Before there were homes, there were townhouses and farmhouses, chateaux and castles, residences everywhere. However, there was no place like home.
Home, argues writer Witold Rybczynski, is a place constructed more of ideas like domesticity and privacy than of stone and mortar, ideas that took centuries to evolve and are still somewhat in flux. More than anything else, Rybczynski argues, home has become a haven for comfort.
”Home: A Short History of an Idea,” a critically acclaimed book just published by Viking, is Rybczynski`s investigation into the origins and development of domestic comfort. A professor of architecture at McGill University in Montreal, he had written two books on technology, including
”Taming the Tiger,” which explored the peaceful coexistence, or lack thereof, between mortals and machines.
Rybczynski found, however, that when people took to describing rooms that pleased them, or when he looked at advertisements and interior magazines, nowhere was this technology to be found. Indeed, when building a house of his own, he ”discovered at firsthand the fundamental poverty of modern architectural ideas. I found myself turning again and again to memories of older houses, and older rooms, and trying to understand what had made them feel so right, so comfortable.”
As a practicing architect, Rybczynski, 43, had received such clues from clients but ignored their instruction. ”I would be worried about the space of the house but the clients weren`t concerned about space,” he said in a cramped, airless office at his publisher. ”Instead, they would show me pictures of rooms they liked. To be honest, I wasn`t sensitive at the time. I thought they were imposing their taste on me when they were actually showing me that this was their notion of comfort.”
Nowhere is the rejection of modern design more evident than in Ralph Lauren`s interior design collections that celebrate an older age and are bereft of all technology, Rybczynski said. Lauren`s resounding success is, in part, ”a sign of dissatisfaction with the present.” Specifically, that dissatisfaction is with the present`s interior design; with almost everything else, from food to music to clothes, consumers are quite smitten with the new. ”Architects have a great disdain for interior design. Not only is it forbidden to study interior design in school, it isn`t there,” he said, perched on a low, armless chair covered with Naugahyde. ”Is this a mistake?
It hasn`t necessarily produced bad things. It does create an artificial line between the inside and the outside of a structure.” Rybczynski`s intention was ”to go into this forbidden territory,” to understand the world of interiors, the importance of place.
The idea of comfort, Rybczynski writes, ”has developed historically. It is an idea that has meant different things at different times. In the 17th century, comfort meant privacy, which led to intimacy and, in turn, to domesticity. The 18th century shifted the emphasis to leisure and ease, the 19th to mechanically aided comforts–light, heat and ventilation. The 20th-century domestic engineers stressed efficiency and convenience.
”At various times, and in response to various outside forces–social, economic, and technological–the idea of comfort has changed, sometimes drastically. … But what is striking is that the idea of comfort, even as it has changed, has preserved most of its earlier meanings.”
The notion of comfort, and the origin of home as an ideal, began in 17th Century Holland, with women`s increasing role in the family and new-placed importance on children, domestic life and cleanliness, he says. Drawing from European history books, art and literature, Rybczynski finds that prior to that era, couples enjoyed almost no privacy, children were put to work as soon as possible, and dwellings, even those owned by the bourgeois or better, were occupied the way youth hostels are now.
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”Domestic comfort is really a northern idea. It has to do with climate,” Rybczynski said. ”The idea of comfort in India, Africa and China is quite different from ours. It is so different they should have a different word for it. Our idea that a room should reflect the person in it, they don`t have that. There is truly a strong connection between cold climate and comfort. Consider the language–coziness, comfort, a comforter–in a warm climate a lot of that is lost. A tropical house is very open. You wouldn`t want it to be cozy.”
We have this ideal, Rybczynski argues, but we don`t always adhere to it. Pots and pans are hidden in kitchen cabinets when they really should be visible and close at hand. A leather chair or couch is considered an item of luxury, ”yet leather is one of the worst materials to sit in. It`s bad in the summer and it`s bad in the winter; it isn`t particularly warm and is easy to slide out of.”
For years, Rybczynski yearned for a Wassily chair, a cool composition of stretched leather and chromed-metal tubing designed by Marcel Breuer in the
`20s. He finally received this object of desire as a 10th anniversary present from his wife. ”I sat down and I discovered that it wasn`t very comfortable,” he said, laughing heartily at the memory. ”It wasn`t comfortable at all. It`s really very revealing about the relationship between design and comfort.”
Rybczynski still has the chair in his bedroom. ”We use it to hang our clothes.”
Rybczynski is an admirer of Tom Wolfe`s ”From Bauhaus to Our House”
(1981). While Rybczynski`s book is not as strident in its attacks of the 20th Century design movement, it does share Wolfe`s disdain for the Bauhaus emphasis on efficiency, austerity and intellectual precepts. ”I admire that generation for their singlemindedness,” he said. ”I find there is something heroic in that.” He does not, however, find their designs, like the Wassily chair, particularly comfortable; this, in part, may have given rise to Lauren`s success and the current rediscovery of Victoriana.
While ”Home” is a history, not a prescription, Rybczynski does offer suggestions similar to Wolfe`s. He believes the resident should prevail, that architects and decorators should be more sensitive and not ignore, as Rybczynski once did, photos offered up as suggestions of comfort. ”Domestic well-being is too important to be left to its experts; it is, as it has always been, the business of the family and the individual.”
He also cautions that, historically, architects and decorators have been male, while women spend the most time in homes, and possess a greater understanding of comfort.
Houses may take a matter of months to build; homes take a lot longer.
”You don`t make a comfortable home,” Rybczynski says. ”It`s something you achieve over a period of time. It matters what makes you comfortable. It takes a lot of time to find comfort. We expect that it will happen very quickly. We take it too much for granted. We think it`s having a soft chair to read in when it`s a lot of complicated ideas.” In the end, Rybczynski argues, there really is no place like home.