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Fascinating history of the home from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, with a focus on how the built domestic environment influences us and vice versa. The cultural focus is western and European.
It's basically a selective history of the concepts of home and comfort, related to changing forms of the family, over the last four or five hundred years. It's a light, easy and pleasant read.
But in the end it's not really substantial. It's the type of book you curl up with next to a fire with a skim mocha nutmeg and cinnamon whatever when you need to give your brain a break but can't quite stoop to watching American Idol.
It didn't leave me with anything of substance that stuck in my memory, but I definitely enjoyed reading it. And it's fun - and we all probably need to have a little fun now and then (in between reading all these serious books and growing our big, fat brains).
May be of interest to househunters trying to envision what their happy home to be might want to be. It's full of interesting factoids, probably ultimately of less significance than Rybczynski had hoped, but he's a good writer and charming (a hair too warm and fuzzy for me).
Okay, sorry - it's a much better book than that.
The modern (Western) idea of a home is very new, historically. Catherine E. For this reviewer, who spent 20 years inventing an "alternative" house from scratch, it is greatly amusing to learn that I have spent a lot of hours reinventing wheels rounded out a hundred years ago. Rybczynski artfully traces the development of the modern household, decor and furnishing, to enable a deep understanding of why we live as we do, what works and what doesn't. HOME reports that they didn't work as living quarters either). Even the notion of "family" that occupies so much of modern political cant, and seems so central to our social organization, goes back no further than the early 18th Century. Beds were built to handle 6-8 adults and work tables often tripled as dining boards and sleeping platforms. The only modern chairs which come near to the standard set in those classic designs are found in the best mechanical chairs, made to be adjusted to the user's body and to flex with movement.
Most likely you share my sense that home has been thus for a long time, subject to the whims of fashion and demands of social hierarchy. This author's highest praise falls to the women who invented household engineering in the late 1800s, stepping into the architectural void, inventing home economics, and shaping the modern home to suit the needs of a servantless woman charged with housekeeping and child rearing. Beecher and Ellen Richards come in for particular commendation. (More often to be found in office furniture than in a home). Altogether an illuminating look at the circumstances of our lives. Modern furniture also falls under the author's verbal axe.
Children were farmed out as apprentices at a tender age -- even in the wealthiest households where fortunate youngsters were placed as servants to courtiers and nobles in order to learn the ropes of oligarchy. Talk about being forced to repeat history one has failed to learn. As an architect he reserves some of his harshest criticism for his fellows, and neatly shoots down such icons as Le Corbusier and Wright who were too hung on their brilliance to notice that things weren't working. What I learned from Witold Rybczynski is that those are very near-sighted suppositions. Households before that time were comprised of groups of working adults, house owners and employees and servants, plus infants.
(As I reported in my review of Stewart Brand's excellent HOW BUILDINGS LEARN, Viking, 1994, most -- if not all -- of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses leaked, badly. And so it goes. Been there. You probably have notions about what "home" means, and those notions probably revolve around your immediate family, domestic comfort and convenience, with a dash of nostalgia. Privacy was rare.
Designed for style instead of comfort, he describes its advent as a foolish embrace of creativity above function, and offers the detailed research in France under the Louises (Louies)., which erupted as Chippendale and Hepplewhite designs: templates which carefully noted dimensions and proportions that actually fit a human body and allowed for the constant movement necessary to ongoing comfort.
Home is an articulate, rapid reading book about the developements leading to the current concept of "home". Tying history, architecture, sociology and technology together the emerging concept of home and comfort developes in clear visualizations.After reading this book I now appreciate the evolution of the contradictory outlooks over time and how they affect our current drives in creating our personal living spaces.
Rybczynski's book to anyone who would appreciate seeing their home in a whole new way. I recommend Mr. Home utilizes the time line approach, begining in the medieval era, to explain Ralph Lauren's heightend understanding of the public's ideas of comfort. Home is a well-structured and planned tracing of society's development of the concepts of home and comfort and relates to today's audiences with a new perspective on where and how they live. Rybczynski highlights the different aspects of the setting that Lauren creates to entice the public and the different props he uses to create this feeling of home. Mr.
Rybczynski's book remeinds architects and interior designers that even in today's society it is easy to get caught up in what is in style or what would make a statement rather than what is comfertable for occupants to inhabit. One of Mr. Mr. Mr. Rybczynski's strengths as a writer is his conversational writing style and the flow of the organization of his main ideas. Witold Rybczynski's Home: A Short History Of An Idea, is an historical and informational text following the devlopment of the concept of home and discusses the psychological effects of different types of dwellings and personal space, architecture, and society.
Home instantly dives into the development of society's ideas of comfort and home with an almost staggering jump into a strong comparison and analysis of the four style lines of the Ralph Lauren collection. Rybczynski also examines the work of Le Corbusier and relates the modernist movement with current modern trends.
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