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The five hundred plans that make up the British sample have been collected from the first two specialised periodicals published in Britain — The Builder and The Building News . The fact that these journals published plans by builders, students and amateur designers as well as by qualified architects added to their potentiality for providing a panorama of the domestic

architecture in Britain. The examples were collected without any specific criterion — other than time of construction (or design), display of room labels and legibility — by leafing through the pages of the journals, and photocopying whatever came into view in terms of complete plans of one-family dwellings.

Although it was known from the outset that the real target was the centre of the socioeconomic pyramid it was felt that social boundaries should also be

defined by observation and no attempt to restrict collection of available plans was made but for a few really grand mansions and houses with less than two day living cell. It should also be noticed that although the dates here

considered are those of publication, during the search for additional

information about the plans in the data-gathering process, it was found there nearly always to be some sort of remark about either the time of design or that of construction for the great majority of published drawings. Apart from the

sum up to a maximum of three hundred cases. Since choosing this or that plan was out of the question, it was decided that research would be

concentrated in either one journal at a time. The Building News was chosen for the period between 1911 and 1925 due to its frequent competitions*’ that regularly brought to light the work of builders, students and amateur architects. With the disappearance of The Building News in 1926, when it was

amalgamated with The Architect, plan-hunting was again resumed in the pages of The Builder until 1930. The total number of complete plans amounted to a little over five hundred examples. The plans exceeding this figure were randomly discharged and saved as spares in case undetected replicas or incomplete plans were to be identified later, a precaution that eventually proved worth taking. More than one plan in a same housing development were often collected as long as they presented different layouts. Exact replicas were disregarded.

The analysis of the full sample aimed at revealing broad tendencies in terms of spatial distribution and spatial configuration, across social class and time. Although analytical techniques were applied to each plan, no insight on individual examples was attempted and results were treated as pertaining to groups or clusters rather than to specific cases. For this reason and because the display of five hundred plans (some up to six storeys high) on paper would take a massive volume and consume precious time, the plans will not be

presented in printed form. However, photocopied drawings were scanned and saved in the floppy disks annexed to the back cover of this volume

(disks2 through?) so that they can be checked, if necessary, and may serve as a data bank for future studies.

The idea behind a large body of data, besides being an attempt to escape the bias of selection, was to construct a sample robust enough to stand breaking- up's into sub-samples and still comprise fairly large clusters so that mainstream

®®The editor, In the first issue of the amalgamated new journal The Architect and Building News of 19 March, 1926 refers to these competitions: The Building News first appeared in

1654... One of its most notable features was for many years The B uilding News

Designing Club, Founded when architectural education, save that to be learnt by rule of thumb in offices, hardly existed and when the Architectural Association School held night

classes only in which architects in practice taught and lectured. The Building News

Designing Club gave the younger men both incentive to design and the experience only to be gained by competition and criticism,...

spatial patterns could be backed by reasonably numerous cases and contrast conspicuously in number with those that were not, thus, allowing for the

identification of types.

The global analysis dealt with basic — general and syntactic — features, in terms of interior spaces only. These were also examined in the light of some textual references. Socioeconomic categories resulted from the analysis of general features — i.e availability and labelling of certain cells — thus enabling findings to be examined across social status. Prevailing patterns of spatial configuration and of integration hierarchy among key functions — genotypical inequalities — were identified and led to further categories being established. ‘Strong’ genotypes associated with middling social enclaves constituted the main criteria for the identification of a sub-sample reduced enough to allow individual scrutiny.

A representative subsample of twenty-five cases was examined on a plan-by- plan basis. Each complex was syntactically reworked to include exterior spaces and allow further investigation. Results from the global and the individual analysis were later compared to those drawn from the investigation of houses in Recife.