DREAMING HOUSES.

Houses, far from being machines for living in, are above all dreams of how people can and might live. Those for the rich provide inspiration for the rest of us, but we need new models as society becomes more complex.

The notion of house went through some strange transformations over the last hundred years. 'London's first blocks of leasehold flats have been built only quite recently', wrote Hermann Muthesius in his great book on the English house nearly a century ago. 'Should the custom become more widespread -- ... which at the moment seems unlikely -- this could only be a sign of economic recession and, even worse, would spell the demise of one of the best aspects of the English heritage.

'For there can be no doubt that to live in a private house is in every way a higher form of life. Its most important virtues are ethical The calm certainty of having "our own four walls", the feeling of contentment, the development of our personality and the fostering of all our natural talents that derive from it ... can hardly find a place in the nomadic life of metropolitan removals. [1] Muthesius, cultural attach[acute{e}] at the German Embassy in London, was writing to try to convert his nation to the English predilection for living in houses (as opposed to the Continental one for apartments). Individual houses, he thought, were healthier, enabled people to live in close contact with nature, and developed their individuality Muthesius was a liberal Prussian, and hence maybe resistant to that state's oppressive social conformity.

He was (without being much aware of it) reflecting on a phenomenon integral to the development of prosperous societies. Britain was the richest country when he wrote, and London, the great city of houses, was the place in which the populace was most free. From Classical times, rich (and hence most independent) people built villas outside towns -- for instance there are big and very varied houses outside the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Although 'city air made men free', throughout history, the most prosperous citizens of stable societies, ones where you don't expect to be visited by bands of brigands or looting and raping foreign armies, have built houses outside the city walls. The explosion of industrial wealth (and mechanized transport) in the nineteenth century enabled the development of new house types (such as the semi-detached) and a wonderful proliferation of house types for people who were a great deal less well off than the grandees of Pompeii. The twentieth century saw the colossal proliferat ion of the suburban house in the richest and most stable societies: North America, the Antipodes, and in Europe since the end of the Second World War, once armies seemed no longer to be a threat. Invention has developed as rapidly as numbers, wealth and technology: the contemporary house remains a test-bed for architectural and human ideas, as it always has been.

In the middle of the last century, F. R. S. Yorke produced a key book on the development of individual houses: in its later editions, though he published the Villa Mairea, the Farnsworth House and the Maisons Jaoul, he had severe reservations about the nature of the type. 'The building of villas', he said, 'is [not] a good or even a possible solution to the problem of housing the people ... until land is controlled so that flats can be planned in proper relation to neighbourhoods and to open space, the majority of people will want to live in detached or semi-detached houses. [2] In Britain and in many of the other post-combatant countries, the climate was (temporally) fiercely turned against the suburban and the individual.

At the end of the century, Rem Koolhaas remarked that, 'Between the houses of childhood and death, between those of play and work, stands the house of everyday life, which architects have called many things -- residence, habitation, dwelling, etc -- as if life could develop in one place only. [3] Koolhaas, who was partly brought up in Amsterdam, one of the densest and most flatted cities in the world is no house lover. Indeed, he seems to prefer hotels. 'I like hotels', he says, 'because in a hotel room, you, have no history. You feel like you're all potential, waiting to be rewritten ... There is no past. [4]

Curiously, for all his lust to escape from time and place, Koolhaas rightly identifies one of the key elements in human psyche -- the houses of childhood. I can still remember (and love) the houses of my grandparents, in which I was brought up as a little boy: their rooms, their aromas, their light, their noises. Yet I have not seen either for very many years (one has long been demolished). Their plans are part of me, even though I last saw the places before I could draw a plan, or even knew what one was. But surely that familiarity with the houses of our past extends long after childhood: all the houses we have ever lived in are, to different degrees, engraved in our memories and personalities.

Even Le Corbusier in his most techno-fabulist days had some notion of the psychological importance of the house. 'Everybody,' he said, 'quite rightly, dreams of sheltering himself [5] in a sure and permanent home of his own.' But stern discipline was required. 'This dream, because it is impossible in the existing state of things, is deemed incapable of realization, and so provokes an actual state of sentimental hysteria ... In our towns and their outskirts, we have had not so much houses as poems.' 'It is essential,' he urged, to create the right state of mind for living in mass-production houses.' [6] This sinister phrase foreshadows some of his later parafascist notions of urban planning, in which the plebs would live in slab blocks while the rulers were to be in carefully segregated villas.

What is now clear in the post-Modern world is that houses, while they can he produced by industrial means, can and should be poems. As Alison Ravetz remarked recently, 'through the later twentieth century, people have steadily developed a more personal relationship with their homes'. [7] She argues from Britain, where more than a quarter of all houses were made before 1914 -- Muthesius could well have seen them. But the domestic technical revolution in power, sanitary and heating systems has transformed our relationship to our homes in ways that Muthesius could only guess at. And, says Ravetz, 'Over the same period, the stock of dwellings quietly absorbed a veritable explosion of personal posessions including, latterly, a wealth of computers and electronic equipment. This was made easier by the much lower occupancy of houses than in former times'. [8]

In the richer countries, we may live in less crowded quarters, but as Ravetz points out, we have not yet come to grips properly with the way in which dwellings are needed for a far wider range of households than Muthesius, and even Yorke and Le Corbusier considered. They were concerned mainly with provision for the then standard family with parents and two or three children. Now, households are of many types: as well as the standard family, there are single person establishments (at both the young and the old ends of the spectrum of life), childless couples (of all kinds), single-parent families, multigenerational families, co-operative groups and so on. We have, as yet, far too few inventive models of how to build for such people.

The villas shown in this issue are made, in most part, for well-off people. But as is always the case in architecture, the rich patron (public or private) tends to set the pace of architectural imagination. The innovations of their architects have lessons for other kinds of home: in clusters, courtyards, terraces as well as on individual plots. Imagination is used in multifarious ways: about space, materials, our understanding and appreciation of nature, our relationships to each other. About poems, and how to help people dream and make places of their own.

(1.) Muthesius, Hermann, The English House, trans Janet Seligman and ed by Dennis Sharp. BSP Professional Books, London etc, 1987, pp 8-9. First published as Das Englische Haus (1904-05).

(2.) Yorke, F.R.S. The Architectural Press, London, 1962, pl. The eighth edition of a book first published in 1934; this one includes the Fransworth House and the Maison Jaoul.

(3.) Koolhaas, Rem and Bruce Man S,M,L,XL, 1905, 101 Publishers, Rotterdam, p776.

(4.) Ibid, p 780.

(5.) Political correctness had not been invented in the 1920s.

(6.) Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans Frederick Etchells, Architectural Press, London, 1927, p245.

(7.) Ravetz, Alison, Looking Forward and Looking Back, in Richer Futures, Fashioning a New Politics, ed Ken Worpole, Earthscan, London, 1990, p67.

(8.) Ibid, p68.