The Making of Home Read online

  In Britain, the equivalent suburban style was initially a detached house, or at least a semi-detached one, a pair of houses sharing a central party wall. Bedford Park and the earlier upper-middle-class suburbs had assumed the Queen Anne style of the period, but most suburbs adopted the more ‘rustic’, and therefore comforting, Tudor motifs. By now, Tudor was a style that had apparently always existed, and was viewed as entirely ahistorical, belonging to no particular place – Tudor flourishes might coexist alongside Indian-inspired verandas, for example, or Arts and Crafts tiled entranceways – just as it belonged to no particular time, not even the sixteenth century. It reflected instead generic ‘old’ values such as community, continuity, and a world (always benevolent) that had vanished. As the suburbs were planned to join town and country, so Tudor joined modern suburban dwellers with their semi-mythical ancestors.

  The Tudor, the Gothic, the ranch house – all were architectures of rejection, bricks-and-mortar repudiations of the lives that their inhabitants did not want to live. Their owners did not want to be modern, nor urban, they did not want to live in densely populated town centres, nor in mixed communities, which all seemed to represent a turning away from the now well-developed idea of what ‘home’ meant. Instead they sought a mythical past, a time when things had been simpler, easier. Articulating their desires in architectural styles allowed those living in a Tudor suburban semi to imagine that they were party to some form of exclusive, unusual domesticity. Yet the very universality of these desires altered the nature of the suburban experience. From the 1920s, the ‘flight to suburbia’ was a well-recognized pattern. By 1970, more Americans lived in suburbs than in either rural or urban environments; by 2000, more Americans lived in suburbs than in cities and rural areas combined. To consider that suburbs were somehow special, self-selected communities was no longer tenable. Suburbia was now for traditional couples with 2.4 children. And for singles. And the widowed. And the divorced. Suburbia was everywhere, and for everyone.

  As a result, suburbs were transformed, even if, thanks to their reliance on mythological styles of domesticity, those transformations have barely been noticeable as they occurred. As more and more women returned to the workforce in numbers not seen since the nineteenth century, the lack of services and commercial premises near home ceased to be an acceptable, or even desirable, inconvenience, and became intolerable. So, steadily but surely, suburbs transformed themselves from residential satellites of nearby employment centres, and became employment centres themselves, complete with shops, services, offices and entertainment venues.

  As this economic balance shifted, so too did ideas of what suburbs were, or what they should look like. If they were no longer isolated, protected residential communities, what were they? Developers in much of the English-speaking world answered that question with a new category of invisible commodity: suburbs, too, had become ‘heritage’, communities packaged to look old. They had become a means of representing the myth of the happy family times of olden days in architecture. Sometimes the trend for individual houses developed spontaneously, with a population buying into the nostalgia package, and being drawn to building styles that matched a prevalent myth. In suburban Santa Fe, in New Mexico, many houses are cement-covered, timber-framed buildings that have merely been decorated to resemble adobe, rather than actually being made of the region’s indigenous clay. Other suburbs, however, were from their inception designed as a single heritage unit, as structured and planned as any garden city of Ebenezer Howard. Celebration, a suburb in Florida, was financed and designed by the Disney Corporation in the 1990s; Seaside, in the same state, was designed by its private owners in the 1980s in an amalgam of small-town motifs and styles chosen from a variety of Victorian, Classical, modern and postmodern options.* In Britain, Poundbury, under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, is a Dorset suburb masquerading as a pastiche olde-worlde village (which particular historical period it references is left carefully vague). In keeping with modern economic and social realities, many of Poundbury’s ‘houses’ are actually banks, building societies, offices and the like, while all the signifiers of modern life – plumbing, gas, electricity, phone, television – are covered up, as if they were dirty secrets. Instead, the centrally heated buildings have false chimneys that produce no smoke.

  It is not at all surprising that the heritage industry, the rise of the home-museum and the popularization of mythologized and patriotic styles took off as industrialization spread ever wider. In the twentieth century, many of the men who made their fortunes from technological modernity were great promoters of commercial depictions of idealized pasts: Henry Ford built Greenfield Village, John D. Rockefeller was instrumental in the establishment of Colonial Williamsburg. Heritage is an expression of fear of the future by taking refuge in a simplified past, a rejection of uncertainty by refusing to engage with variety, evolution and change. The revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made the simplifications of Altdeutsch and Colonial attractive, styles of safety. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, the revolution of modernism, with its love of surface and its recoil from the past, made many cling harder than ever to their suburban dreams.

  Coda: Not at Home

  In 1925, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes was held in Paris. This was one of a long line of such exhibitions, all drawing their inspiration from London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, at the height of the Victorian age. Art Deco was the style of the moment, but if the Exposition of 1925 is remembered at all, it is as a birthplace of modern architecture, for it was here that the ideas of the Swiss–French modernist Le Corbusier were made concrete, in the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau. Here, in three dimensions, the visionary father of architectural modernism demonstrated in bricks and mortar the theories he had set out in his manifesto, Towards a New Architecture, two years earlier. These stylish, sleek rooms displayed his ‘five points’ of modern architecture in action: that the structure should be raised off the ground; that it should have a flow of windows giving views of the outdoors; that it should have a terrace where nature comes into the house; that it should have non-supporting walls, allowing the architect to design by eye, rather than for structural necessity; and that it should be organized on an open-plan.

  This five-point plan was to be hugely influential. But while the history of modernism has a literature rich in the theoretical, economic and philosophical underpinnings of the movement, it is worth considering for a moment the possibility that modern architecture was propelled not by Le Corbusier, or any other Great Man of the twentieth century, but by a housewife of the nineteenth.

  Catharine Beecher was of course more than a housewife. As well as being the sister of the more famous Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the daughter of a celebrated preacher of the day, she ran schools and established the American Women’s Educational Association in 1852, which trained teachers for frontier schools. It was in her books on domestic management, however, which at first glance appear to be the most conservative part of her work, that she set out the ideas that in retrospect can be read as the first proposals for the rationalization of household space. ‘A place for every thing, and every thing in its place’ was her motto, and to make that possible for people with even modest amounts of space, she formulated the concept for what is today called a built-in cupboard, but then was a novelty without a name. She combined this with many other ideas that later time-and-motion experts would adopt, and which enabled the creation of the twentieth century’s open-plan household. She moved the broom cupboard into the kitchen, the linen cupboard to, or at least near, the bedrooms, the medicine cabinet to the bathroom. Such arrangements appear so obvious now that it seems inconceivable that someone had to propose it, but as Dutch linen-cupboards in reception rooms show, it had not historically been the case. In 1912, Christine Frederick adopted Beecher’s ‘every thing in its place’ and her built-in cupboards to create built-in units of shelves, storage and seating. From there, er
gonomic arrangements of both rooms and their furniture followed naturally.

  Unlike Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, today neither of these women is recognized as a pioneer of modernism. High modernism has tended to focus its attentions more on appearance than utility, both in architecture and in product design, even as the most successful built their careers on the design and decoration of vernacular housing, whether the private houses of the rich, following the practices of the architects of earlier movements, such as Aestheticism, Wiener Werkstätte and the Arts and Crafts movement, or the apartment buildings of entirely new cities. Office buildings, or places where the public gathered, generally played a smaller role.

  Architects, as we have seen, historically engaged little with the concerns of daily life. It was not, quite simply, considered to be their job. It would be unfair to blame the modernists for continuing along this separate path, were it not for their famous dictum, ‘form follows function’, which gave the illusion that function was, finally, to become a part of the architectural vision. As it transpired, however, few practitioners were interested enough in function to discover how form might be made to follow it. In Towards a New Architecture Le Corbusier has a great deal to say about the form a house should take, how it should look, but little on its function, on how it was to be used: nothing on how a house was to be kept warm, or the processes by which food was put on the table, from getting the shopping in, to cooking, cleaning and eating. And modernist architecture and householders continued to diverge over the essence of home – how people experienced their domestic spaces. Le Corbusier’s slightly older contemporary, Adolf Loos, if apparently unintentionally, dismissed the entire ambience of a household, hominess, as an ‘effect’ which the architect ‘wishes to exert upon the spectator’. Not only did he perceive domesticity merely as an effect, but he thought it was one the architect imposed – and not even on the residents, but merely on a ‘spectator’, a bystander. Others valued it even less, seeing the very idea of home as the enemy of modernism. As the philosopher Theodor Adorno said simply, ‘The house is past’.

  This was the case from the movement’s very inception in the nineteenth century. In 1863, in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire had described the perfect flâneur, or man about town, as one who lives ‘in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite … to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen [by] the world’ is his ideal. For Baudelaire, and for the readers of his essay, the flâneur was anonymous and solitary, detached from both family and home. It may be no coincidence that modernism took root most easily in house countries, in places where the life of the streets had always been paramount. In home countries by this date, the house, no matter how small or inconvenient, or how divided up into multiple occupancy, was the central focus of desire, the imagined site of the good life. In house countries of Europe, life was most agreeably passed in the public sphere – the café, brasserie and restaurant. But of course, no division is absolute. In the first half of the twentieth century, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin rejected nineteenth-century domesticity as physically and mentally cloying, conveying his distaste in metaphors of upholstery, which swaddles and swallows, or spider’s webs, which ensnare. A man has two choices, he suggested. He can sit on a sofa, and leave the impression of his behind on the cushion. Or he can live in the city, the streets, and leave his impression on history. Adolf Behne, an avant-garde architect and critic in the Weimar Republic, thought that the solution to what Benjamin had called the nineteenth century’s ‘addiction’ to home life was material, not psychological. Architects, he said, should build with glass, which ‘has an extra-human, super-human quality’. That housewives had rejected it as too uncomfortable was, he enthused, what made it perfect: ‘And that is not its least advantage. For first of all the European must be wrenched out of his cosiness [Gemütlichkeit]. Not without good reason does the adjective gemütlich intensified become saugemütlich [swinishly comfortable]. Away with cosiness! Only where cosiness ends, does humanity begin.’

  The nineteenth century had barricaded its homes with the physical embodiments of comfort, physical and emotional, to protect them from the harshness of the rapidly evolving industrial world. Modernism wanted to tear those cosy barricades down again as it presented itself as the antithesis of bourgeois comfort, instead representing social equality and a belief in progress, of mankind striding into an enlightened future.

  Le Corbusier’s pronouncement, that a house is a ‘machine for living’, initially suggests an engagement with the nineteenth century’s embrace of mass-produced, technological domesticity. As the spread of public utilities had rendered the deep structure of housing – the pipes, the wires – homogeneous, so modernist architects and designers embraced standardization and mass production for the goods that would fill the house. William Morris, a lifelong socialist, had advocated better design for all, although his hand-crafted aesthetic had kept his designs out of reach for all but the wealthy. In the twentieth century, those who shared his political views saw that better design for all could be achieved by harnessing technology and mass production. The Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius was vehement: ‘The vital needs of the majority of people are essentially identical. A home and domestic utensils are important things for everybody, and their shape can be determined by reason rather than by artistic imagination.’ For Gropius and his colleagues, unlike Morris, mass-produced objects could be ‘better than those made by hand’. But just as Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt kitchen layout had imposed her own political and economic views of how daily life should be lived on sometimes unwilling residents, so too the assessment of what made an item ‘better’ was not made by those who were going to use it, but by designers and architects and city-planners. Meanwhile, industrial technology was producing a stream of innovations that were making houses easier to maintain: linoleum flooring that needed only a quick wipe rather than intensive polishing; toughened, later ovenproof, glass – Duran glass in Germany in 1893, Pyrex in the USA in 1915; non-stick pots and pans after World War II. But these products were of little interest to the pioneers of modernism. The tableware, textiles and furnishings that they designed were not easier to use, nor easier to care for. They just looked good.

  It is possible to view these designers as throwbacks, having a great deal in common with the grand architectural theorists of the Baroque age. Le Corbusier’s primary aim in his houses was to create a dramatic visual statement, just as it had been the aim of Le Vau when he laid out the grands appartements at Versailles. The rooms designed by both architects were, to paraphrase Gibbon, for ostentation rather than use. The modernism of Le Corbusier was a modernism of the eye. The technology that underlay appearance, which governed people’s daily lives, was of next to no interest to him. If a house looked sleek and streamlined, it was modern. If a wall had no electric sockets showing, it was modern, even if it left the residents nowhere to plug in a lamp; if the room had no skirting-boards, it was streamlined, even if mops and vacuums then marked the walls. As with the Baroque architects, too, furniture for the modernists once more became part of the overall design scheme of a house, not an aid to the sociability or comfort of its residents. If a chair enhanced the design, it was good, even if it was too low, or too narrow; if a table looked right, it was right, even if it was too heavy to move into position as needed. Comfort, utility, function – these had rarely been the architects’ concern, but few had spoken as frequently as the modernists of utility, of building entirely new ways of living.

  Le Corbusier was perhaps an extreme example. But he was also extremely influential. His open-plan layout in the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau was widely admired. It was also widely adapted, although in large part for reasons that had little to do with any underlying artistic, political or philosophical beliefs. That the architects working on public housing were followers of the modernist school played a small part. But this was overall of less significance than the need to resolve
the acute housing shortage created by the two World Wars. Governments and local authorities were suddenly required to build large quantities of working-class housing in densely populated cities, striving to achieve standards to create maximum health and social welfare in the minimum amount of space. At the same time, land values and construction costs soared (in Europe after World War I, in the USA after World War II), and so houses became ever smaller. Three rooms – a living room, dining room and kitchen – occupy considerably more space than one mixed-use area. To compensate, technological advances such as replacing radiators with heating through wall-vents were deftly combined with the pragmatic arrangements of Catharine Beecher and Christine Frederick to turn the space that had been freed into wall-units and storage. As the century progressed, better heating and improved glass technology made it possible to install wide patio doors and large windows, which gave the illusion of more space as the outdoors visually infiltrated the house. These commercial necessities and technological opportunities were glossed with a superficial coating of modernist theory as the open-plan housing of the 1950s through to the 1970s returned families to patterns of communal living last experienced in the Middle Ages.