Home by Witold Rybczynski

First published: 1986

Type of work: Cultural criticism/history

Form and Content

Witold Rybczynski, a professor of architecture at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has written an interesting overview of the history of the idea of “home.” He states that the book originated from his experience in designing homes for clients. He learned that conventional architectural designs were frequently unwanted, unloved, and perceived as uncomfortable. In his foreword he notes,

During the six years of my architectural education, the subject of comfort was mentioned only once. . . . This, apparently, was all that we needed to know about the subject. 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. . . .”

The more he worked, the more he wondered about the omission.

Rybczynski begins his history by looking at how homes were viewed in the Middle Ages. Focusing exclusively on bourgeois, middle-class townhouses, Rybczynski presents his understanding of the medieval household. In a building which had little heat or light, no running water, a minimum of furniture, few rooms, and afforded essentially no privacy, “People didn’t so much live in their houses as camp in them.” Moreover, the focus of the building was the work area, which occupied the majority of the space within the house.

Only in the houses of the seventeenth century Dutch bourgeois did work space become separate from living space. This distinction led to a sense of domesticity that existed in few other homes in Europe at this time. A strong sense of family life, and of comfort, began to emerge. Visitors to the Low Countries carried these “ideas” home with them, and residences in other areas began to be built with comfort in mind. Having established that historic change, Rybczynski shifts his focus to England, for it was there that the Industrial Revolution was transforming society. It also provided the means for the middle class to enjoy the comforts which could be provided as the result of their labors.

Another significant change was that of the role of the woman in the house. In the medieval period, when the house was primarily a work space first and a living space second, the needs of the man usually prevailed. As the idea of separating living and working quarters gradually evolved, the female began asserting herself with regard to the layout and the contents of the domicile. First in the Low Countries, then in England and later in the United States, women’s ideas played an ever-expanding role in making the house not only more functional but also more comfortable. These “domestic technicians” also required more efficiency. This meant that engineering techniques were used to make rooms of the household more efficient— safer fireplaces, better ventilation, more effective lighting, and labor-saving devices resulted. More important, to Rybczynski, the domestic engineer was insistent that the house be as comfortable as it was convenient.

What was comfort? Rybczynski notes that there is no absolute way to define comfort. Like beauty, which is in the eye of the beholder, comfort is in the mind of the user. Comfort, like an onion, “is both something simple and complicated. It incorporates many transparent layers of meaning—privacy, ease, convenience— some of which are buried deeper than others.” Rybczynski asserts that comfort must be made part of the architect’s equation. If the consumer is to be satisfied, he “must rediscover for [himself] the mystery of comfort, for without it, . . . dwellings will indeed be machines instead of homes.”

The book itself is divided into ten chapters. The first chapter introduces the idea of comfort. Rybczynski uses the clothing of Ralph Lauren for his first analogy. Lauren, in order to sell clothes, concerned himself from the beginning with learning popular tastes. Lauren learned what was perceived as comfortable and then marketed it. In the 1980’s, Lauren entered the home furnishings market. Rybczynski asks, “And how does Ralph Lauren intend to dress the modern home?” Lauren’s “collections” were all based on periods that may be viewed with nostalgia—and as comfortable. Modern was out; nostalgic comfort was in.

From this beginning, Rybczynski, over the next seven chapters, reviews the history of the development of the home—its furnishings, its utilization, and the attitudes regarding it. The ninth chapter condemns modernistic architectural design as austere, cold, and purely functional. His final chapter offers an alternative, the return to the ideas of the period which Lauren was so successfully marketing. Lauren, however, was appealing to a very limited market; for the broader market, architects and interior designers alike would have to be able to provide what the consumer really wanted. “What is needed is a reexamination not of bourgeois styles, but of bourgeois traditions,” according to Rybczynski. Thus, through an awareness of history, the house builder and furnisher could become a home creator.

Critical Context

Witold Rybczynski had two purposes in writing Home. First, he wanted to trace the history of the ideas of comfort and domesticity in the West since the Middle Ages. Second, he wanted to condemn modern architects for their unwillingness to incorporate those ideas into their designs. While tracing the history of the concept of home, he uncovers and presents many absorbing facts about the evolution of the bourgeois style. He shows how the discoveries of the scientific revolution enhanced the comfort of those who could afford it. While glib at times, and overly simplistic at others, Rybczynski has certainly presented an excellent introduction to a little studied aspect of Western civilization.

Rybczynski may be unfair in blaming the modernists for all the problems of modern home architecture. The polemical nature of the introduction and the concluding chapter do weaken the significance of the work. Yet his efforts are important in that they call attention to some of the problems of home design. Most important, where he asks for a reevaluation and reexamination of bourgeois life-styles in order to understand comfort, he points other researchers in an important direction. Moreover, the values the book defends are certainly worthy: privacy, comfort, efficiency, and individuality. Despite its flaws, Rybczynski’s work is an entertaining, interdisciplinary study of the historical forces which helped create an important concept.

Bibliography

Alexander, Christopher. The Timeless Way of Building, 1979.

Alexander, Christopher, et al. A Pattern Language: Towns, Building, Construction, 1977.

Kidder, Tracy. House, 1985.

Kron, Joan. Home-Psych: The Social Psychology of Home and Decoration, 1983.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. XCI (August 3, 1986), p. 1.

The New Yorker. Review. LXII (September 1, 1986), p. 96.

Pawley, Martin. Architecture Versus Housing, 1971.

Rudofsky, Bernard. Now I Lay Me Down to Eat: Notes and Footnotes on the Lost Art of Living, 1980.