Word: rybczynski
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...Witold Rybczynski, an engaging professor of architecture at McGill University in Montreal, got immersed in such questions because he found that when he designed homes in the approved modern style, they often made his , clients feel uncomfortable. When he designed his own house in the same way, he felt like one of his clients: "I found myself turning again and again to memories of older houses, and older rooms, and trying to understand what had made them feel so right, so comfortable...
...console, as in Jesus comforting the afflicted. The medieval citizen who used the word in that sense could scarcely use it about his house, which generally consisted of one large room, little heat or light, a minimum of furniture and no running water. "In the Middle Ages," observes Rybczynski, "people didn't so much live in their houses as camp in them...
...century. In 1870 fully 60% of employed American women worked as household servants; 50 years later most of the servants had vanished, to be replaced by electric vacuums and washing machines. "The feminine idea of the home . . . shifted the focus from the drawing room to the kitchen," Rybczynski writes, "which was why, when electricity entered the home, it was by the kitchen door...
...Rybczynski keeps differentiating between what a house looks like and how it functions, and charges that architects all too often concentrate on the former. A case in point was Le Corbusier's celebrated "New Spirit" pavilion at the Paris exposition of 1925: bare white walls, stairs made out of steel pipes, only a few restaurant-style chairs. "The house is a machine for living in," said Le Corbusier. This concept became very fashionable, but Rybczynski finds it hopelessly contradictory: "Marble kitchen counters and bamboo window shades . . . a Matisse on the wall and a sleeping mat on the floor...
Only after writing a whole history of the idea of comfort does Rybczynski attempt to define it. The simplest definition would be just "feeling good," but that is too simple. The scientific definition would be a "condition in which discomfort has been avoided," but that is too negative. Since Rybczynski is not a scientist but an architect, and a subtly witty analyst of how people live, he prefers to end with a metaphor, "the Onion Theory of Comfort." In this, the slowly evolving attributes of comfort -- privacy, intimacy, domesticity, pleasure, ease, leisure, efficiency, convenience -- form a series of layers, partly...