Perspectiva de la participación

A broad if somewhat shadowy picture of late nineteenth and early twentieth century houses has emerged from the basic analysis applied to the British sample in the previous chapter. Consistent correlations enabled a general idea of how much space distinct social groups of potential occupants were likely to have afforded, before and after World War I, and what sort of use normally associated with some of these spaces, according to the needs of those groups. It has also been seen that a common designation for rooms used for a similar purpose in houses of a different class of inhabitants was not good enough to identify their designed use but that semantic adjustments were necessary to fine tune these functions to their proper status. Furthermore, it has been found that functions as well as labels were partly altered along the period.

However, the number of spaces in a house, the use designed for them, and even the subtle connotations underlying the term by which they are referred to are still far from revealing the cultural ethos of a society's domestic milieu, a distinctive way of behaving within home boundaries which might have

contributed towards altering the ways in which people of other cultural realms behave or at least capable of leaving detectable traces of its presence at a certain stage of the development of another society’s domestic models.

The next step towards deciphering the social soul of the British house was, then, to investigate its spatial structure, led by the notion that a building’s ... spatial pattern can, and does, In itself carry social information and content ... , the kernel assumption of the methodology chosen as the main investigation tool in the present research. It is believed that b y ... giving shape and form to

our material world, architecture structures the system of space in which we live and move ... [and]... provides the material preconditions for the patterns of movement, encounter and avoidance which are the material realisation — as well as sometimes the generator — of social relations.

Granted that buildings are networks of walls and doorways which orders a void for the purpose of separating and connecting functions and the people who perform them, it is believed, that by inspecting the way in which those elements were put together to enable the daily movements of a certain group of people at a certain period of time, a record of their behaviour is being inspected much in the way that archaeological evidence from a past era is dug out.

3.1.1 Spatial configuration and the quest for privacy

Hermann Muthesius comparing English and German houses finds th a t... the most striking difference is the lack in England of communicating doors

between the rooms, which means that the only access to a room is from a passage or hall. Thus the English room is a sort of cage, in which the inmate is entirely cut off from the next room.'^ He also stresses as ... a major

concern... that the paths of the servants and of the family and visitors shall never cross...

Girouard'^' views the increase in the complexity of the circulation network as a crucial aspect of seventeenth century English country houses. In particular, the introduction of backstairs, spared those of gentle birth from much discomfort in terms of crossing paths with unwelcome people and their business. The gentry walking up the stairs no longer met their last night’s faeces coming down them. Servants ... became, if not invisible, very much less visible.

Millier & Hanson, 1984, op.cit. pp. xi and ix Muthesius, H. Op.cit.p.79.

Idem, p.95.

What Muthesius terms as a cage - like room is referred by Robin Evans’® as the terminal room, a dead-end cell linked to a transition space. This mode of spatial articulation defines, according to the author, the corridor plan as opposed to a matrix of interconnected rooms, both referred in chapter 1 of the present study. According to Evans’® the ...history of the corridor as a device for moving traffic from rooms has yet to be written. He adds that from the little evidence he had ...so far managed to glean, it makes its first recorded

appearance in England at Beaufort House, Chelsea, designed around 1597 by John Thorpe staircases began to be attached to the corridors and no longer terminated in rooms.

After 1630 these changes of internal arrangements became very evident in houses built for the rich. Entrance hall, grand open stair, passages and backstairs coalesced to perform a penetrating network of circulation space which touched every major room ... the passage was for servants: to keep them out of each other’s way and, more important still, to keep them out of the way of gentlemen and ladies.

What appears to be an obsessive desire to keep activities apart and, specially, to separate the communities of adult family members and their guests from the rest of the household is thought to have reached state-of-the-art condition in the Victorian period and may be summarised, in its strongest colours, through the writings of Robert Kerr, specially on his design guidelines on Privacy.

Primarily the House, of an English gentleman is divisible into two departments, namely that of THE FAMILY, and that of THE SEP VANTS. ... this element of character must be considered essential; and as the importance of the family increases the distinction is widened, ... ’^

The idea here implied ... being the basis of our primary classification. ... the Family Rooms shall be essentially private, and as much as possible the Family Thoroughfares. It becomes the foremost of all maxims,... that the Servants’ Department shall be separated from the Main House, so that what

Evans, op.cit.p.268 Idem, pp. 271-272.

passes on either side of the boundary shalf be both invisible and inaudible on the other. ....

The idea which underlies all is simply this. The family constitutes one

community; the servants another. Whatever may be their mutual regard and confidence as dwellers under the same roof, each class is entitled to shut its door upon the other, and be alone.

The complexity of the circulation network and the confined character of the rooms in British houses, at least in those dating from the late eighteenth century onwards, are perhaps the most recurrent themes in the study of this nation’s domestic space.

In syntactic terms, a set of rooms linked to different segments in a chain of transition spaces by way of a single door — the image of the British home as outlined in the referred literature — configures highly asymmetric and

nondistributed complexes.^* This model has been identified in a number of studies utilising space syntax techniques as, for instance, in seventeenth century houses in the Banbury re g io n ,in traditional working-class terraced houses’* in London, in apartments in North London,’* in houses built recently in Milton Keynes.’'”

However, findings do not entitle the assumption that the

asymmetric/nondistributed type is the British model of domestic space configuration, not only due to the localised nature of these and other studies, but also because, in some of them, other recurrent spatial patterns have actually been revealed. Eighteenth century Banbury houses altered from an asymmetric/nondistributed model to a symmetric/distributed one, apparently

Idem, p.76

A system is said to be asymmetric when one or more cells control access to other cells and distributedness is defined as a relation with more than one locus of control. Hillier&Hanson, 1984, op.cit.pp. 12 and 154.See also pp.11, 14 and 108.

Hanson & Millier, Tradition and Chance in the English House. UAS-Bartlett, mimeo, 1 9 7 9 .p.20.

Hanson&Hillier, op.cit.,1982, p.20-23.

Ran. Ami. Domestic Soace - Organisation and Use in The English Home. MSc Thesis. Bartlett. UCL, 1981, p.74.

accompanying changes in the region’s social climate."'*^ So did working-class terraced dwellings converted into middle-class homes/'® Another study of North London dwellings, this time concerning apartment plans designed with the participation of residents,’'® showed the prevailing model to be a

symmetric/nondistributed one.

Shiftings concerning relations of asymmetry and distributedness In domestic space systems appear then to be a powerful issue underlying socio-cultural changes. By measuring the asymmetry of a space in relation to all others in a complex, one is actually assessing how integrated that space is in the system. High asymmetry in a spatial network signifies low levels of integration, that is, of accessibility to and from that space. This may translate, for instance, a feeling of discrimination against certain activities or a desire of privacy, such as the one often referred as governing the logic behind the spatial arrangement of British house. Integration is then, as Hanson puts it, ... one of the fundamental ways in which houses convey culture through their configuration.^^