“(The) history of physical amenities can be divided into two major phases: all the years leading up to 1890 and the three following decades. (All) the “modern” devices that contribute to our domestic comfort— central heating, indoor plumbing, running hot and cold water, electric light and power and elevators—were unavailable before 1890, and were all known by 1920. We live, like it or not, on the far side of a technological divide.” —Witold Rybczynski, 1986.


We’ve spent the last 50 years, more importantly the recent 20, doubling down on energy efficiency. We’ll spend the next 50 on energy transformation to ensure the advancement of home and energy-driven comfort is ubiquitous, accessible, and considering equity and energy justice, that it doesn’t kill us all and the planet in the process. That has to be our legacy of affordable comfort. ( )

May be of interest to househunters trying to envision what their happy home to be might want to be. It’s basically a selective history of the concepts of home and comfort, related to changing forms of the family, over the last four or five hundred years. It’s full of interesting factoids, probably ultimately of less significance than Rybczynski had hoped, but he’s a good writer and charming (a hair too warm and fuzzy for me). It’s a light, easy and pleasant read. It didn’t leave me with anything of substance that stuck in my memory, but I definitely enjoyed reading it. It’s the type of book you curl up with next to a fire with a skim mocha nutmeg and cinnamon whatever when you need to give your brain a break but can’t quite stoop to watching American Idol. Okay, sorry – it’s a much better book than that. And it’s fun – and we all probably need to have a little fun now and then (in between reading all these serious books and growing our big, fat brains). ( )

This book examines how the ideas of "home" and "comfort" and "domesticity" came into being and changed over the years and the relation of these ideas to technology in the home. For the most part, the book covers the period from the middle ages to the present. It is the author's claim that during this period, the home as an idea (rather than a shelter) came into being.

During the middle ages, homes contained many people who were only tenuously connected. A person's livelihood was based out of the same building that was used for sleeping and eating, so the buildings housed servants, employees, and apprentices in addition to the family. The family itself was abbreviated because children were sent off as apprentices when they became old enough. The large household (sometimes up to 25 people), the lack of privacy due to being a place of business, and the less coherent family led to the medieval idea of home being quite different from the modern idea of home.

Over time, the ideas of home, comfort, domesticity, privacy, and intimacy started to become more common. These ideas had several sources. Eventually, where people work became more separated from where people lived; it became a distinctly different part of the same building or another building completely. Aristocrats started valuing furniture for its ability to provide comfort as well as the status or appearance it provided; these ideas eventually became more wide spread. Children stopped leaving the family to become apprentices. As industrial jobs became more common, servants were harder to find; this led to the development of technology that could allow a family to maintain a home without servants, and increased privacy. It was interesting to see how these ideas have changed over time. Like so many (more or less) historical works that focus on home life, it shows how our modern idea of the "traditional" family is actually a idea that has changed over time.

At times, Rybczynski focuses on the design home when other social factors should also be considered. He seems to think that nostalgia for past decorative and architectural styles expresses a longing for a sense of homeyness no longer present (I am with him so far) and that this lack of homeyness can be blamed on the fact that modern design (modern in the Le Corbusier sense) is not comfortable and intimate. He does not consider that the modern lack of homeyness may have less to do with any architectural style and more to do with how society has changed. Today, families tend to be more spread out geographically, people are part of many disjoint communities and have to balance them, houses are built in a cookie cutter manner that focuses on maximizing profits rather than comfort. I think lack of homeyness has less to do with the fact that there is a line of sight from the living room through the dining room to the kitchen and more to do with the fact that people plop in front of the TV when they get home from a work place where they are expected to be friends with everyone but not too close to anyone.

Overall, I really really liked this book until I got to the last two chapters. The second to last chapter was the author ranting against modern architecture in a book where it is not relevant proportional to the space devoted to it. The last chapter was a rant against "science" and definitions. Because science (behavioral psychology) has only been able to experimentally determine what comfort is not, science is of no use in defining what comfort is; we cannot hope to have any sort of general definition at all. The best we can do is define comfort as being like an onion [no please, not the onion analogy]; comfort is a complex and many layered thing, but you cannot examine it by cutting it up because then it loses its oniony nature. Instead, comfort can only be defined with vague descriptions of particular comfortable situations (comfort is a good book, a pot of tea in just the right place, and lots of comfy pillows). The author claims that this is the best we can do to define comfort, but then goes on to say that these descriptions define comfort because they address convenience, efficiency, domesticity, physical ease, privacy, and intimacy. Which is it, can we generalize or not? (Okay, that rant felt good. =) ( )

Dr. Rybczynski, has written an interesting exploration of the interaction between technology and the concept of "Comfort" in the American and European family dwelling. I have found him an interesting and insightful observer.
The prose is good magazine quality, and the illustrations, sadly few, are well chosen for his points. this is a couple of hours reading about a topic whose importance may have slipped your mind, up to when he engages you. ( )

Most interesting: 1. family (kids of paupers in service of strangers); 2. evolution of the term 'home' from 'public', uncomfortable, multipurpose to 'private', cosy, homey. 3. servants .. we want privacy more than free time