House (architecture) I INTRODUCTION Trulli in Alberobello, Italy Alberobello, in the Apulia region of southeastern Italy, is noted for its unusual limestone houses known as trulli (from Greek trullos, dome). The houses are built of limestone boulders, using an ancient technique that requires no mortar. Their cylindrical domes are made of stone slabs. Danilo Donadoni/Bruce Coleman, Inc. House (architecture), dwelling place, constructed as a home for one or more persons. Whether a crude hut or an elaborate mansion, and whatever its degree of intrinsic architectural interest, a house provides protection from weather and adversaries. The physical characteristics of a house depend on the surrounding environment (climate and terrain), available building materials, technological know-how, and such cultural determinants as the social status and economic resources of the owner or owners. In rural areas until modern times, people and animals were often housed together; today's houses frequently include storage, work, and guest areas, with several separate spaces for different activities. Houses can be wholly below ground level, dug out of the earth, or can be partly below and partly above the ground; most contemporary houses are built aboveground (over cellars in cold climates). The primary structural materials employed are wood, sod, brick, and stone, with concrete and steel increasingly used, especially for city dwellings; many of these materials are used in combination also. Choice of material depends on prevalent style, individual taste, and availability. Depending on climate and available fuels, provisions may be made for heating. In modern industrialized areas, running water and interior toilets are common. Whatever its size and conveniences, a house both contains and stands for the basic human social unit. II HOUSES OF TRIBAL SOCIETIES Kwakiutl Plank House The indigenous peoples who lived along the west coast of Canada constructed rectangular houses covered with cedar planks. Many of these plank houses had brightly painted decorations and featured totem poles in front that served as family crests. Gary Braasch/Corbis In tribal societies the house tends to be a single volume, a room for all activities. It is usually built directly against neighboring structures and is often close to the tribal meetinghouse or religious structure as well. The shape of such a house may be repeated through an entire village, creating fascinating patterns, as in the Dogon district of the Sudan or the settlements of Zambian herders. Such houses are often of simple geometric shapes--circular, with conical roofs, for example. Building materials are those at hand. If mud and clay are available, they are used to fill the spaces between pieces of wood or are made into bricks (usually sun-dried). Even huge reeds are used in the construction of dwellings, as by the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. In rainy areas most tribal houses have interior hearths. III HOUSES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD Fresco in the Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii The Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii, Italy (built about 50 bc), featured a large hall with this mural encircling it. The mural is painted in the Second Style of Roman painting. (Historians of art recognize four periods or styles in Roman wall painting.) The mural in the Villa of the Mysteries is thought to depict the initiation rituals of a mystery religion. For this reason, it has been conjectured that the hall was used for cult rituals. Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York In ancient Egypt ordinary people dwelt in plain, mud-brick houses of rectangular plan. Excavations indicate that workers' houses had two to four rooms all on one floor and were densely packed into a gridlike pattern, with narrow alleys running between long rows of these quarters; the foremen had bigger houses. Throughout the Middle East much depended on the materials available. Where clay was found, beehive-shaped, single-room structures were common. Where stone but no timber was available, even the roofs were made of long strips of stone. These traditions continued well into modern times. Ancient Egyptian Housing Most people in ancient Egypt lived in mud-brick houses. The activities of everyday life occurred in and around the houses. Click on the labels to see examples of these activities: cooking in outdoor domed ovens, repairing a wall with mud bricks and plaster, performing daily chores under thatched rooftop awnings, and playing children's games. © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Except for the fairly elaborate chieftains' houses, Greek dwellings remained simple through classical times. A passageway led from the street into an open court off which three or four rooms were reached, the whole being fairly small in scale. The Roman houses, as seen, for example, at Pompeii, also stood at the street's edge. Past a vestibule was an open space called the atrium, from which the sleeping rooms were reached; a colonnaded garden often stood in back. In ancient Rome most people lived in the equivalent of apartment houses, three to five stories high, with apartments ranging from three to six rooms; some were like tenements, others were elaborate. At ground level were rows of small shops. The rich had huge villas outside the cities that were composed of living quarters and pleasure pavilions. IV HOUSES OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE This comparative sophistication in housing disappeared during the so-called Dark Ages in Europe. Although castles and primitive manors housed many people, most of the remaining population were packed into simple, unsanitary dwellings huddled within the walls of small cities and towns. The countryside was unsafe, and agriculture and population both declined; the prosperous farms of classical antiquity disappeared. Slowly, after AD1000, conditions improved, first around the great monasteries and then in the expanding cities. The rise of a prosperous mercantile class resulted in the construction of large town houses and in due time country manors. Comparatively peaceful conditions brought some improvement in housing for farm serfs, but the living conditions of the poor town-dweller continued, on the whole, to be miserable. By the end of the Middle Ages the concept of the palace had evolved from the idea of the grand town house. These palaces were elaborate dwellings for ranking ecclesiastics, merchant princes, or ruling families; they might occupy a whole block and contain, in addition to ceremonial and private apartments, quarters for large numbers of retainers and hangers-on. V FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE 19TH CENTURY Chateau at Ancy-le-Franc The Italian architect Sebastiano Serlio designed this chateau in about 1546. Located in Ancy-Le-Franc, Tonnerre, Burgundy, the chateau is built around three sides of a courtyard. Serlio brought an Italian influence to French architecture, which at that time was overwrought with detail. The plain surfaces and simple contours were the direct result of classical influence on Serlio's work. Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York The palace was perfected during the Renaissance and remains one of architecture's most enduring images, a dignified, large-scale city element that has been adapted and repeated ever since. Palaces were first built in Florence, Italy, and then throughout the Western world. In France the palace concept was combined with that of the late medieval castle to produce the French country château--the setting, with its gardens and fountains, of aristocratic life from the 16th century onward. In England the lord's manor became the squire's hall, the center of an estate that often included villages composed of the not uncomfortable, thatched-roof homes of local farmers. Meanwhile, in the cities and towns, some attempts were made to improve the housing of ordinary folk by building more or less uniform dwellings; on the whole, however, standards remained below those of antiquity for a long time. VI 19TH-CENTURY HOUSING The Industrial Revolution brought some relief to the city poor in the form of reasonable well-built rows of small houses for laborers, especially in England, although these in time often decayed into slums. The middle class in most Western countries, able to buy land and to build, rapidly expanded into fairly comfortable large houses, the styles of which depended largely on local tradition. New transportation systems, and the desire of the middle classes to own a plot of land, produced suburbs, where the majority of independently sited family houses are found today. As population increased, technology responded. In the U.S., for example, the balloon frame was invented in the 1830s, making solid, satisfactory housing possible through its ingenious assembly of standardized pieces of lumber --chiefly the familiar two-by four. In the cities, however, tenements persisted, often near the elegant mansions of the rich. The Industrial Revolution also spawned the dream of having one's own house irrespective of social or economic status. By the late 19th century the construction of houses had become a major architectural subject, studied by ranking architects. Books with drawings of both simple and elaborate houses were perennially popular, and domestic architecture was discussed in the new architectural journals as well. Houses became, for many, symbols of status. Cottages and bungalows, small one-story dwellings each on its own land, proliferated. Large ornate houses became fairly common, closely adjacent to their neighbors in the older cities, standing alone in the newer towns and the suburbs. Distinctive styles of domestic architecture rose in popularity and waned. The technology of the support systems--heating, cooling, and water supply, for example--improved rapidly. Once the elevator became available (after the American Civil War), the tall apartment house became increasingly possible. Workers' suburbs appeared, their streets solidly built up with two- and threefamily frame houses; building speculators thrived. Dealing in real estate quickly became a major occupation, and houses began to change hands more frequently as families became more mobile. VII 20TH-CENTURY HOUSING Rem Koolhaas House in Bordeaux Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas designed this house in Bordeaux, France, on three levels. The lower level is carved from the hillside as a series of caverns, and serves for communal family life. The middle level of glass is designed to accommodate the husband, who is confined to a wheelchair; the central part is an elevator platform that moves between levels. The third level is divided into sections for the husband, wife, and children. Koolhaas was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000 for his innovative work. Courtesy of OMA/Rem Koolhaas Houses that broke with historical architectural styles were slow to be accepted. As early as 1889 the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright built a house embodying new concepts of spatial flow from one room to another. He and others, both in Europe and in the United States, soon moved toward a domestic architectural style of metric forms and simplified surfaces largely free of decoration. Contemporary changes in painting and sculpture were allied to this movement, and by the 1920s modern architecture, though by no means universally accepted, had arrived. Glass, steel, and concrete reinforced with steel gave architects many new design options, and by the mid-20th century the modern house was commonplace. Glass boxes, freely curving styles, and stark, austere geometric forms were all possible; but at the same time traditional styles persisted, and in the U.S. many homeowners found a more or less standard, one-floor, two- or three-bedroom ranch house satisfactory. VIII HOUSES OF THE FAR EAST Chinese House This contemporary house in Hangzhou, China, typifies the basic architectural style of that country, which hasn't changed significantly in centuries. The structure is made of wood, with piers for support. The roof, made of tile, features curving lines with wide, turned-up eaves supported on carved brackets. Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York House types in India vary greatly according to region, climate, and local tradition. The villages have courtyard houses as well as simple, single-volume dwellings; in the cities, densely populated tenements are found as well. Palaces abound in all areas; many are fortified, and some that are open to the land have multiple outbuildings such as pleasure pavilions. European influence is mostly limited to certain areas in the major cities. In China, the courtyard house, built of wood with a tile roof, has persisted for many centuries. Walled in, it is a microcosm of Chinese social traditions. Rows of single-volume dwellings, each with a tiny court or garden, are also found. At the other end of the scale are the imperial palace compounds, of which the Forbidden City in Beijing is the outstanding example. The various buildings of these compounds, laid out to form a vast, symmetrical complex, are a symbolic summary of the celestial claims of the emperors and the society they governed. In Japan, the traditional house is an elongated and somewhat rambling affair, made of wood and roofed with tile; if space is available, a garden, however small, is included. Good proportions in design and elegant simplicity of form are always evident. Western architectural influence has perhaps been greater in Japan than in the rest of the Orient, although Japanese architects have themselves been in the forefront of the modern movement in architecture. Contributed By: William L. MacDonald Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
