In the dust of flaking plaster surrounded by faded pink wallpaper a solitary tablecloth and vitrine feign the maudlin persistence of trivia.
The bourgeois maggot
tries in vain to restore its shredded body.
Here lies in agony a dying class Here lie in dust their family traditions:
Shake down their houses, let them disgorge small tea spoons and their cockroaches with the dust of the Middle Ages.
—Louis Aragon
The dwelling of our time has developed as two concurrent and well-defined models: villa and rental house.
Both of these dwelling forms have gradually evolved into today’s typical bourgeois types dur-ing the Empire and after. In both cases the models are the aristocratic residence and the feu-dal dwelling as castle, manor house, or palace. The villa in particular traces its origin to the summer country mansion, the so-called maison de plaisance. The various housing types that were developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represent not only a transfor-mation but also a reduction of the aristocratic dwelling into its bourgeois or petit bourgeois counterpart in terms of both space and interior appointments; and its layout was changed to accommodate different functions to groups of larger or smaller rooms, serving different household, sanitary, living, and representational purposes.
Even though these new housing types were historical trendsetters for their time and their so-ciety, they were by no means meant for everybody, for the dominant dwelling type is nat-urally the dwelling type of the dominant class. Apart from larger or smaller family houses and better and worse apartments in rental houses, we find many hovels, temporary shacks, and rental barracks. As discussed earlier, dwelling in the true sense of the word is in effect reserved only for the well-to-do segments of the population; thus, it is possible to speak about proper dwelling only with respect to a certain level of prosperity, a certain position on the ladder of social status and property. Although the right to dwell decently is guaranteed in some coun-tries by law (e.g., Germany) and has been declared a universal human right, this right in real-ity has been extended only to the better-off classes. The phrase “dwelling for the subsistence minimum” is actually a paradox; by definition, minimum subsistence excludes dwelling in the conventional sense of the word. The dwellings of those on the lowest level of social status and property ownership (residence, flat, apartment, etc.) bear no resemblance to the functionally differentiated dwelling types of the ruling class. It is in this sense that the abode of the proletariat and the poor in tenements or workers’ barracks is not a dwelling in the true sense of the word, but merely a shelter. It is not a home, but merely a lodging.
The first transformation of the two dominant types mentioned above was from the medieval burgher’s house to the rental apartment building. The bourgeois family house is of a later type, with its own distinctive architectural form. Its floor plan developed its own distinctive features only at the turn of the century (see Jan Koteˇra in Czechoslovakia), primarily under the influence of the English garden city movement. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until our own day, responding to social and lifestyle changes on the one hand and improved architectural solutions on the other, both of these dominant types — the family house and the apartment house — have undergone many changes and many improvements. The evolution from the rental apartment of the Empire style to the contemporary type, as well as the evolu-tion of the contemporary villa from family residence of the Empire style to, say, Le Corbusier’s Villa Garches or Poissy, provides ample evidence of this quantitative change. However, even though the floor plans have been improved, what has not changed is the basic housing type in historical-social terms: the functionally differentiated house, with its family-based house-keeping regime.
The prevalent type of the bourgeois dwelling [in Europe] is the multiroom apartment; its evo-lution originated with a gentleman’s residence, whose dimensions are reduced to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the level of affluence of its inhabitants. Basing its layout on this model, the apartment consists of an endless row of salonlike rooms of approximately equal dimensions. Double-leaf doors open along the axis of their lateral walls. The vista along the perspective of all these chambers, which form a kind of connected, continuous corridor, is ter-minated by the master bedroom, with the obligatory monumental catafalque of its shared marital bed. At first these rooms were treated as salons, without specific functions: green room, blue room, brown room, purple room, and so on. Special functions were assigned to them only later: master’s room, lady’s boudoir, library, study, reception, children’s rooms, guest rooms, smoking room, musical salon, bedrooms, dining room, and so on.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the so-called open gallery type was intro-duced, representing a remarkable adaptation of the Empire style to urban multistory housing.
At first open, these galleries were later glazed in (northern type) to become corridors, similar to the side corridor (Seitengang) in a modern railroad car. All the apartments accessible from the open gallery — regardless of the number of rooms — were at first without service facili-ties: the only service space provided within the apartment was the kitchen. Service spaces out-side the apartment included a cellar and a loft, and sometimes wood and other storage sheds in the courtyard. The entrance from the open gallery led directly into the kitchen, for there was no hall, and from there one gained access to the other rooms (some of which had separate en-trances). As a rule, a single toilet was provided at the end of the open gallery and separate from the apartments, to be shared by the tenants on each floor. Individual toilet “lockups” out-side the apartments came into existence only during the sixties and seventies. In other words, this meant that the reform included the installation and gradual improvement of the technical infrastructure of an apartment, the addition of special housekeeping and sanitary rooms, and — at the same time — a reduction of the number of rooms used less frequently (in effect, habitable but unused rooms) and the revision of their size.
The first service space to be added was the hall. At the same time the number of toilets was increased: instead of a common toilet, shared by a whole floor, a toilet shared only by two apartments was provided. Actually, even earlier, from the fifties onward, apartments of good quality tended to have their own toilet, frequently accessible only from the kitchen. Other ser-vice spaces added were a food storage closet (larder) and later a walk-in closet for storing in-frequently used housekeeping items. However, this latter was added only to comply with fire regulations that made it illegal to store combustible items in the lofts. The bathroom as an
integral part of the apartment became a standard feature only at the end of the nineteenth cen-tury, but — to be sure — only in large apartments of four rooms and more. Only during the last fifteen to twenty years has it become common in medium-size and small apartments as well.
Other housekeeping spaces and equipment, such as food preparation counters and kitchen sinks, clothes closets in bedrooms, and occasionally a separate toilet and a small bedroom for a servant near the hall, appear even later and only in the large apartments of the affluent.
At the same time, the dimensions of the rooms were being adjusted according to the special functional requirements of each, resulting in the gradual emergence of the most mature form of the bourgeois apartment: its center is defined by a large living room and a sitting room. The other rooms are kept small, more like cubicles, each dedicated to its own special function. In smaller apartments the living room doubles as a dining room, salon, and library as well. By means of these various reforms of the apartment layout, rationalization and economization have simplified all housekeeping operations in the apartment. The result is an apartment made up of a living room of adequate size and a number of individual sleeping cubicles, which in turn are combined with technically superior but smaller spaces designed for sanitary functions.
These changes in plan were accompanied by corresponding changes in the typical arrange-ment of windows and doors. Load-bearing masonry restricted both the placearrange-ment and size of openings, while vaulting allowed an increase in size vertically but not horizontally. With mas-sive bearing walls, any increase in the size of a window causes considerable technical diffi-culties, besides increasing construction costs. The masonry pier system, as used in Gothic construction, does allow the extension of the width of windows from one pillar to the next, thus opening the spaces behind to daylight. (Note that Gothic construction attempted to in-crease general window size not only in cathedrals but in its mature domestic architecture as well. The Flemish houses in Ghent, Louvaine, and the Grande Place in Brussels and Antwerp and many other cities, display facades with very large window openings; these are based on an even earlier Gothic tradition, which also used large windows, inserted within the open spaces of the structural timber frame. The masonry pier system uses a stone structural frame instead. The Renaissance and baroque aspired to large windows as well, but only to the ex-tent that the massive bearing walls made this possible.)
At first, the bourgeois apartment of the nineteenth century used prevailing baroque and Em-pire window styles: that is, a window elongated along its upright dimension, the vertical win-dow. A typical room of a bourgeois apartment of the seventies has one or two vertical windows, placed on the axis of symmetry of the front facade. The desire to exploit the site (and rents) to the maximum led both to a reduction in room size for middle-income people and an increase in the number of apartments per house: the exploitation of every square meter of floor area as well as facade frontage exposure made it necessary to squeeze the greatest pos-sible number of small rooms along the facade wall. Rental apartments built during Hauss-mann’s time and after typify this development: each room has only one vertical window, extending from floor to ceiling, with windows spaced as tightly as possible next to each other along the facade. The result is a row of vertical windows, each practically touching its neigh-bor (the bearing wall of the facade becomes transformed into a row of narrow masonry piers).
This design already points toward the later emergence of the continuous horizontal window, made possible by the introduction of concrete and steel skeleton construction, which allowed whole facades to be suspended on brackets.
Subsequently, a number of transitional types were developed, ranging from Haussmann’s ver-tical windows to today’s oblong or horizontal strip windows in concrete or steel frame build-ings. The Secession loosened up the rigid shape of the traditional window by introducing
playful grotesque forms and shapes, such as oval and round windows and windows joined in pairs, threesomes, or even foursomes of roughly square shape. These squarish shapes were later lowered and elongated, to end up as the modern horizontal oblong window.
Initially, doors in bourgeois apartments were almost exclusively double leaf and relatively high (120 ⫻ 250 cm); the rooms themselves were relatively high as well, similar to the cham-bers in baroque palaces. Designed in the manner of grand monumental entrances, these doors actually looked more like portals than like ordinary apartment doors. Lower, single-leaf doors made their appearance at first only in kitchens and service spaces. The change to single-leaf, low, and anthropometrically dimensioned doors occurred concurrently with the change in windows discussed above, and for the same reason, namely to achieve a better utilization of space. The introduction of glazed doors, sliding doors, folding doors, and so on, occurred con-currently with the modernization of the house’s floor plan from a collection of closed, self-contained rooms to a more open space. This change, in turn, led to the introduction of the movable partition: in certain cases the functions of doors and windows began to merge into an entire movable, transparent wall.
The changes described above in the layout of the bourgeois apartment during the nineteenth century also led to the abandonment of the simple open-gallery apartment type in rental hous-ing, as apartments increasingly became the object of rental exploitation and speculation. The desire to maximize exploitation of the building site led to extremely complex and forced com-partmentalized (box-in-box) apartment layout schemes containing a great number of tight light wells and ventilation shafts; the quality of site plans worsened in inverse proportion to the growing internal comfort of the apartments, progressively decreasing direct access to daylight and natural ventilation and, as a consequence, also bringing about a general deteri-oration of health conditions in the city as well. For example, stairs were eventually provided with natural light only from the top, kitchens received only indirect daylight from the corridor, and halls were left dark, without any daylight. This change accompanied the transition from the open gallery layout to the interior, double-loaded corridor type. The schematic layout of the double-loaded corridor type is essentially similar to that of Renaissance palaces; it is axial and monumental. It is here that the apartment becomes endowed with its patrician form:
a row of rooms a la manor house. The need for individual entrances into many of the rooms from the hall lead to extensions into subsidiary corridors inside the apartment, generally inserted between two rows of rooms and poorly lit (despite all the light shafts) and poorly ventilated.
Despite this change in plan from a single-bay, open corridor type to a three-bay type, no rad-ical, substantial improvement can be observed that might have led overall housing quality to improve and that might be seen as compatible with contemporary technical progress. On the contrary, the tendency to build rows of lateral bays extending between street and courtyard, designed to exploit the site to the utmost, caused the rows of rooms in between to become dark and poorly ventilated and represented in fact a step backward from the single-bay gallery-corridor type.
The palaces of the wealthy bourgeoisie, their grand villas and hôtels particuliers, use the feu-dal, aristocratic dwelling as their model. The villa of the nineteenth century is an atavistic throwback to the era of a gentleman’s manor house. It is the lord’s past castle, transplanted into an urban environment. In his book Neues Wohnen, neues Bauen [New Housing, New Building, 1927], Adolf Behne discusses at length the power of these reactionary models and the pernicious influence of the Middle Ages with its knights and assorted other phantoms haunting the dark corners of the bourgeois world. Just look at the city halls constructed by the
good burghers of the nineteenth century: nothing but monstrous examples of “knightly”
pseudo-Gothic architecture built in an age when knighthood had been dead for more than three hundred years. Built at the close of the last century, these bourgeois villas with their fashionable and now popular Secession-style facades all too often even try to imitate the lay-out of knightly castles or the plans of Renaissance summer pleasure palaces.
One has to wonder; how is it possible that a business magnate, the director of a bank, and a retired minister choose to build houses on their big lots with tiny rooms that are packed like little boxes one next to the other and wedged into each other, even though the large space of the lot would easily accommodate an open plan? The cramped layout of real castles was dic-tated by the lack of space on the top of some hill or steep cliff chosen for defensive purposes.
Does the owner of such a castle-villa on the outskirts of the city expect to be besieged by en-emy armies? And yet, his “small castle, but my own” has a small tower, resembling a medieval turret. The reason for these follies may perhaps be found in the fondness of painters and ar-chitects of the Renaissance for sketching plans of fortresses, which evidently inspired them to see a great number of decorative possibilities in their professional work. The architect’s love of decoration may thus be traced back to his old love of fortress architecture. Even schools are designed with windows resembling narrow defensive embrasure slots. Even in beach resorts and spas, we discover impregnable villas, endowed with castellated walls and defensive tur-rets. Instead of offering their clients livable houses and efficient workplaces, decorative ar-chitecture has condemned them to spend their whole lives in quasi-fortresses.
The family home of the patriarchal type, executed along monumental lines, was at first con-ceived as a bourgeois copy of an aristocratic residence, a castle or chateau. It professed a symmetrical disposition, replete with a vestibule and imposing staircase. In principle, the floor plan of many rental buildings is designed along similar lines. The urban family house for permanent residence is the patrician hôtel particulier, designed in the classical or neo-Renaissance style (lots of corridors, spacious vestibules, tripartite staircase), as are summer villas outside the city gates or in the country (preferably in romantic Swiss chalet style). The modernization of the villa began with the gradual conjoining of house and garden, the merg-ing of interior and exterior (balcony, terrace, veranda, loggia), the separation of livmerg-ing func-tions from service funcfunc-tions, and the introduction of a large central hall (English “home and bungalow” type), which serves either as a luxurious entry (villas of 1908 to 1914 have such en-try halls, which are veritable caricatures of a living hall) or, in its more rational form, as a liv-ing room, the domestic focal point of the house. Put differently: the palatial vestibule and monumental staircase are transformed into a large living space — that is, the largest and high-est room in the house (often more than two stories high)—ending up as the contemporary living room, which can also serve as dining area, study, reception room, and music salon. In addition, it may also double as interior stair access, terrace, balcony, or open gallery: it is a space used by the whole family throughout the day. (The most mature solutions of this type were developed by Loos and Le Corbusier.)
The urban rental house evolved primarily under the influence of land and rent speculation, but it retained the principle of a family home of the conventional housekeeping household type.
Technical progress had little influence on plan development. The astronomical increase in the
Technical progress had little influence on plan development. The astronomical increase in the