You Are Here (19 page)

Before going on to consider some other aspects of the influence of spatial cognition on our behavior and preference for certain types of houses, it would be wise for us to take a step backward to make sure that we understand what houses are for. If we use the same approach as in earlier chapters, we might begin by comparing our own homes with those of other animals. Surprisingly, our closest living relatives, the other primates, make little effort to build homes. Those animals that do build homes do so for the simplest and most obvious of reasons, it seems—to provide protection from the elements and from predators, and perhaps to provide a physical base from which to nurture young.

How different are human homes? Why do we live in houses at all? For a resident of a temperate climate like that found in much of North America and northern Europe, the answers seem obvious. The main functions of a house are to provide an insulating shell to protect us from the environment and to provide us with a safe repository for our possessions.

Amos Rapoport, a pioneering anthropologist who helped to define the field of environmental psychology, argued persuasively that practical considerations must be only a part of the answer.
⁷
If one looks at the range of house types produced by various cultures, there is only weak evidence of a correlation with either climate or the availability of different types of building materials. Primitive peoples in tropical climates didn’t necessarily build simple dwellings that promoted coolness. On the contrary, some very elaborate and climatically stifling buildings were typical of people who lived in hot climates. One good example is the elaborate system of dwellings used in parts of the South Pacific, in which separate and sometimes closed-in buildings were constructed for men, women, and
for eating. In contrast, some cold-weather dwellers lived in simple huts. Rapoport argued that the shape of the house one lived in spoke at least as strongly about one’s beliefs, values, and culture as it did about the bare necessities of survival. Round houses, for instance, are very economical. They can be easy to build and adaptable to a wide range of building materials. In spite of this, round houses are rare. One reason is that most cultures have placed a high value on the orientation of the rooms in a house with respect to the larger site and to the other buildings in the neighborhood.

This tendency to carefully orient built spaces reaches its apotheosis with the Asian practice of feng shui.
⁸
There are many schools of feng shui. In some quarters, feng shui might be considered a rather mystical and New Age discipline, somewhat on a par with astrology and other forms of divination. Practitioners of what is sometimes called “McFengshui” in North America, by claiming to be able to promote wealth, harmony, and successful marriage by pointing one’s bed and toilet in the right directions, have no doubt contributed to such opinions. Nevertheless, serious schools of feng shui, with theoretical roots that are thousands of years old, can include a comprehensive effort to align one’s home with prevailing geological forces such as magnetic fields, and principles that guide the construction of well-organized and connected interior spaces with respect to the world outside the walls of the house. Adhering to feng shui principles or other cultural practices that connect our homes to the world outside, both natural and supernatural, can be difficult in houses that lack the contours provided by square or rectangular rooms.

Another good example of the influence of culture on the built environment comes from the prevalence of courtyard homes in certain parts of the world, particularly in Islamic countries. One of the benefits of a courtyard construction is that it affords some privacy
for residents of the space, but, within the courtyard, it also allows the construction of separate buildings for men, women, and the generations within a family. In this way, courtyards enhance the privacy of the larger family unit and give them shared social spaces away from the public eye, but the separate buildings also allow physical demarcations of family hierarchies within a single courtyard.

Rapoport’s life work consisted of an extended effort to demonstrate that for those of us who build our own homes, the principles that determine how we put together our lived spaces transcend the simple need for shelter and protection from enemies. Our homes are outward manifestations of our beliefs, desires, and perhaps our deep fears as manifested in our own culture.

What about modern homes in North America, Europe, or other parts of the world? Unlike in the cultures or times of which Rapoport speaks, few of us have built our own houses. Rather, we select from those that are offered to us by developers or real estate agents, and we may have only minimal input into the shape of the spaces we occupy. The irony that Rapoport identifies is that at a time when there is greater variety in available building materials than at any other time in human history, and when many of us have fewer economic constraints than those whose houses he describes, the configurations of human dwellings appear to show less variability than at any other time in our past. One reason for this is certainly the great shift from a time when most of us built for ourselves to a time when the majority of dwellings are designed and built by specialists who may be more concerned about their bottom line than about our comfort and enjoyment of our homes. Another reason identified by Rapoport is the diminution in importance of higher-level cultural constraints on home architecture. Few of us worry seriously about how our house is oriented with respect to the coordinates of sacred space (though we may covet a southern exposure for our garden), and we are more
concerned with the number of bathrooms than with the orientation of the toilet with respect to the bed in the master bedroom.

Aside from cultural and economic considerations, technological influences have also drawn the attention of designers away from the construction of habitable dwellings. In a recent conversation I had with Robert Jan van Pelt, an architect with a strong interest in the history of ideas, he argued that most designers and architects today focus upon either the very large—airports, museums, and city halls—or the very small—corkscrews, lemon squeezers, and chairs. The large, one-of-a-kind architectural creation like I. M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Balboa can serve as a long-standing physical monument to the ideas of the architect that is talked about, photographed endlessly, and seen by all from afar. The small household object, sometimes crafted with the same exquisite concern for detail as a large building, can be reproduced in vast numbers using modern methods of mass production. This is not only profitable but also serves as a different route by which the ideas of a designer can penetrate deeply, be seen by many, and influence much of our behavior.

The ordinary dwellings in which we live can lack the glamour of the huge hotel or office tower and the promiscuity of the kitchen utensil. For the designer, there is a bit less appeal, and so for the everyday consumer, there is less variety.

In spite of the stultifying sameness of our cookie-cutter housing developments, it is possible to identify certain patterns that do connect with modern culture and perhaps psychology as well, but one must look closely to see them. One of the most important functions of the inner design of house spaces is to regulate contact not just between members of the household but also between the residents of a space and outsiders. We already saw this at play in the use of courtyard houses to keep outsiders beyond the threshold as
well as to make allowances for regulated social mixing of hierarchies within the household. In the famous hutong neighborhoods of Beijing, to use another example, a few splendid courtyard houses remain intact. To the passerby in the street, the outer ramparts of these courtyards can display nothing more than a bland brick wall with a humble door. The inner courtyard, though, can contain appealing landscaping and complex building forms with specialized functions for different members of the extended family.

In North American architecture, interesting cultural distinctions can be revealed in the way that the transition from public to private space is managed. Though this is somewhat less true now than it was twenty years ago, it is still largely the case that suburban front yards set houses well back from the street on unfenced lawns. This sets up what amounts to a semiprivate space in front of the house. In English and Australian suburbs, on the other hand, one is more likely to see a sharper distinction between public and private spaces in which fences clearly demarcate front gardens as private spaces. Though these fences may be low enough to be merely symbolic, their meaning is still clear.

We can also see the evidence of cultural change in North American houses. The traditional house plan in North America still often includes a formal dining room, for instance, even though this room, normally occupying pride of place in a space adjacent to the kitchen, is seldom used. Few people I know who have a formal dining room use it with any regularity, unless they lack seating space in their kitchen. Many people convert such spaces to other uses, but as these rooms were designed for seated dining, they are not always optimally placed for other uses. One good example of this is my reading armchair location in my house. The chair, housed in a room originally designed as a dining room, does not see as much use as it might have in a space designed explicitly as a comfortable and well-placed reading room.

In times past, one of the most important architectural elements of a dwelling was the foyer. As Winnifred Gallagher points out in
House Thinking
, the main function of the threshold is to manage the transition from the outside world to the inner space of the house. In this light, we can see the foyer as the beginning of a kind of stage performance, the opening act of a drama in which the curtain opens to reveal the detailed inner life of the homeowner. Grand homes of the past included stunningly ornate entry rooms that clearly foreshadowed the character of the house that lay beyond. In modern homes, the foyer is usually designed as a more informal space, often not much more than a coat closet beside a door. In the worst cases (such as the house I own now) the foyer can be missing entirely.

One exception to the simple, informal foyer can be seen in certain grandiose designs in the outer suburbs, the so-called upscale executive designs. In such homes, entrance foyers can consist of multistory spaces complete with overlooking balconies and grand chandeliers. As Gallagher points out, the effect of such entryways can be psychologically negative, causing visitors to jerk their heads upward in anxiety as they walk through the front door, as if they have found themselves at the bottom of a mineshaft. The irony of such grand foyers is that they are seldom used, as the majority of owners of these houses drive directly into attached garages and enter through humble back doors into laundry or mud rooms. It often seems as though the main function of the foyer, as the part of the house that makes that important first impression, is more to stun potential buyers into submission than it is to exert any kind of positive influence on the owners of the house or its visitors.

One probable effect of such foyers is to increase the insular separation between the outside world and the inner world. Like an airlock protecting our spatial mind from the intermingling
of the great outdoors and our pristine inner spaces, the foyer takes advantage of a spatial mind predisposed to cleave the world according to what can or cannot be seen. This is an issue that we will explore in a later chapter when we look at the influence of spatial cognition on our relationship with the natural world. There can be little doubt that the modern foyer, along with many other inventions of modern architecture and design, has helped to sever our relationship with nature. If we are to find a way to survive on this planet, we will need to find ways to heal this enormous rift.

What I have said so far suggests that the size, shape, and configuration of the spaces inside our houses can have an influence on how we feel and where we go for comfort, for solitude, or for conversation. Some of the general principles underlying such behavior have been uncovered by architects and designers using largely intuitive experiential methods.

Christopher Alexander is perhaps the best known of the architects who have tried to apply a thoroughgoing understanding of the interactions between people and spaces in order to design more functional dwelling spaces. A brilliant polymath, Alexander received the first Ph.D. ever awarded in architecture by Harvard University while simultaneously working in the fields of computer science, transportation theory, and cognitive science at both Harvard and MIT. (His thesis, published as
Notes on the Synthesis of Form
, has been required reading for students of computer science for many years.)
⁹
Alexander was recruited by the University of California at Berkeley in 1963, where he has remained ever since.

In a series of books culminating in the four-volume work ambitiously entitled
The Nature of Order
, Alexander argues for
the integral connections of everything from quantum mechanics to living rooms to religious epiphany. What links all these things together, he says, is a set of principles that describe the ways in which what he calls centers, which are explicitly spatial, contribute to “wholeness.” According to Alexander, these rules govern everything from how the large-scale matter of the universe is ordered to what size and shape of living room in a house makes for peace and stillness.
¹⁰