Architects provide answers to all of these questions as they develop and shape their design. But all of the answers put together do not automatically lead to the final form.
However extensive the designers' knowledge of dwelling and however definite their opinions, there are always many different ways of shaping the substance of dwelling. How then do architects organize their design?
From the Renaissance until the end of the nineteenth century, such choices were regulated by the prevailing style. More than siomply the external appearnace and the kind of decorations, a style largely defined the total composition of the edifice.
The style was based on an architectural system, a clear set of rules dictating the proper dimensions, proportions, rhythm, organization of the space, stuructural system and use of materials.
Around 1900 these underlying rules and systems began to be called into queestions from all directions. Victor Horta challenged sysmmetry;
Adorf Loos opened the assault on ornamentation;
Le Corbusier developed new rules of composition;
Gerrit Rietveld and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe borke open the organization of space.
Gradually a new architecture emerged, characterized by the absence of a coherent and generally accepted architectural system. Every design now seems to be searching for its own identitiy, based on its own set of rules.
In essence, these underlying design rules are developed as one-offs for each design. A coherent whole can now be achieved by deriving the various design choices from one guiding main idea, to which all other decisions are subordinated. This main idea, the foundation of the design, we call the concept.
The development of a concept is the first step towards shaping and organizing the design: A concept need not yet reach a verdict about the form of the final designl its primary purpose is to make statements about the idea:
the character and the direction of the solutions. The concept expresses the basic idea behind a designl it provides direction fro the design choices and simultaneously excludes variantsl in a manner of speaking, it organized the deesign choices.
A concept is the representation of an idea. In principle this can be expressed in many different ways, in a blueprint, a diagram, a picture or a story. It can be based on the programme to be deisgned, a reaction to the context, an idea about the users, the expected significance of the building or a metaphor. It can be an abstract idea or dlosely linked to a form to be designed.
But the concept remains the basic rationale, the idea - it is not literally the form itself. Other choices are based on the concept.
How strong the concept is, how much it can be elaborated and whether design choices support the concept determine to to what extent the concept permeates the building and gives it its identity.
Changes in the social organization of our activities are often directly related to the use of the home and its significance for dwelling.
The industrialization of Europe in the nineteenth century, for instance, brought with it major changes to the daily lives of the middle class.
Before this, the home, which consisted of only a few rooms despite often large families, was often also the place where its occupants plied their trade.
It was usually a scene of hustle and bustle and it afforded little price, if any.
The advent of industry changed all this. For the first time, a division between home and workplace was created on a mass scale: the man was out of the house during the day, in the public world, while the woman kept the home and took care of the children.
After work the man would go home, that is to say to a place he did not share with the public world. This division had major implications for the meaning of the home in nineteenth-century society.
This division had major implications for the meaning of the home in nineteenth-century society. This traditional idea is the reason, for instance, that late into the twentieth century the home was still regarded as the woman's domain, a place that was homely, soothing, and private, in contrast with the public,
'manly' outside world. These opposing connotations had not been nearly so marked before industrialization, and yet afterward it would be a very long time before women were accepted into the public sphere,
or men could carry out home decoration or housekeeping work with any degree of respect.
In the rise of the increasingly well-to-do middle class during the nineteenth century, Walter Benjamin sees the emergence- for the first time in history- of the private individual, who creates his private world at home in contrast to his public life outside it.
The private individual, who in the office has to deal with realities, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions...
In the interior, he brings together remote locales and memories of the past.
His living room is a box in the theatre of the world...The interior is not just the universe of the private individual; it is also his etui.
Benjamin sees the endeavors of the nineteenth-century bourgeois as a yearning for a deeper meaning of dwelling, in which home and occupant are entirely attuned to each other:
The original form of all dwelling is existence not in the house but in the shell. The shell bears the impression of its occupant.
In the most extreme instance, the dwelling becomes a shell. The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling's interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its
Welcome to the Office These days, it’s rather easy to define an “office worker”: it’s someone who sits in front of a computer screen for most of the working day, often in a space where others are doing the same, but sometimes alone in a “home office” or with a few others in a “shared office”. In earlier times, many office workers were used not for their knowledge or intelligence, but for the mere objective capacity