I've been watching Grand Designs, the British reality show about people self-building. An English friend says it's known over there as 'grand budgets'. I'm struck by how concerned the builders are about how the rooms look. Aesthetics are important. Architecture can promote happiness, and sometimes even create it, as Alain de Botton has pointed out.
Often, though, the spaces don't work in a practical sense. Oliver Sach's, in An Anthropologist on Mars, describes Temple Grandin's house as 'a machine for living' which exactly conveys what's missing. Some of these grand designs are not efficient machines for living.
If you have five living spaces, you'll spend a lot of time swabbing the decks. If the dining room is on a different floor from the kitchen, the food will arrive cold unless you have a dumb waiter and some really good quality chafing dishes. If you have no storage, you will have get rid of everything you (used to) own to move in. Things like that are important to our everyday experience of our homes.
When we're all striving to make our houses look beautiful like our favourite homewares stores, we may be neglecting this other important aspect of "liveability".
This is post 33 of 43 posts.
2 comments:
I have loathed Le Corbusier's dictum ever since I first came across it. Houses should be practical, but I urge finding another way of expressing that notion.
What's wrong with a machine? Read Jeremy Clarkson's I Know You've Got Soul to really discover the romance of good engineering (and some bad engineering too).
The problem with Le Corbusier is that most of his houses don't operate very successfully as machines for living. Not for the live-er, at least.
The Shakers turned an obsession with functionality into both a high degree of art and also spirituality so it can be done.
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