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... there has been nothing on housing beyond an article or two in academic journals and a few pages in more general works. This statement, by

Dr.Stanley Chapman in 1971, is quoted by Simpson and Lloyd® in 1977 to illustrate the fact that domestic buildings, and particularly those of the middle class, did not deserve enough academic attention. Until not long ago nearly every study on housing started with some sort of remark or other on the meagre scope of serious research concerning this most essential of building types.

This situation appears to be undergoing a radical reversal in recent times, at least as concerns western developed countries, where the former Cinderella of architectural studies has been the object of an ever growing academic output which includes a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches. Some of the works referred in previous paragraphs, and these constitute a fraction of what has come out lately, illustrate the point and the fact that interest

surrounding domestic spatial structures has increasingly gained the attention previously focused on built shells.

A review of the literature on domestic space structures shall not be attempted in the present study. However, something must be said about a few notions which have helped to illuminate the investigation that follows. These notions

underpin, in more or less explicit terms, studies on the spatial configuration of dwelling buildings or have emerged as a result of empirical observations.

The distinction between transition-space-centred and function-space-centred domestic structures is a theme underlying cultural issues in various studies.

By the former concept Hillier et.al.® mean a spatial system in which the most integrated space (or spaces) is transitional, that is, the access to all spaces in the complex is easier from a certain segment (or segments) in the circulation network. In function-space-centred complexes, a room (or rooms) in which activities are developed constitutes the most accessible space in relation to the whole complex.

Simpson, M.A.& Lloyd, T.H. Introduction in Simpson&Lloyd (ed.). Middle Class Housing in Britain. Davld&Charles, Archon Books, 1977, p.7.

Findings have associated the models above with the spatial logic in homes of distinct social class, with diverse patterns of behaviour across nations and time, with socioeconomic and political change, with gender differentiation within the household.

Elsewhere, Hanson and Hillier'" have opposed insulation (the degree of discontinuity between rooms) and sequencing (the way in which spaces are connected together into chains) and have shown how each variable equates with the homes of distinct social classes. The former associates with spatial systems whose main function cells are knitted together by transition spaces that usually insulate rooms from one another. This pattern was found to prevail among traditional working class homes in London whereas sequencing, that translates spatial networks in which chief activities connect or flows into one another, dominated in similar buildings that had been reformed by occupants of a new middle class — academics, journalists, actors, etc. — ... people who

are engaged in capturing, externalising and representing society to itself.^

Robin Evans'"" distinguishes the corridor plan and the matrix of connected rooms as spatial materialisations of two types of social behaviour: one guided by puritan principles and habitual privacy, another by body contact and

habitual gregariousness. The two models are not only found to relate to distinct societies but also to equate with changes in patterns of behaviour within a same society. He associates, for instance, the adoption of the transition-centred model, the corridor plan, in Britain, with the seventeenth century puritan ideal and, again, with the moralism of the Victorian period.

G lassie'^ has attempted to demonstrate how changes in the social, economic, political and religious conditions of life in eighteenth century Middle Virginia triggered an increased need for privacy, individualism and control over nature and led to the adoption of a complex system of transition spaces so that in ... the new house the most public room was only as accessible as the most

Hanson J. & Hillier, B. Domestic Space Organisation. Two Contemporary Space-codes

Compared in Architecture and Behaviour 2. 1982, pp.21-22.

Idem, p.24.

Evans R. op.cit.p.267-274 '^Giassie H.op.cit.p.190.

private room was in earlier buildings.'''

The idea of a transition-centred spatial network as opposed to a function- centred system was also seen to correlate with different dwellings in

Normandy" which may centre around the salle œmmune, a space expected to be essentially occupied by women, or around a transition space. This was found to be suggestive of gender distinctions, the former associating with a female, the latter with a male view of the household.

This leads to another issue underlying the study of domestic space

organisation: that of key domestic functions, how they relate to the homes of distinct groups, how some basic activities associate with certain spaces and their occupants, and the ways in which the spaces designed to accommodate those functions interrelate with one another and with the spatial network.

Robert Kerr^ , Herman Muthesius^ , Dennis Chapman’® and Helen Long*"® are examples of authors who have related function and social class in British homes in studies produced within some forty or fifty years from one another.

Kerr, Muthesius and Long relied on the availability and use assigned to certain rooms to distinguish dwellings in socioeconomic terms and Chapman focused on some key domestic functions to assess differentiation in patterns of

behaviour and the interaction of family and social status based ... on a

functional analysis of the family’s social life as expressed in the material and cultural equipment of the main living-room.^

Essential functions and the way they relate to one another and to all other spaces In a given domestic complex lie behind the notion of genotype, a key issue in the present investigation: the idea is conceived by Hillier and

"■‘ Idem. p. 120-121.

Hillier B.,Hanson J. Grahan H., op.cit.p.383.

'‘’Kerr R. The Gentleman’s House. John Murray, 1864. ''Muthesius H. The English House. 1905.

"“Chapman, D. The Home and Social Status. 1955. pp.24.

"“Long H. The Edwardian House. The Middle-Class Home in Britain 1880-1914, Manchester University Press, 1993.

Hanson‘S a s ... abstract rules underlying spatial forms.*^ The way in which these abstract rules can be retrieved from the spatial structure of a house may be summarised in the following explanation of housing genotype given

elsewhere by Julienne Hanson."

... different functions or activities are assigned to spaces which integrate the complex to differing degrees. Functions thus acquire a spatial expression which can be assigned a numerical value. If these numerical differences in function are in a consistent order across a sample... we can say that a cultural pattern exists ...We call this particular type of numerical consistency in spatial patterning a housing ‘genotype.

The ways in which transition-centred and function-centred complexes relate to general and syntactic aspects of domestic spatial structuring and the

identification of genotypical patterns of integration among key functions, and how they relate to the overall system of spaces, may be viewed as conceptual foundations for the series of observations that will attempt to decipher — in social and temporal terms. — the cultural soul of homes in Britain and Recife.

1.3. The data

What seemed initially as an almost unsolvable difficulty regarding the collection of the data was the fact that whereas one knew within fairly good chances of accuracy what houses had been built before and after the arrival of British residents in Recife, where these could be found, and what sort of people might have occupied them, there were no clues about the homes the newly- arrived had left behind except that these were not likely to be dwellings

associated with either extremes of the social scale, as records refer mainly to traders, engineers, skilled workers, clerical staff and clergymen.” This meant that the sample should be representative of virtually the universe of late nineteenth and early twentieth century British homes of middling economic

HillierS Hanson^ 1984, op.cit.(passim). " Idem. p. 12.

" Hanson J. Tradition and Experimentation in Housing and Neighbourhood Design in Proceedings of Prospects on Housing Policy and Technology Development for the 21 st Century. Korea Exhibition Center, Seoul, 1992.

Although references about large groups of workers hired in Britain for building railways can be found, it appears that these were lodged on site and tended to return to their homeland once the work was finished.

status.

As has already been stated, the temptation of constructing a sample out of carefully selected cases was to be avoided at any cost as was the easy artifice of examining a handful of cases come across by more or less chancy

circumstances. This attitude ruled out most architectural studies and second­ hand data in general. On the other hand, the research’s deadlines and resources prevented surveys on government offices being carried out, since these may prove very time-consuming when one cannot afford to restrict one’s data to a certain region, the same applying to the examination of surviving examples in loco which besides being impractical is hampered by alterations and conversions in the original building. Periodicals were thus considered the most satisfactory source for collecting a large sample of plans that reflected, as closely as possible, the housing production of the period.