Sharon Zukin explores how an 'untested and unlikely sort of housing space - a loft - becomes a hot commodity' and how developers have capitalised on this new housing option.

Adaptive Reuse In the beginning, the term 'loft' was used to describe the relatively large open space on each floor of a multi-storey industrial building or warehouse. The design was made as simple and open as possible: lines of columns holding up the ceilings to allow flexible floor space, large windows for maximum illumination, industrial materials and a rarity of decoration to keep costs as low as possible.

Artists liked them because they offered raw, open and, above all, cheap space - and since then, others have followed.

Since the first lofts, the process of recycling decommissioned commercial buildings has been applied to more or less any building not originally intended for residential use, whether an office tower, or an institution such as a hospital or school. This trend reflects changing urban usage as manufacturing gives way to service industries, and civic buildings and the public sector are dismantled by privatisation.

Adaptive Reuse Originally, the habitation of industrial buildings was an American phenomenon, and New York City has been both the harbinger of and model for loft-living. In the 1940s and 1950s it was a radical, even politicised housing option pioneered by the Abstract Expressionist generation of artists, performers and photographers who required cheap space for living and working.

SoHo's cast-iron buildings were still occupied by light industry, wholesalers and sweatshops. By day, the districts rumbled with deliveries, while at night, the industrial hulks stood as empty and dark as ships in mothballs. In the beginning, 'lofts' were neither chic nor comfortable, and were mostly considerably closer to the idea of a factory than to a home in the usual middle-class sense of the word.

A deďŹ ning characteristic of ďŹ rst-generation lofts, if not of more recent incarnations, was the merger oi work and living, making the home a place of production as well as of habitation. As Zukin has observed, 'Although homes are considered private space, the openness of a loft makes it a public space.

Adaptive Reuse Whether one thinks of Manhattan's brooding brownstones, the austere Georgian terraces of Dublin, Bath or Edinburgh, London's white stucco squares or the crenelated red-brick houses lining Amsterdam's canals, one sees that the town house has been one of the principal building blocks of cities around the world, and still remains an urban ideal today.

Although it might seem to be a residential model rooted in the habitation patterns of another age, and its rigid layout and vertical stack of rooms might appear to be opposed to our increasing move towards more lateral, open and exible living spaces, it has proved a surprisingly durable residential model.

Already most town houses have lasted considerably longer than their builders would have expected and in these conservation-minded times, they look likely to continue. At the same time, the density of habitation that can be achieved with town houses means that they are still a feasible model for building.

Adaptive Reuse The uniformity of the typical town-house facade may give the impression of inexibility, but paradoxically it is this that has contributed to the town house's longevity.

The facade often has an independent existence from the interior, which may have been regularly altered to bring it up to date with contemporary ideas of convenience and comfort.

Today's more extreme conversions, which sometimes retain little of the original house other than the foundations and the facade, may seem almost schizophrenic,

Adaptive Reuse In Home: A Short History of an Idea, author Witold Rybczinski describes how in seventeenth century Holland, the town house - and home life more or less as we know it - began to take shape.

According to Rybczynski, “Initially, these rooms, with the exception of the kitchen, did not have special functions. By mid-century, however, the subdivision of the house into day and night uses, and into formal and informal areas, had begun.’

With increasing prosperity, work was removed from the house as those who could afford it built separate business establishments, thus initiating the town house as a family home.

Another aspect of the Dutch house was the private garden at the back. Whereas the typical continental town houses of this period were organised around a communal courtyard that was essentially a public space, the Dutch house generally had a stoop or verandah at the front and a secluded rear garden.

Richard Rogers’ conversion of two London terraced houses in 1987 set a benchmark for facadism by contrasting the formality of the original facade with a contemporary interior.

Here the first and second floors have been joined to make a double-height living room extending across the two houses.