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Back to the Future of the House
Can the low-tech dwellings of the past offer design lessons for homes to come? A palace curator and book author says yes
Author and Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity looking after The Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace and Kensington Palace State Apartments.
Her recent book is "If Walls Could Talk, an Intimate History of the Home" (http://amzn.to/QfP5dn).
Author and Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity... More »
I believe that domestic life in the past was smelly, cold, dirty and uncomfortable — but that we have much to learn from studying it.
I normally spend my days in historic buildings, indeed in Britain’s grand historic royal palaces, where I work as a curator. In recent years, though (researching If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home), I’ve visited a huge number of normal people’s homes, from all levels in society, dating from the Normans to the present day.
I’ve concluded from my experience that the houses of the past have a huge amount to teach us about the future. When the oil runs out, I think our houses will become much more like those of our low technology, preindustrial ancestors.
I normally spend my days in historic buildings, indeed in Britain’s grand historic royal palaces, where I work as a curator. In recent years, though (researching If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home), I’ve visited a huge number of normal people’s homes, from all levels in society, dating from the Normans to the present day.
I’ve concluded from my experience that the houses of the past have a huge amount to teach us about the future. When the oil runs out, I think our houses will become much more like those of our low technology, preindustrial ancestors.
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by Lucy Worsley
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| The first point to consider is that the age of specialized rooms is long since over. In Britain today, the legislation governing the design of new houses contains echoes of the distant past. It insists that, once again, rooms should be able to multitask. The living room must have space for a bed in case its owner becomes incapacitated and can’t climb upstairs — and medieval people lived, ate and slept in just one room. (So do I, in my modern open-plan flat.) |
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by Lucy Worsley
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| Photo: "Chimneys" lift excess heat and stale air out of a development at BedZed, Wallington, Surrey. The sun is also becoming more important in house design. Once upon a time, people selected sites with good "air"; now well-thought-out houses are situated to minimize solar gain in summer and to maximize it in winter. Most houses will need to face south, which will prove challenging to conventional street arrangements. Next, various architectural features from the past will start to reappear in house design. The chimney appeared in the 13th century before beginning to disappear in the 20th. But it’s coming back, as wood-burning stoves make a welcome return. The chimney also serves another purpose, and you’ll find chimneys even in modern buildings without fireplaces. It allows natural ventilation, lifting stale air out of the house. Mechanical air conditioning uses valuable energy and will soon become simply unaffordable. |
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| Windows will grow smaller once again, and houses will contain much less glass, not only because of the high energy cost of the glass itself, but because it’s such a thermally inefficient material. I myself live in a tall glass tower, built in 1998, and agree with Francis Bacon, who condemned the great glass-filled palaces of the Jacobean age. In a house "full of Glass," he wrote, "one cannot tell where to become to be out of the Sun or Cold." |
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| Upon the medieval model, walls are getting thicker. Medieval buildings had thick walls because they were easier to build, but they also have the useful purpose of providing insulation. |
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We’ll also experience the return of the shutter: It’s the best way to keep heat out of a house.
Along with a hotter climate, we’ll also experience water shortages. The daily water consumption per person in Britain today runs an average of 160 liters. The government expects us to get down to 80 liters — the contents of just one deep bath — by the end of the decade. The simple earth or midden toilet has already been revived in the form of the ecologically sound composting loo.
Along with a hotter climate, we’ll also experience water shortages. The daily water consumption per person in Britain today runs an average of 160 liters. The government expects us to get down to 80 liters — the contents of just one deep bath — by the end of the decade. The simple earth or midden toilet has already been revived in the form of the ecologically sound composting loo.
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| Water will become a much more valuable resource, just as it was when you had to carry every drop into your house by hand. We’ll need to grow as water thrifty as the Victorians were, with their average use of 20 liters a day. The Victorian cook was also a terrific recycler and wasted no scrap of food. See how this modern home captures the rain |
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| More significantly, though, than the return of shutters, chimneys and middens, we’ll see a change in our attitude toward buildings. There’s already been a revival of the natural building materials used in the past, breathable substances with low environmental footprints, like wood, wool insulation and lime mortar. In the last 10 years, timber-framed houses have once again started to sprout up across Britain. |
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by FABRE/deMARIEN
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| We’ll likewise become more medieval in reusing, adapting and making additions to our houses. On the space-short island of Great Britain, it’s been calculated that we need to build 200,000 new homes each year to cope with the population increase. According to the Empty Homes Agency, there are currently 700,000 homes standing unused. It’s really obvious that we need to bring them up to date and get them occupied. Medieval and Tudor people recycled buildings and didn’t disdainfully treat them as a semidisposable resource like we do. Tour this converted garage in Bordeaux, France |
| Perhaps most controversially, we also need to think again about what makes a community. Today’s builders and town planners believe that people don’t just live in houses, they inhabit "places." Medieval towns were perfect examples of what planners seek: densely populated, walkable communities in which people ate local, seasonal food, and rich and poor lived in close proximity. A successful "place" mixes the different groups in society. In this sense, a great Elizabethan mansion like Hardwick Hall was successful social housing: Bess of Hardwick, its chatelaine, slept within meters of the dozens of people in her employment. It was a life of huge inequality, but Bess had personal responsibility for the poor and the sick, and they all belonged to a common endeavor. This sounds conservative, but it’s radically so. Today we live lives of vastly varying levels of luxury, unaware of those with alternative experiences. We’ve spent too long inside our own snug homes, looking smugly out the window at the world. The dwindling of the natural resources that have fueled our way of life since the 18th century will force us to change. But I don’t think that change need frighten us. Throughout history, people have thought their own age wildly novel, deeply violent and sinking into the utmost depravity. However, it’s comforting to think that the pleasures of domesticity are perennial. As Samuel Johnson put it, "To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition." |
by Lucy Worsley
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If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home is a book and a four-part BBC TV series.
You can also see Worsley at these talks in 2013.
Photo of Lucy Worsley by Stuart Clarke
More: When Color Could Kill: Stories From the History of Paint
You can also see Worsley at these talks in 2013.
Photo of Lucy Worsley by Stuart Clarke
More: When Color Could Kill: Stories From the History of Paint
Ideabook updated on Feb. 2, 2013.
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Christy Dillard Kratzer, Dillard Pierce Design Associates, LLC
But I don’t expect us all to live in cabins with small windows, shutters closed, gathering around a wood burning stove. Mankind has always adapted to changing conditions and when it comes to housing, we do already have an answer to the challenges that lie ahead: green building. Passive houses can produce even more energy than they consume. The faster energy prices rise, the faster the extra costs for new technologies will pay off.
Of couse it doesn’t hurt to look back on our ancestors’ frugal way of living. We may need to resort to some of their wisdom because continuing our wasteful western lifestyle is going to become unaffordable for most of us. Once we have to choose between food on the table and gas in the tank or electricity, we'll know that we have to change something. Well, we know it already, but we still stick our heads in the sand, don't we?
I'll come back again and re-read this as it's given me a few ideas for some article for Hometipster.com.
Thanks Lucy
Graham
Thank you for a great article/book/show.
Just a note: while I do not disagree with the statement "Most houses will need to face south, which will prove challenging to conventional street arrangements,"
the phrase "face south" can be misleading. It is not the front door that benefits from facing south, but the windows or the "open" side of the house. Many prefer the south/north axis to also be the long axis; but, with some creativity this is not necessary.
Traditional urban & town planning might be challenged slightly by these orientation preferences, but not much.
allison drinkwater johnson
I live in a 100 year old house with wood framing, thick walls, chimneys etc. in Michigan. I'm glad I'm in a cold climate surrounded by the largest bodies of fresh water in the world considering global warming and water shortage!!!
However I enjoyed the article and it's always educational to get development perspective from other cultures.
Mass also means load. Lightweight synthetic insulation means far less load and far more options for house form and function. And there are greener alternatives to styrofoam such as poured Perlite. There is no serious reason here to shift from multi-room spaces to single room ones even in green building. And fenestration is not an either/or matter here, it is as much a matter of where you put the windows as how many you have. In our latitudes there is far more winter solar energy to tap than in yours. Most of us here also don't have that nice ocean near us to damp down summer heat, and once an under windowed building, in, say, St. Louis, gets hot, it stays hot, shooting up the energy cost to cool it. Properly sited fenestration for summer ventilation and nighttime heat transfer will still predominate.
In America we also have places where wood heat is cost effective and many people have been using it--Albuquerque, NM comes to mind, but the pollutant biproducts are always a problem. London chimneys left London covered in soot and coal dust.
As to cozier communities, we have a saying here in America, "Good fences make good neighbors." And here, at least, it is largely true. This social phenomenon will severely limit how cozy we can ever be on this side of the Atlantic.