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This tendency to carefully orient built spaces reaches its apotheosis with the Asian practice of feng shui.8 There are many schools of feng shui. In some quarters, feng shui might be considered a rather mystical and New Age discipline, somewhat on a par with astrology and other forms of divination. Practitioners of what is sometimes called “McFengshui” in North America, by claiming to be able to promote wealth, harmony, and successful marriage by pointing one’s bed and toilet in the right directions, have no doubt contributed to such opinions. Nevertheless, serious schools of feng shui, with theoretical roots that are thousands of years old, can include a comprehensive effort to align one’s home with prevailing geological forces such as magnetic fields, and principles that guide the construction of well-organized and connected interior spaces with respect to the world outside the walls of the house. Adhering to feng shui principles or other cultural practices that connect our homes to the world outside, both natural and supernatural, can be difficult in houses that lack the contours provided by square or rectangular rooms.
Another good example of the influence of culture on the built environment comes from the prevalence of courtyard homes in certain parts of the world, particularly in Islamic countries. One of the benefits of a courtyard construction is that it affords some privacy for residents of the space, but, within the courtyard, it also allows the construction of separate buildings for men, women, and the generations within a family. In this way, courtyards enhance the privacy of the larger family unit and give them shared social spaces away from the public eye, but the separate buildings also allow physical demarcations of family hierarchies within a single courtyard.
Rapoport’s life work consisted of an extended effort to demonstrate that for those of us who build our own homes, the principles that determine how we put together our lived spaces transcend the simple need for shelter and protection from enemies. Our homes are outward manifestations of our beliefs, desires, and perhaps our deep fears as manifested in our own culture.
What about modern homes in North America, Europe, or other parts of the world? Unlike in the cultures or times of which Rapoport speaks, few of us have built our own houses. Rather, we select from those that are offered to us by developers or real estate agents, and we may have only minimal input into the shape of the spaces we occupy. The irony that Rapoport identifies is that at a time when there is greater variety in available building materials than at any other time in human history, and when many of us have fewer economic constraints than those whose houses he describes, the configurations of human dwellings appear to show less variability than at any other time in our past. One reason for this is certainly the great shift from a time when most of us built for ourselves to a time when the majority of dwellings are designed and built by specialists who may be more concerned about their bottom line than about our comfort and enjoyment of our homes. Another reason identified by Rapoport is the diminution in importance of higher-level cultural constraints on home architecture. Few of us worry seriously about how our house is oriented with respect to the coordinates of sacred space (though we may covet a southern exposure for our garden), and we are more concerned with the number of bathrooms than with the orientation of the toilet with respect to the bed in the master bedroom.
Aside from cultural and economic considerations, technological influences have also drawn the attention of designers away from the construction of habitable dwellings. In a recent conversation I had with Robert Jan van Pelt, an architect with a strong interest in the history of ideas, he argued that most designers and architects today focus upon either the very large—airports, museums, and city halls—or the very small—corkscrews, lemon squeezers, and chairs. The large, one-of-a-kind architectural creation like I. M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Balboa can serve as a long-standing physical monument to the ideas of the architect that is talked about, photographed endlessly, and seen by all from afar. The small household object, sometimes crafted with the same exquisite concern for detail as a large building, can be reproduced in vast numbers using modern methods of mass production. This is not only profitable but also serves as a different route by which the ideas of a designer can penetrate deeply, be seen by many, and influence much of our behavior.
The ordinary dwellings in which we live can lack the glamour of the huge hotel or office tower and the promiscuity of the kitchen utensil. For the designer, there is a bit less appeal, and so for the everyday consumer, there is less variety.
In spite of the stultifying sameness of our cookie-cutter housing developments, it is possible to identify certain patterns that do connect with modern culture and perhaps psychology as well, but one must look closely to see them. One of the most important functions of the inner design of house spaces is to regulate contact not just between members of the household but also between the residents of a space and outsiders. We already saw this at play in the use of courtyard houses to keep outsiders beyond the threshold as well as to make allowances for regulated social mixing of hierarchies within the household. In the famous hutong neighborhoods of Beijing, to use another example, a few splendid courtyard houses remain intact. To the passerby in the street, the outer ramparts of these courtyards can display nothing more than a bland brick wall with a humble door. The inner courtyard, though, can contain appealing landscaping and complex building forms with specialized functions for different members of the extended family.
In North American architecture, interesting cultural distinctions can be revealed in the way that the transition from public to private space is managed. Though this is somewhat less true now than it was twenty years ago, it is still largely the case that suburban front yards set houses well back from the street on unfenced lawns. This sets up what amounts to a semiprivate space in front of the house. In English and Australian suburbs, on the other hand, one is more likely to see a sharper distinction between public and private spaces in which fences clearly demarcate front gardens as private spaces. Though these fences may be low enough to be merely symbolic, their meaning is still clear.
We can also see the evidence of cultural change in North American houses. The traditional house plan in North America still often includes a formal dining room, for instance, even though this room, normally occupying pride of place in a space adjacent to the kitchen, is seldom used. Few people I know who have a formal dining room use it with any regularity, unless they lack seating space in their kitchen. Many people convert such spaces to other uses, but as these rooms were designed for seated dining, they are not always optimally placed for other uses. One good example of this is my reading armchair location in my house. The chair, housed in a room originally designed as a dining room, does not see as much use as it might have in a space designed explicitly as a comfortable and well-placed reading room.
In times past, one of the most important architectural elements of a dwelling was the foyer. As Winnifred Gallagher points out in House Thinking, the main function of the threshold is to manage the transition from the outside world to the inner space of the house. In this light, we can see the foyer as the beginning of a kind of stage performance, the opening act of a drama in which the curtain opens to reveal the detailed inner life of the homeowner. Grand homes of the past included stunningly ornate entry rooms that clearly foreshadowed the character of the house that lay beyond. In modern homes, the foyer is usually designed as a more informal space, often not much more than a coat closet beside a door. In the worst cases (such as the house I own now) the foyer can be missing entirely.
One exception to the simple, informal foyer can be seen in certain grandiose designs in the outer suburbs, the so-called upscale executive designs. In such homes, entrance foyers can consist of multistory spaces complete with overlooking balconies and grand chandeliers. As Gallagher points out, the effect of such entryways can be psychologically negative, causing visitors to jerk their heads upward in anxiety as they walk through the front door, as if they have found themselves at the bottom of
a mineshaft. The irony of such grand foyers is that they are seldom used, as the majority of owners of these houses drive directly into attached garages and enter through humble back doors into laundry or mud rooms. It often seems as though the main function of the foyer, as the part of the house that makes that important first impression, is more to stun potential buyers into submission than it is to exert any kind of positive influence on the owners of the house or its visitors.
One probable effect of such foyers is to increase the insular separation between the outside world and the inner world. Like an airlock protecting our spatial mind from the intermingling of the great outdoors and our pristine inner spaces, the foyer takes advantage of a spatial mind predisposed to cleave the world according to what can or cannot be seen. This is an issue that we will explore in a later chapter when we look at the influence of spatial cognition on our relationship with the natural world. There can be little doubt that the modern foyer, along with many other inventions of modern architecture and design, has helped to sever our relationship with nature. If we are to find a way to survive on this planet, we will need to find ways to heal this enormous rift.
HERMANN MUTHESIUS AND THE ENGLISH HOUSE
What I have said so far suggests that the size, shape, and configuration of the spaces inside our houses can have an influence on how we feel and where we go for comfort, for solitude, or for conversation. Some of the general principles underlying such behavior have been uncovered by architects and designers using largely intuitive experiential methods.
Christopher Alexander is perhaps the best known of the architects who have tried to apply a thoroughgoing understanding of the interactions between people and spaces in order to design more functional dwelling spaces. A brilliant polymath, Alexander received the first Ph.D. ever awarded in architecture by Harvard University while simultaneously working in the fields of computer science, transportation theory, and cognitive science at both Harvard and MIT. (His thesis, published as Notes on the Synthesis of Form, has been required reading for students of computer science for many years.)9 Alexander was recruited by the University of California at Berkeley in 1963, where he has remained ever since.
In a series of books culminating in the four-volume work ambitiously entitled The Nature of Order, Alexander argues for the integral connections of everything from quantum mechanics to living rooms to religious epiphany. What links all these things together, he says, is a set of principles that describe the ways in which what he calls centers, which are explicitly spatial, contribute to “wholeness.” According to Alexander, these rules govern everything from how the large-scale matter of the universe is ordered to what size and shape of living room in a house makes for peace and stillness.10
Given my thumbnail sketch, you might be left thinking that Alexander is something of a New Age mystic, but such an impression would be deeply misguided. Alexander deals with the notion of centers and wholeness at a completely pragmatic level, using it to explain such things as how the different parts of a well-made chisel (its blade, handle, connections) contribute to its beautifully simple functionality. In almost the same breath, Alexander draws an analogy with the connection between the length and orientation of a hallway and the quiet dwelling space it is attached to, making it clear how the two parts (two centers) contribute to the organic unity of the whole. Alexander’s main aim is to find a way to explain how the geometric properties of spaces have “the power to touch the human heart.”
Though his agenda is sweeping, his belief that space influences feeling and movement at a deep level is very much in accord with what we are now beginning to document with scientific experiments. The underlying reasons for these types of influences are buried in the nature and organization of the parts of our mind that have evolved to contend with problems of physical space. Alexander may not mention isovist analysis explicitly, yet it seems certain that some of the ways the shape of space influences behavior can be explained using the same analyses that I described earlier, and, in turn, that these analyses work so well to predict feeling and movement because of the size and shape of our spatial brain.
Sarah Susanka, the successful architect and popular author of the groundbreaking The Not So Big House, bemoans the North American tendency to equate square footage with happiness. She has demonstrated through more than two decades of building, writing, and case studies some of the same principles espoused by Alexander. Susanka insists that it is the quality of space, rather than its quantity, that influences our behavior. How we are attracted to spaces and how we thrive in our own dwellings has much more to do with the configuration of spaces and the small finishing touches, such as alcoves, built-in furnishings, and the quality of light, than it does with pure geometric horsepower: the number of tape measures needed to measure our expanses of real estate. What Alexander has managed to convey over a life’s work of practice and writing, Susanka has attempted to boil down to a somewhat simpler level, allowing more of us to take advantage of what is known about how shape influences feeling.11
Hermann Muthesius, though not exactly a household name, is well known to students of architecture. Muthesius was recruited by the German government in 1896 to work in England as a cultural attache. Rumors have swirled from time to time suggesting that Muthesius had a secret role as a spy (it does seem to be true both that he was personally appointed by the Kaiser and that part of his work consisted of careful documentation of English infrastructure, including railroads and heavy industries). Yet mostly he occupied himself scrutinizing the architecture, furniture, and manners of the English household. He quickly “went native,” packed an inordinate amount of traveling into a short tenure in England, and studied every detail of English life, from the habits of afternoon visitors to the placement of soap dishes near bathtubs. The culmination of this work was the monumental three-volume The English
House and, in it, the suggestion that an integral connection existed between the design of the English home and what Muthesius saw as their enviably successful way of life.12
For example, Muthesius was much struck by the English lack of ostentation in their dealings with houseguests. The common German practice consisted of carefully stage-managing visitors such that private quarters were kept hidden away and that the best, biggest, and most formal and impressive rooms and furnishings were highlighted. The English seemed to simply invite outsiders into the most intimate corners of the house:
It is amiably taken for granted that no special arrangements will be made for the visitor. He is one of the family and can do or not do as he wishes, like any of the others. … Everything goes on as usual and the visitor is spared the embarrassing feeling—that ultimately obliges him to leave—that he is upsetting the routine of the house. True courtesy lies in the very absence of conspicuous marks of it}13
Muthesius noted that the absence of physical separation between guests and residents in English homes was brought about by the artful arrangement of spaces. For one thing, the rooms of the English homes that Muthesius studied possessed what he called “very good wall spaces.” What he meant by this was that typical rooms in these houses were entered from hallways and were almost always cloistered behind doors. Door hinges were arranged so that the doors always opened inwardly upon the private spaces behind them. In this way, someone entering the room would begin their experience of the room by first seeing a tiny crack of an opening before seeing the entire room. This way of hinging doors produces an isovist that increases in size slowly and methodically, much as Muthesius saw the English style of life. This method of door hinging would have the further advantage that anyone already inside the room would have ample warning of the entry of the visitor, and so have time to prepare for the visit.
Muthesius contrasted such arrangements as he saw in English houses with German houses of the time, in which one room commonly contained an open doorway to another room, making the whole affair more like a succession of ostentatious entry halls to the living space rather than a comfortable set of qu
iet, contemplative spaces shared by guest and owner alike. More generally, he saw the German approach to the design of dwelling spaces to be showy, wasteful, and stiff compared to the more relaxed, humble, and disingenuous approach espoused by English architecture.
Arguments such as those of Muthesius are interesting because they suggest that there are interesting relationships between the way we design built spaces, the way that such spaces interact with our psychological makeup (the manner in which the organization of space makes or breaks intimacy, for example), and our cultures. Not only can the architecture of house spaces be used to reinforce cultural norms but it may also amplify them. Muthesius saw in microcosm in the organization of the English home many of the reasons for the apparent economic and social success of England at a time when Germany was struggling.
As we have already seen, such clashes of culture and space may have exerted enough of an influence over human behavior to cause bloodshed in our own times. Mohammed Atta, incensed by the imposition of Western architectural ideals on Muslim streetscapes, was ultimately prepared to sentence thousands of innocent people to death to exact payment for the insult. Later in our story, when we look at city space, we will see another example of a head-on collision between the organization of built spaces and the cultural values of those sentenced to live in them, a clash that contributed to death and destruction on a grand scale. Before we venture into the city, though, we must spend some time with the larger interior spaces where we work and play.