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Bertha Wegmann, The
Artist's Sister, 1882
Top marks to Rybczynski for choosing such a great topic: “home”
is something we all think we know, and take for granted, but which doesn’t
quite correspond with anything we learn in our academic studies. Nobody studies
“home”. He describes it as follows: ““This book is an attempt … to discover …
the meaning of comfort” [p vii], and indeed he does (on the very last page)
define the term, but his book achieves more than that. In the course of describing
how architecture and interiors moved towards our present-day ideas of comfort,
it is at the same time a very revealing depiction of the architectural
profession, based on Rybczynski’s own experience, which is perhaps what makes
his books so readable: he is honest enough to admit when his experience clashes
with his reading. When Rybczynski designed houses for clients, “I found that
the architectural ideals I had been taught in school frequently disregarded –
if they did not altogether contradict – my clients’ conventional notions of
comfort.”
So this book isn’t just about home, or comfort; it’s about
architects and their changing relationship, and sometimes actual discomfort,
with the term “comfort”. It is the story of how architects followed style at
the expense of comfort and technology, at some point in the C19, and as a
result, have had only a subordinate role ever since, for many aspects of home
design, specifically, kitchens and bathrooms. When we have a kitchen extension,
the architect might design it, but we hire a kitchen designer to plan the
layout. Why this split? Because we don’t
believe the architect has comfort as the main goal.
In this account, Le Corbusier represents a perhaps
depressing milestone in that strange divergence: the moment when the architect
fails to respond to people and their preference for such things as kitchen and
bathroom design, or to the intelligent use of technology. By the C20, Le
Corbusier could design a house as a “machine for living”, yet turn his back on
the great comfort-based innovations, and way of thinking, described by R in his
historical chapters.
Criticisms
I loved Rybczynski’s book, but it has some faults. Inevitably,
tackling an inter-disciplinary and wide-ranging subject such as comfort would
be difficult to do with primary sources.
I would feel happier about Rybczynski’s text if he provided
better citations, and better illustrations. For example, he claims (ch4 p84)
that the first sloping-backed chairs since ancient Greece appeared during the
reign of Louis XV. It should be possible to provide pictures, in fact, a book
of this kind cries out for illustrations.
I don’t believe that comfort appeared first in C16
Netherlands – there are plenty of examples of comfort in earlier Renaissance paintings,
even if they were not primarily studies of interiors. The birth of the Virgin,
for example, is a common subject for depicting a domestic interior.
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Hans Fries, Birth of
the Virgin, 1512
Much of the book is a historical survey of interior design
as it is affected by architectural styles. We begin with medieval times. As we
move through history, he gives us a
potted history of major movements, which are sometimes only tenuously related
to comfort. As he acknowledges, the “Georgian style” (for want of a better
word) was fixed in the C19 and remains the style of comfort to the present day.
Although he makes the fundamental split between comfort and style, I think he
should have concentrated on that topic. For example, he makes a clear and interesting distinction between
French and English styles: the former remained formal, and based around the court,
while English style was less formal and more practical (“The preference for
country homes … resulted in a style of living that was much more relaxed than
its French counterpart, and that eventually produced a different domestic
ideal”. [p106, ch 5]. But having made this distinction, Rybczynski then continues
to focus on the fashionable at the expense of comfort, by describing C20 styles
that look to me anything but comfortable, such as Art Deco (although he later valiantly
claims that Art Deco was more human-centred than subsequent styles such as minimalism,
which wouldn’t be difficult). As an architect and architectural historian, Rybczynski
tries to show some solidarity with architects, even doing his best to defend Le
Corbusier, but it’s cleaer from the author’s own description that C19
architects, by concentrating on the visual, lost the opportunity to take
responsibility for interior design, and never regained it. Worse, they showed
little interest in technology and the infrastructure of buildings. If we want
evidence of modern architects rejecting comfort, we have only to browse the
many depressing accounts by family members growing up in their father’s (inhuman
and impractical) architectural statement, such as Elizabeth Garber’s Implosion:
A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter (2018).
The present day
To complete R’s fascinating journey through architectural
history from the point of view of convenience and comfort, we should move to
the present day. The modern home really is a “machine for living in”, even if
Le C would have been dismayed at our lack of attention to style. More important
than a specific style, we expect all devices in the home to be linked, and to
respond to our controls. We want to be able to play music and video from our
phone to the TV. We want to charge our electric car, and to be able to control
domestic appliances, such as dishwashers and blinds, with our phone. We want
the home to be intelligent enough to transfer energy back to the grid when the
domestic generator (from solar power or heat pumps) has a surplus above the house’s
own requirement. If we want advice on all of this, do we go to an architect? I
don’t think so. Architects lost touch with technology over 150 years ago. Yet
the joined-up house would be central to what we today define as comfort. And
comfort, in the broad sense that Rybczynski defines it, as the tailored and
appropriate use of technology, has led to the growth of the design and build
movement, with an architect frequently not even involved in the project. Visit
any recent hotel or hospital building: these are spaces where function is far
more important than any style. They do not look like designed spaces, even
though they are highly functional.
Oh, and, in case you are wondering, what exactly is comfort?
Rybczynski defines it as “a cultural artifice” involving “convenience,
efficiency, domesticity, ease, privacy, intimacy” – whatever environment provides
a feeling of well-being, in other words.
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