Figure 3.0.1A Space in the Home, government publication of 1963: daily activities on a timeline: 6.30, mother cooks while father relaxes
In Part 1, we looked at movement from the point of view of the designing architect, and in Part 2, in terms of the individual’s experience and his or her reading of place, but as soon as two or more people are involved, there is a relationship. They must confront each other, cooperate or at very least observe each other, and no human being is viable alone for long, Crusoe myths notwithstanding. Apart from the sick, the occasional prisoner or the Carthusian monk, we all move about, not only making journeys, as discussed in the previous sections, but also changing territory and, with it, our role: academic till 6 o’clock, father and husband at 7. Roles are like theatrical parts, often with changes of dress to match, and tend to belong each to a setting that acts like a theatrical set, offering necessary props. Goffman’s metaphor of frontstage versus backstage was mentioned in the general introduction and is readily applicable to buildings of almost all kinds.1 We are always, to some extent, putting on a show for others, and each setting we inhabit has its rules, explicit or implicit, that we mostly take for granted. It also has a membership: the university, the ticketed train passenger, the family home extended only to invited visitors. Institutions have names associated with familiar building types: school, home, shop, restaurant. Within them are rooms, also named, normally by functional associations, so that estate agents classify dwellings in terms of living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms. Such names also appear on architects’ plans, everyone assuming we all know what they mean.
These designations carry cultural values and expectations – summed up by Pierre Bourdieu in his concept habitus – which can be defined briefly as, ‘the socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating structures through which the habitat is engaged’.2 That is to say, we each possess a set of beliefs, values and habits that govern our expectations of the world, and that need to mesh with the meanings and arrangements of the habitat, so that the two can reinforce each other. This process of recognition can change considerably from place to place. In Europe, the idea of bed is fairly entrenched, and it is one of very few pieces of furniture explicitly described in The Rule of St Benedict, dating from about 530, which also prescribes that there should be one monk per bed, and they should sleep together in one room.3 In contrast, the Japanese have long held the custom of folding out bedding and sleeping on the floor, so avoiding the need to switch rooms between day and night. In some cultures, even the orientation of the sleeping place is important; for example, in Thailand, it has long been unpropitious to sleep with one’s head towards the west, the direction connected with death.4 If such readings of pollution seem strange, we are not free ourselves from such values and expectations, as exemplified by changing attitudes to bathrooms and kitchens in European societies. Defecating in the house was long avoided, but, even after the introduction of sewers and water closets, the lavatory often faced outwards, into the open air. In Dora Tack’s reminiscence of childhood spent in Brixton, London, the family moved in the 1930s to a flat with a fitted bath, but her policeman father refused it, setting a board on top and using it for storage. The filling of a movable tin bath in front of the living-room fire, habit of their previous existence, continued.5
The kitchen has changed greatly with the disappearance of servants, the heightened status of women and the sharing of food preparation, not only becoming larger, more prominent and more central to the house or flat, but also subject to nearly a century of design revolution, involving fitted units and innumerable gadgets. It is now a fashion statement to be shown off to friends, renovated at frequent intervals for change of style, and a key element in selling a house. Taking up the contrast again with Thailand, their traditional vernacular kitchen, along with the washroom, was considered an especially dirty place, set on the side of the deathly west with the lowest floor level.6 In our society, by contrast, it aspires to the allure of being spotlessly clean, not just hygienically but spiritually pure.7 Hosts of both genders cook and are proud of it, and so the kitchen has crossed the boundary to become a polite space, but, even now, nobody shows off their lavatory, even if they ensure it is clean for guests and well provided with paper, soap and towels. It is important for guests to find it and to be able to recognise it when they see it, even when visiting for the first time, because it is embarrassing to ask. There is a symbolic implication here, and nobody who has read Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger can continue to attribute cleanliness to hygiene alone.8 She shows that our attitudes of repugnance and avoidance are every bit as constructed and structured as those devoted to more positive aesthetic matters.
Such are the changing territories of everyday life that we move through, only partly cognisant of their implied values. They are differentiated by contrast, and patterns of movement have shaped them, especially kitchens and bathrooms, which sustain endless gestures and postures as bodies go about their everyday tasks. In recent history, these passed through an obsession with ergonomics recorded in government publications such as Space in the Home, which now seem both excessively reductive and socially presumptuous (Figures 3.0.1–3.0.4).9 But who sits where in the living room or at table remains significant, and even more so who sleeps where. These territories still have their rules and membership, which their architecture helps to declare. We must enter and leave, and move between them, crossing thresholds and making appropriate gestures of greeting or parting. For clarity and convenience, all this has been so far described in terms of domestic examples, but the same principles apply to bigger institutions, even to whole cultures. In the chapters that follow, these relationships between space, use and meaning are explored through a wider range of contrasting examples.
In Chapter 3.1, Peter Blundell Jones sets out some general cross-cultural principles, concentrating first on the idea of centre versus periphery, and second on linear paths that give direction, generating roads and implicit spatial axes. Taking the example of the Australian Aborigine circumcision ground, a temporary theatre, he shows how a space can be prepared for and defined by social action, so that it becomes both a temporary record of that action and a necessary means of sharing it. He also discusses the inevitability of thresholds, which, because they mark changes of territory, are bound to be significant, and extends this to a discussion of their symbolic importance.
Figure 3.0.1A Space in the Home, government publication of 1963: daily activities on a timeline: 6.30, mother cooks while father relaxes
Figure 3.0.1B Space in the Home, 1963: 7.00, Mother serves them all at table
Figure 3.0.2 Space in the Home, 1963: dimensions to gain access to the dining table
Figure 3.0.3 Space in the Home, 1972: right and wrong ergonomic movements to enter the room
In Chapter 3.2, to provide an example of how spaces in buildings mesh with rules about use, we set the plan of Rievaulx Abbey alongside selected extracts from The Rule of St Benedict concerned with architecture and place. When read in full, the Rule has – as one might expect – much more to say about roles and correct behaviour, and it is noticeably more explicit about time than space, presumably because timings needed to be dictated, whereas the space of the monastic plan was already given. Where the architecture does appear, one glimpses how it supports and substantiates the rule.
The Belgian architect Lucien Kroll was a great pioneer of participation and a believer in the idea that ordinary citizens should be allowed the chance to express themselves through their dwellings. We include as Chapter 3.3 a brief comment from his book Composants (English version, The Architecture of Complexity) of the mid 1980s, which sings the praises of the traditional domestic threshold and laments its deterioration.
In Chapter 3.4, we move to the other side of the world to consider the Japanese tea house, as described by Lucy Block. The tea ritual is highly prescribed, intricate and dependent on consistently polite and correct behaviour by all. The setting, though apparently humble, receives great aesthetic attention, as do the taste and smell of the tea and the character and quality of implements used in its preparation. Dedicated to such a special social purpose, the intimate structure reveals architecture again in a framing role, and, as the rules are unfamiliar, they stand out all the more. Despite the precedence of the host, it is hard to see quite who is putting on a show for whom, as all are suppporting actors.
Chapter 3.5, another East Asian example, concerns a monument at large scale. In collaboration with Jianghua Wang and Bing Jiang, Peter Blundell Jones considers the East Qing Tombs, north of Beijing, where the last Chinese emperors were laid to rest. Death is a major rite of passage, all the more so under the influence of Confucianism, and so where the ancestors were placed was of the utmost importance. The special site, chosen for its feng-shui properties, is entered by a spirit path several kilometres long. Few places on Earth show such elaborate progressions and layerings, and, in imperial times, an enormous staff was on hand to protect it, and yet the tombs remained for most people a forbidden place. The question of who is putting on a show for whom here involves heaven and the ancestors.
If customs surrounding Chinese emperors seem strange, so do those of eighteenth-century European aristocrats. In Chapter 3.6, Renata Tyszczuk looks at the gardens of the exiled Polish king at Lunéville in France, in which nothing was quite what it seemed, nature gave way to layers of artifice, and roles were reversed in a highly theatrical manner. At a simple level, this parody of a royal court, showing the aristocracy at play, contributed to the inven -tion of the circuit walk with sequentially orchestrated incidents, as described by Jan Woudstra (p. 102), but the many water-driven automata for which it was famed gain darker implications in Tyszczuk’s interpretation, as presaging the arrival of a virtual world.
The selections from Garnier and Muthesius included in Part 1 showed spaces held in tension by social rules. Both architects revealed a deep concern for the propriety of their tasks: Garnier occupied with a polite setting for the opera, Muthesius in managing confrontations between master, mistress, servants and guests. We end with a parallel piece by a contemporary architect. It concerns the rebuilding of Lauriston School in Hackney, London, and the problem of the corridor. As famously pointed out by Robin Evans,10 corridors are a relatively recent invention, marking the period in which concern began to shift to circulation pure and simple. It is hardly surprising to find, in one school after another, rules about ‘not running in the corridor’, when there is nothing to do there other than to get to the other end as fast as possible. A major innovation of Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry’s Impington Village College of 1937 was the ‘prom’, a wide circulation space also used for social occasions, and, after World War Two, the architects of the Hertfordshire schools tried to develop access spaces between classrooms as secondary teaching areas.11 Hans Scharoun in Germany, in the same period, made a more radical proposal by developing his linking spaces as irregular internal streets.12 By the time of the previous Lauriston School, built in the 1970s, everything had given way to open plan, with loss of thresholds and very little differentiation between class rooms. When designing its much-expanded replacement, Ann Griffin and Philip Meadowcroft were asked to secure the identity of the single classroom, and yet retain the advantages of the open plan, developing access spaces as both inviting and usable. In Chapter 3.7, Ann Griffin retells the story of her dialogue with the staff and pupils.
1 Goffman 1971.
2 This usefully clear formulation was on the Internet, but seems to have disappeared. For his own more contorted explanations and the whole theory, which perhaps suffers in translation, see Bourdieu 1977.
3 ‘For bedding, a mattress, a blanket, a coverlet and a pillow are enough. The beds should be frequently inspected by the Abbott as a precaution against private possessions’ (Parry 1990, p. 87).
4 There is much about specific orientation in Stanley Tambiah, Classification of Animals in Thailand, in Douglas 2003, pp. 127–66. The general principles and continuing significance of these ideas about orientation are confirmed by current work at Sheffield by Supakit Yimsrual.
5 Tack 1992.
6 See note 4.
7 For background history, see Wright 1960.
8 Douglas 1966.
9 Evident in government publications such as Space in the Home, HMSO Publications 1966.
10 Evans 1997, pp. 70–9.
11 Saint 1987.
12 Blundell Jones 1995, pp. 136–51.