Mercedes and I love to watch shows about houses. In one of these shows, Dermot Bannon’s Incredible Homes, I heard something that stuck with me: all houses are based on either a tent or a cave.
Here are a few associations I make with the two concepts:
And here is another take.
Ultimately, most houses have elements of both. That is, a house (and architecture in general) is a balance between providing protection and providing a sense of space and opportunity. How we balance these things in our architecture says a lot about how we view the world.
So I want to take a look at a few examples and ask the questions:
- What is the house protecting us from?
- What is the house opening us up to?
An example Cave (Hakka Tulou)
The first example I want to discuss comes from the new live action Mulan. Mulan’s village was built according to the Tolou design characteristic of the Hakka people of China. The building looks something like the picture above, or the design below:
The key thing to note about the Tolou design is that it has two main levels of organization: a number apartments for individual families arranged into a unified house. The apartments arranged so that looking “outward” for each family involves looking “inward” to the community.
The overall effect is very cavelike, because there is not a lot of emphasis on opening up to the world. The design communicates permanence and security because it is protecting the families from everything outside the community walls. To the extent that the houses open up they look inward, which naturally supports a strong communal identity among the resident families.
An Example Tent (Urban Penthouse)
Now compare the roundhouse to the penthouse. On one level the typical urban apartment is nothing like the Tolou design because modern apartments don’t usually look inward. So where do they look? Into the city. Here is an example of an urban “tent”.
I consider apartments to be tent-like because while the buildings themselves might be permanent, our presence in them is usually designed to be temporary.
Another thing about living in the city is that while you tend to have a smaller personal living space, yet you share a lot of facilities with other people. So, your personal dwelling may look like this:
But you share this with the rest of the city:
Apartments tend to look outward from the building because the building is not the relevant community. The whole city is. So what does an apartment protect you from? The city. What does it open you up to? The city.
Suburban Single Family Home
Now let’s take a look at a typical suburban house.
Notice that in this example there really is no looking toward a community at all (either inward like the roundhouse or outward like an urban aparment). Suburban homes are like individual, self-contained units — tiny communities unto themselves.
Sometimes suburban homes are organized into meaningful neighborhoods. For example, my neighborhood consists of a bunch of homes arranged around a shared lake. But the reality is that suburban living is usually not centered around any specific community.
Instead, modern lives are largely deconstructed. Our homes represent a certain facet of of our lives (the home life, centered on the nuclear family). But then we engage in bunch of subcommunities. For example, we have:
Churches
Schools
Offices
Markets
In some cases, the subcommunities are associated with an identifiable group (e.g., a congregation or a company) but in other cases the community that uses the spaces is pretty amorphous (like the shoppers in a mall). Of course, markets have long been organized to accommodate transactions with strangers, so that is nothing new.
In any case, the fact that suburban houses look self-contained is a consequence of two things. A few elements may have been moved into the houses and become individualized (say, like a personal theatre, a big kitchen or a hot tub), but many things are moved out of the neighborhood entirely. Our houses aren’t self-sufficient, they just aren’t dependent on their immediate neighbors.
So what do suburban houses protect us from? Largely, they protect us from being noticed by our neighbors (i.e., privacy). And what do they open up to? Well, many houses connect to the world primarily through their garages.
That is, they connect us to roads, which string together the far flung communities that make up our deconstructed lives.
Common Private Space
You may have guessed that I am not exactly in love with suburban architecture. In fact, I am kind of in love with the Hakka roundhouses I started with. In many cases, the Tolou design accommodates a perfect bite-sized community right around the Dunbar limit.
However, I also realize that modern architecture has evolved because modern life has evolved. But the two are self-reinforcing. If we want to build different communities, we need different architecture. But in order for different architecture to make sense, we need different communities.
I want to revisit the difference between the Tolou dwellings and the urban apartments. Despite the fact that city dwellers share a lot of common spaces, because the scope of the community so big, the common spaces are also public spaces. By contrast, the common space of the Tolou is also a private space. It is common because it is shared beyond the nuclear family, but private because it is still limited to a select group.
To me, the combination of “common” and “private” is where we find security. One of the reasons that modern life is stressful is that we don’t have enough of these kinds of spaces. and of course, this is mainly because we don’t have enough of these kinds of relationships.
Growing up as a Mormon, I am pretty familiar with another example of a common private space: the multi-purpose church building. Almost every Mormon church has a basketball court. Thus, I grew up in spaces like this:
Interestingly, despite the fact that Mormons have pretty unique communities, I am not really aware of any architectural differences between Mormon homes and any other homes (aside from perhaps having a larger number of bedrooms).
The fact is that the world is no longer built for traditional kinship-based communities (like the Hakka Chinese), and our architecture reflects that. Neighbors don’t typically share a lot of common space because their lives don’t overlap very much. We don’t work with our neighbors, we don’t raise kids together, we don’t relax together.
Thus, instead of opening us to our neighbors and protecting us from the world, our houses do the opposite. Is it too late to go back?
