A House is Not a Home: Witold Rybczynski Explores the History of Domestic Comfort

Interview by Barbara Spronk

As you read this, you are likely sitting down. Pause for a moment and consider where you are sitting. Think first about the room in which you are sitting. Is it single purpose or multi-purpose? Is the furniture arrangement relatively fixed, or are the pieces moved around to suit the occasion? Are you alone in this room? If you are not alone at the moment, is this a room in which you could be alone for some time and have some privacy? Does whatever you are seated on, or in, permit you to shift about and adopt a variety of positions? Does it accommodate a number of activities, not only relaxed sitting and reading, but also conversation, having a drink, or dozing? Or is it designed more as an aesthetic object than as a practical one, more for show than for comfort?

Comfort emerged as an issue for author and professor Witold Rybczynski, of McGill University’s School of Architecture, in his work of designing and building houses. As he explains in the foreword to Home: A Short History of an Idea, he found the experience “sometimes disturbing”:

... I found that the architectural ideals that I had been taught in school-frequently disregarded—if they did not altogether contradict—my clients’ conventional notions of comfort... 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.”

Fortunately for us, Professor Rybczynski has pursued this issue with scholarly care and an engaging style. Beginning with the Middle Ages, Rybczynski takes us inside the dwellings of the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie of Western Europe and eventually of twentieth-century North America. Rybczynski’s tour is not the “note-the-many-Rembrandts-that line-this-corridor” variety to which tour guides subject us. Rather, with Rybczynski as our guide we learn something of what these dwellings meant to those who lived in them, the kinds of objects, surroundings, and relationships those house owners valued, and why. When Rybczynski points us towards portraits, it is not because of the gilded light they shed on their owners, but rather because of what they tell us about the interior and domestic lives of the societies which shaped their creators. His intent throughout is to search out and understand the social forms that gave rise to the notion that comfort and domestic well-being are worthy goals. His hope, as he makes clear in the interview which follows, is that such an understanding can help homeowners recapture or refashion a sense of comfort that has been lost, by generating comforts appropriate to present lives and emerging social forms.

Aurora: You tell your readers in the introduction to Home: A Short History of an Idea that your book is an attempt to discover, first of all for yourself, the meaning of comfort. Could we begin with a definition of what you mean by comfort?

Rybczynski: I never had a definition until I finished the book, and I only included it then because I felt that readers deserved at least that much. I still don’t think I could give a simple definition. The best I came up with was an analogy between comfort and an onion. Like an onion, the notion of comfort has many layers, which were added historically. The image of the onion also conveys the elusive nature of comfort: if you take it apart and look at the layers one by one, you lose the overall shape, and yet the layers are still visible one beneath the other. These layers consist of ideas such as privacy or intimacy, convenience, physical ease. Each generation has added something to the definition, has added a layer without necessarily contradicting what came before.

Aurora: Margaret Visser, another author interviewed for this issue, also begins her work (Much Depends on Dinner) with reference to the onion. In many ways you two seem to be doing the same kind of work. Visser argues that ordinary things order our lives, and that it is important not to take them for granted. You likewise probe beneath the surface of ordinary things we tend to take for granted, such as the chair. Could you reconstruct the history of the notion of comfort using the chair as your central focus?

Rybczynski: Up to a point. The chair of the Middle Ages, for example, was a symbolic piece of furniture, not particularly comfortable but intended rather to symbolize the status or position of the person sitting in it. That is a kind of neat analogy to the attitude toward comfort in the Middle Ages or, rather, the reason for the lack of comfort, in that symbols of status overrode considerations of physical comfort. By contrast, in the eighteenth century chairs became extremely comfortable, a development that mirrored the greater concern for comfort in the home. This probably culminated in the Victorian home, with its extremely soft, upholstered chairs and heavy armchairs, which were in some ways the height of physical ease.

Once you get to the modern period, particularly the 1920s, the chair is a very important element in designers’ schemes. I am thinking of people like Marcel Breuer, or Mies van der Rohe, or the Modern designers. The chairs they designed indicate their attitude towards the home, namely, their emphasis on design almost to the neglect of physical ease. They saw the chair and the house as aesthetic objects. There is an analogy there, but I am not quite sure that you could make the case that the chair symbolizes comfort in the home. It does in certain periods, but not in all. The Greeks, for instance, had extremely comfortable chairs—or at least were reputed to have them; it is impossible to know since it is impossible to sit in them in museums—but I’m not so sure that their homes mirrored a notion that we would identify as comfort.

Aurora: In your discussion of domestic comfort, the notion of privacy as it developed in Western history plays a central role. You point out, for example, that in the Middle Ages, the house served as a setting for social theatre. Rooms in these houses were crowded with people day in and day out with no provision at all for privacy. What would it have been like to have been part of a household in the Middle Ages?

Rybczynski: When I started reading about the Middle Ages, it became quite clear that before you could concern yourself with comfort in the way that we are, you had to have a sense of intimacy and privacy in the home, both of which were quite absent in the medieval home. I made the analogy between the medieval home and a boarding school, in the sense that although the society was feudal, it was also democratic, because people shared the same space and were close to one another. Servants slept beside their masters in the same room. People slept many to a bed.

The house itself was undifferentiated in the sense that in one room you had a whole variety of activities including eating, cooking, doing business, and entertaining. This meant that furniture was very utilitarian. Trestles with boards laid on them served as tables, and benches as seats. There was no such thing as a single room arrangement as we think of it. The furniture stood around the edges of the room, and the various pieces were brought out according to the activity that was going on.

I’ve seen homes like this in contemporary cultures. The same thing happens: there is no furniture arrangement; the furniture is simply stored at the edge of the room and then carried into the centre to be used and put back again when it has served its purpose. Homes of native people in Canada are similar in some respects to those of the Middle Ages. Although they live in replicas of Canadian bungalows, native people use them differently than do Canadians in the south. Native people often have a great many people in one house. Medieval homes had enormous numbers of people in them: twenty, thirty, or forty people was not unusual. The family was extended, there were no hotels, and much work was done at home so relatives, servants, employees, travellers, all stayed at your home.

Aurora: Throughout your book there is an awareness of social class. You mention in several sections the fact that your book unavoidably centres on the bourgeoise. Is this an awareness that you brought to your research on the home and on comfort, or is it an awareness that grew as you did your research?

Rybczynski: I think it grew. There is no question in my mind that comfort, and some would argue the whole sense of domesticity, is a bourgeois invention. You can’t really separate the two. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie had the resources, and on the other hand the bourgeois culture produced the whole idea of the home as we now know it. To deal with the homes of the poor, the working class, would mean a second book. Certainly in Europe until well after the Second World War, working people lived in dismal circumstances. That was very different in America; it needs to be underlined that the development of the home in the United States and Canada was different, because the home was accessible to many more people. In terms of access to physical comforts, Canadians and Americans had much greater access than their European counterparts, probably until 1950 or so.

Aurora: You pay considerable attention as well to the role of women, who, you point out, invented domesticity. Again, is this an awareness that you brought to your work, or is it an awareness that grew as you did your research?

Rybczynski: I think that came out of the books I read where the connection between women and the creation of domesticity was reinforced again and again. By the nineteenth century, there were a whole group of women who were making overt attempts to promote women’s status by promoting convenience in the home and homemaking as a science.

Aurora: We began our conversation with a consideration of your purpose in writing the book, namely, to discover first of all for yourself the meaning of comfort. Do you feel that you have answered this question satisfactorily for yourself?

Rybczynski: Partly. Out of discussions about the book the question has arisen of whether you can have comfort without the forms. That is, if comfort is a bourgeois invention, can you have comfort without bourgeois social forms? We need to reconsider the traditions that gave rise to comfort if we are to have it again or if we are to continue to have it. I’m still not sure whether traditions are enough or whether we don’t need to re-examine the forms of comfort themselves. Comfort is not an abstraction, after all. It is something very tangible, and achieving it may require more than simply resurrecting traditions. It may require being much more aware of the forms that are part of the tradition.

Aurora: Could you give us an example?

Rybczynski: Well, for example, eighteenth-century furniture is extremely comfortable. You can try to analyse what makes those chairs comfortable and then reinterpret them into some modern idiom, or you can simply re-create the designs of the eighteenth century. The latter seems, in some ways, a much more direct and less complex way to achieve comfort. Since somebody has already gone to the trouble of developing, over a long period, these comfortable pieces of furniture, we should simply use them as they are. This is an example of the difference between reinterpreting the forms of the past and simply adopting them.

Inevitably some kinds of furnishings will have be adapted in some way. I am not suggesting putting light bulbs in gas lamps, for instance. But there is no need to reinvent everything. Many eighteenth-century chairs are perfectly useable today and don’t need to be changed at all. The beginning of the twentieth century was very strong on reinventing everything, starting from scratch, and that is something I would question.

Aurora: What kind of traditions that gave rise to comfort may or may not need to be reinterpreted in the twentieth century?

Rybczynski: The domesticity of the nineteenth century—the idea of the home with women as the cultural centre—has changed radically over the last 50 years. That type of domesticity which was prevalent in North America from say 1850 to 1900 will likely never return. So to talk about resurrecting that kind of domesticity in a direct way is obviously theoretical. On the other hand, the home as a centre of culture, with the roles of husband and wife changed, might be stronger in the future. So the domestic atmosphere that we admire from that time may be available to us, although it will come in a very different form.

Aurora: I can’t conclude this interview without asking you if you have managed to translate your notions of comfort, your ideal of comfort, into your own home.

Rybczynski: I think so. Writing the book has made me aware, in that kind of overt way which is the purpose of writing, of issues of which I was either unaware previously, or only very dimly or subconsciously aware. Putting them down in black and white—which is what I meant by trying to understand for myself— clarified a whole range of things. Of course, Home... is not a how-to-do-it book. It offers no formula that you can plug into your own home or that you can use in arranging or designing your home. But, yes, I think that writing the book has very much influenced the way we live and organize our own home.

Aurora: You mention several times how difficult very large homes—let’s say those over 3,000 square feet—are to take care of. Have you worked that out for yourself in terms of the ideal size for your own situation?

Rybczynski: My home is very small, about 1500 square feet. That is something which has fascinated me for a long time, and that is why I was so interested in and sympathetic to people like Catherine Beecher, who was trying to design extremely small homes, almost like boats, where everything has two functions and overlaps. Size is wonderful if you can afford it and are willing to live that way. The shame is if people are getting homes that are really bigger than they actually want or need, but especially than they want.

One of the more direct messages of the book is that you don’t need space to achieve comfort. You can have comfort in a much more restricted space. The notion of space, of houses needing to be big, is oddly enough a modern notion in the sense that modern architecture is extremely bare and sparse in furnishings. One of the few things you can really enjoy in a modern home is the feeling of space. This makes it difficult to design a very small modern house, because modern preferences are not for a cozy style of architecture.

Aurora: I suspect, though, that the preference for large houses comes more from notions of what gives people more status or prestige than it does from what gives more comfort.

Rybczynski: Yes, although there is a shift toward achieving prestige with things other than size—with a BMW, for instance, rather than with a huge Lincoln. I think that part of the appeal of my book is due to the fact that people are becoming more sophisticated, in the sense that they are beginning to appreciate values in homes which have less to do with the size of the home than with the quality of what is in it.

Books by Witold Rybczynski

Home: A Short History of an Idea. Viking, 1986.

Taming the Tiger: The Struggle to Control Technology. Viking, 1973.

Paper Heroes: A Review of Appropriate Technology. Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980.

Dr. Spronk, a professor of anthropology at Athabasca University, is writing a book on housing co-operatives and condominiums as forms of home ownership that shape in many ways the lives of those who own them. She has conducted several interviews for Aurora, including one with author Margaret Visser.

An Aurora Update

Witold Rybczynski regularly contributes articles on architecture for popular publications such as the New Yorker, New York Times and New York Review. One of his most recent publications, One Good Turn, Harper Collins Canada, 2000 was included in the McLean's bestseller list for nonfiction, and was nominated for the 2000 Governor General's Literary Award.

Currently he is Martin & Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism; Professor of Real Estate at the University of Pennsylvannia.

Books by Witold Rybczynski

An Aurora Update

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