Short History Of An Idea

Home: A Short History of an Idea, WitoldRybczynski, Penguin Books, 1986.

ISBN 0140102310 Rybczynski, a Canadian professor of Architecture, is one of those rare writers who can take you on a coherent wild romp, leaving you feeling that you've learned a lot and have had fun in the process. Home traces the development of the interior architecture of houses, touching on all manner of influences, from technological to societal to fad, including the various historical schisms between the Architects who concerned themselves primarily with external appearance, and the "upholsterers" (interior decorators), who dealt with internal appearance and livability. He also explores the development of the concept of a home as a comfortable place.

The following quote doesn't do the book justice, but it resonates with the day-to-day experience with office "comfort" that many of us endure, and it contains the obligatory Alexander reference.

"The Merck offices had been designed to eliminate discomfort, yet the survey showed that many of the employees did not experience well-being in their workplace--an inability to concentrate was the common complaint. Despite the restful colors and the attractive furnishings (which everyone appreciated), something was missing. The scientific approach assumes that if background noises are muffled and direct view controlled, the office worker will feel comfortable. But working comfort depends on many more factors than these. There must also be a sense of intimacy and privacy, which is produced by a balance between isolation and publicness; too much of one or the other will produce discomfort. A group of architects in California recently identified as many as nine different aspects of workplace enclosure that must be met in order to create this feeling [ChristopherAlexander," A PatternLanguage, pp 847-52].

These included the presence of walls behind and beside the worker, the amount of open space in front of the desk, the area of the workspace, the amount of enclosure, a view to the outside, the distance to the nearest person, the number of people in the immediate vicinity, and the level and type of noise. Since most office layouts do not address these concerns directly, it is not surprising that people have difficulty concentrating on their work.

"The fallacy of the scientific definition of comfort is that it considers only those aspects of comfort that are measurable, and with not untypical arrogance denies the existence of the rest--many behavioral scientists have concluded that because people experience only discomfort, comfort as a physical phenomenon does not really exist at all. It is hardly surprising that genuine intimacy, which is impossible to measure, is absent in most planned office environments."

Aside from being a fun read, I think the book has much to say about the forces that we balance when developing patterns, and how we can gain insights by examining the historical development of those forces. --DaveSmith

CategoryBook.