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House
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not to be confused with Home, Shelter, or place of living. For other uses, see House (disambiguation).

A Szekely house in Szekely Land, Transylvania

15th century Hanging Houses inCuenca, Spain.

A traditional house in Novosibirsk,Siberia, Russia

A ranch-style house in Salinas, California, US

"Terem" Traditional house inEuropean Russia

A traditional Finnish house from the beginning of 20th century in Jyvskyl

A house is a home, building, or structure that functions as a habitat forhumans or other creatures.
[3][4]

[1][2]

The

term house includes many kinds of dwellings ranging from rudimentary huts of nomadic tribes to complex structures composed of many systems. routinely occupy "home". The social unit that lives in a house is known as a household. Most commonly, a household is a family unit of some kind, though households may be other social groups, organizations, or individuals.
Contents [hide]

English-speaking people generally call any building they

1 Etymology 2 Inside the house

o o o

2.1 Layout 2.2 Parts 2.3 History of the interior

2.3.1 Communal rooms 2.3.2 Interconnecting rooms 2.3.3 Corridor 2.3.4 Employment-free house 2.3.5 Technology and privacy

3 Construction

o o

3.1 Energy efficiency 3.2 Earthquake protection

4 Found materials 5 Legal issues

o o

5.1 United Kingdom 5.2 United States and Canada

6 Identifying houses 7 Animal houses 8 Houses and symbolism 9 See also 10 References 11 External links

[edit]Etymology

The English word house derives directly from the Old English Hus meaning "dwelling, shelter, home, house," which in turn derives from Proto-GermanicKhusan (reconstructed by etymological analysis) which is of unknown origin.
[5]

The house itself gave rise to the letter 'B' through an early Proto[6]

Semitic hieroglyphic symbol depicting a house. The symbol was called "bayt", "bet" or "beth" in various related languages, and became beta, the Greek letter, before it was used by the Romans.
[edit]Inside [edit]Layout

the house

Example of an early Victorian"Gingerbread House" in Connecticut, United States, built in 1855

Main article: House plan Ideally, architects of houses design rooms to meet the needs of the people who will live in the house. Such designing, known as "interior design", has become a popular subject in universities. Feng shui, originally a Chinesemethod of moving houses according to such factors as rain and micro-climates, has recently expanded its scope to address the design of interior spaces with a view to promoting harmonious effects on the people living inside the house. Feng shui can also mean the "aura" in or around a dwelling. Compare the real-estate sales concept of "indoor-outdoor flow". The square footage of a house in the United States reports the area of "living space", excluding the garage and other non-living spaces. The "square meters" figure of a house in Europe reports the area of the walls enclosing the home, and thus includes any attached garage and non-living spaces.
needed] [citation needed] [citation

How many floors, or levels, the home is will play a big role in determining the square footage of a

home.

[edit]Parts

Floor plan of a "foursquare" house

Many houses have several large rooms with specialized functions and several very small rooms for other various reasons. These may include a living/eating area, a sleeping area, and (if suitable facilities and services exist) separate or combined washing and lavatory areas. Additionally, spa room, indoor pool, indoor basketball court, and so forth. In traditional agriculture-oriented societies, domestic animals such as chickens or larger livestock (like cattle) often share part of the house with human beings. Most conventional modern houses will at least contain a bedroom, bathroom,kitchen or cooking area, and a living room. A typical "foursquare house" (as pictured) occurred commonly in the early history of the US where they were mainly built, with a staircase in the center of the house, surrounded by four rooms, and connected to other sections of the home (including in more recent eras a garage). The names of parts of a house often echo the names of parts of other buildings, but could typically include:
Atrium Attic Alcove Basement/cellar Bathroom (in various senses of the word)

Hearth often an important symbolic focus of family togetherness

Kitchen Larder Laundry room Library Living room Loft Nook Window Office or study Pantry Parlour Pew/porch

Bath/shower Toilet

Bedroom (or nursery, for infants or small children) Box-room / storage room Conservatory Dining room Family room or den


Fireplace (for warmth during winter; generally not found in warmer climates)

Recreation room / rumpus room / television room

Shrines to serve the religious functions associated with a family

Foyer Front room (in various senses of the phrase) Garage Hallway / passage / Vestibule

Stairwell Sunroom Workshop

Some houses have a pool in the backyard, or a trampoline, or a playground. [edit]History

of the interior

See also: Room (architecture) It is unknown of the complete origin of the house and its interior, but it can be traced back to the simplest form of shelters. Roman architect Vitruvius' theories have claimed the first form of architecture as a frame of timber branches finished in mud, also known as the primitive hut.
[7]

Philip Tabor later states the

contribution of 17th century Dutch houses as the foundation of houses today. "As far as the idea of the home is concerned, the home of the home is the Netherlands. This idea's crystallization might be dated to the first three-quarters of the 17th century, when the Dutch Netherlands amassed the unprecedented and unrivalled accumulation of capital, and emptied their purses into domestic space.
[edit]Communal rooms
[8]

In the Middle Ages, the Manor Houses facilitated different activities and events. Furthermore, the houses accommodated numerous people, including the likes of the family, relatives, employees, servants and their guests.
[7]

Their lifestyles were largely communal, as areas such as

[9]

the Great Hall enforced the custom of dining and meetings and the Solarintended for shared sleeping beds.
[edit]Interconnecting rooms

During the 15th and 16th centuries, the Italian Renaissance Palazzo consisted of plentiful rooms of connectivity. Unlike the qualities and uses of the Manor Houses, most rooms of the palazzo contained no purpose, yet were given severaldoors. These doors adjoined rooms in which Robin Evans describes as a "matrix of discrete but thoroughly

interconnected chambers."

[10]

The layout allowed occupants to freely

walk room to room from one door to another, thus breaking the boundaries of privacy. "Once inside it is necessary to pass from on room to the next, then to the next to traverse the building. Where passages and staircases are used, as inevitably they are, they nearly always connect just one space to another and never serve as general distributors of movement. Thus, despite the precise architectural containment offered by the addition of room upon room, the villa was, in terms of occupation, an open plan, relatively permeable to the numerous members of the household."
[10]

Although very public, the open plan however encouraged sociality and connectivity for all inhabitants.
[edit]Corridor
[7]

An early example of the segregation of rooms and consequent enhancement of privacy may be found in 1597 at the Beaufort House built in Chelsea. It was designed by English architect John Thorpe who wrote on his plans, "A Long Entry through all".
[11]

The

separation of the passageway from the room developed the function of the corridor. This new extension was revolutionary at the time, allowing the integration of one door per room, in which all universally connected to the same corridor. English architect Sir Roger Pratt states "the common way in the middle through the whole length of the house, [avoids] the offices from one molesting the other by continual passing through them."
[12]

Social

hierarchieswithin the 17th century was highly regarded, as architecture was able epitomize the servants and the upper class. More privacy is offered to the occupant as Pratt further claims, "the ordinary servants may never publicly appear in passing to and fro for their occasions there."
[12]

This social divide between rich and

poor favored the physical integration of the corridor into housing by the 19th century. Sociologist Witold Rybczynski wrote, "the subdivision of the house into day and night uses, and into formal and informal areas, had

begun."

[13]

Rooms were changed from public to private as single

entryways forced notions of entering a room with a specific purpose.

[7]

[edit]Employment-free house

Compared to the large scaled houses in England and the Renaissance, the 17th Century Dutch house was smaller, and was only inhabited by up to four to five members. their embracing "self-reliance",
[7] [7]

This was due to

in contrast to the dependence on

servants, and a design for a lifestyle centered on the family. It was important for the Dutch to separate work from domesticity, as the home became an escape and a place of comfort. This way of living and the home has been noted as highly similar to the contemporary family and their dwellings. House layouts also incorporated the idea of the corridor as well as the importance of function and privacy. By the end of the 17th Century, the house layout was soon transformed to become employment-free, enforcing these ideas for future. This came in favour for the industrial revolution, gaining large-scale factory production and workers. The house layout of the Dutch and its functions are still relevant today.
[edit]Technology and privacy
[7]

The introduction of technology and electronic systems within the house has questioned the impressions of privacy as well as the segregation of work from home. Technological advances of surveillance and communications allow insight of personal habits and private lives.
[7]

As a result, the "private becomes ever more

[7]

public, [and] the desire for a protective home life increases, fuelled by the very media that undermine it" writes Hill. Work also, has been altered due to the increase of communications. The "deluge of information",
[7]

has expressed the efforts of work, conveniently

gaining access inside the house. Although commuting is reduced, "the desire to separate working and living remains apparent." In Jonathan Hill's book Immature Architecture, he identifies this new invasion of privacy as ElectromagneticWeather.
[7]

Natural or man-made weather remains concurrent inside or outside the house, yet the electromagnetic weather is able to generate within both positions.
[7][clarification needed]

On the other hand, some

architects have designed homes in which eating, working and living are brought together.
[edit]Construction

The structure of the house (underdemolition). This house is constructed from bricks and wood and was later covered by insulating panels. The roof construction is also seen.

In the United States, modern house-construction techniques include light-frame construction (in areas with access to supplies of wood) and adobe or sometimes rammed-earth construction (in arid regions with scarce wood-resources). Some areas use brick almost exclusively, and quarried stone has long provided walling. To some extent, aluminum and steel have displaced some traditional building materials. Increasingly popular alternative construction materials include insulating concrete forms (foam forms filled with concrete), structural insulated panels (foam panels faced with oriented strand board or fiber cement), and light-gauge steel framing and heavy-gauge steel framing.
[citation needed]

The Saitta House, Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, New York,United States built in 1899 is made of and decorated inwood.[14]

More generally, people often build houses out of the nearest available material, and often tradition and/or culture govern construction-materials, so whole towns, areas, counties or even states/countries may be built out of one main type of material. For example, a large fraction of American houses use wood, while most British and many European houses utilize stone or brick. In the 1900s (decade), some house designers started using prefabrication. Sears, Roebuck & Co. first marketed their Sears Catalog Homes to the general public in 1908. Prefab techniques became popular after World War II. First small inside rooms framing, then later, whole walls were prefabricated and carried to the construction site. The original impetus was to use the labor force inside a shelter during inclement weather. More recently builders have begun to collaborate with structural engineers who use computers and finite element analysis to design prefabricated steel-framedhomes with known resistance to high wind-loads and seismic forces. These newer products provide labor savings, more consistent quality, and possibly accelerated construction processes. Lesser-used construction methods have gained (or regained) popularity in recent years. Though not in wide use, these methods

frequently appeal to homeowners who may become actively involved in the construction process. They include: Cannabrick construction Cordwood construction Geodesic domes Straw-bale construction Wattle and daub Timber framing Framing (construction)

Thermographic comparison of traditional (left) and "passivhaus" (right) buildings.

[edit]Energy

efficiency

In the developed world, energy-conservation has grown in importance in house-design. Housing produces a major proportion of carbon emissions(30% of the total in the UK, for example). Development of a number of low-energy building types and techniques continues. They include the zero-energy house, the passive solar house, theautonomous buildings, the superinsulated and houses built to the Passivhausstandard.
[edit]Earthquake
[15]

protection

One tool of earthquake engineering is base isolation which is increasingly used for earthquake protection. Base isolation is a collection of structural elements of a building that should substantiallydecouple it from the shaking ground thus protecting the building's integrity
[16]

and enhancing its seismic performance.

This technology, which is a kind of seismic vibration control, can be

applied both to a newly designed building and to seismic upgrading of existing structures.
[17]

Normally, excavations are made around the building and the building is separated from the foundations. Steel orreinforced concrete beams replace the connections to the foundations, while under these, the isolating pads, or base isolators, replace the material removed. While the base isolation tends to restrict transmission of the ground motion to the building, it also keeps the building positioned properly over the foundation. Careful attention to detail is required where the building interfaces with the ground, especially at entrances, stairways and ramps, to ensure sufficient relative motion of those structural elements.
[edit]Found

materials

In many parts of the world, houses are constructed using scavenged materials. In Manila, houses in the Payatasneighborhood are made primarily of material sourced from a nearby garbage dump.
[18]

In Dakar it is not uncommon to see houses made of recycled materials standing atop a mixture of garbage and sand which serves as a foundation. The garbage-sand mixture is also used to protect the house from flooding.
[edit]Legal
[19]

issues

Buildings with historical importance have restrictions.

[edit]United

Kingdom

New houses in the UK are not covered by the Sale of Goods Act. When purchasing a new house the buyer has less legal protection than when buying a new car. New houses in the UK may be covered by a NHBC guarantee but some people feel that it would be more useful to put new houses on the same legal footing as other products.
[edit]United
[citation needed]

States and Canada

In the US and Canada, many new houses are built in housing tracts, which provide homeowners a sense of "belonging" and the feeling they have "made the best use" of their money. However, these houses are sometimes built as cheaply and quickly as possible by large builders seeking to maximize profits. Many environmental health issues may be ignored or minimized in the construction of these structures. In one case in Benicia, California, a housing tract was built over an old landfill. Home buyers were never told, and only found out when some began having reactions to high levels of leadand chromium.
needed] [citation

[edit]Identifying

houses

With the growth of dense settlement, humans designed ways of identifying houses and/or parcels of land. Individual houses sometimes acquire proper names; and those names may acquire in their turn considerable emotional connotations: see for example the house of Howards End or the castle of Brideshead Revisited. A more systematic and general approach to identifying houses may use various methods of house numbering.
[edit]Animal

houses

Humans often build "houses" for domestic or wild animals, often resembling smaller versions of human domiciles.Familiar animal houses built by humans include bird-houses, henhouses/chicken-coops and doghouses (kennels); while housed agricultural animals more often live in barns and stables. However, human interest in building houses for animals does not stop at the domestic pet. People build bat-houses, nesting-sites for wild ducks and other birds, bee houses, giraffe houses, kangaroo houses, worm houses, hermit crab houses, as well as shelters for many other animals.

A modern-style house in Canberra,Australia.

A mountain house in Barzio, Italy.

[edit]Houses

and symbolism

Houses may express the circumstances or opinions of their builders or their inhabitants. Thus a vast and elaborate house may serve as a sign of conspicuous wealth, whereas a low-profile house built of recycled materials may indicate support of energy conservation. Houses of particular historical significance (former residences of the famous, for example, or even just very old houses) may gain a protected status intown planning as examples of built heritage and/or of streetscape values.Commemorative plaques may mark such structures. Home ownership provides a common measure of prosperity in economics. Contrast the importance of housedestruction, tent dwelling and house rebuilding in the wake of many natural disasters.

Peter Olshavsky's "House for the Dance of Death" a'pataphysical variation on the house.
[edit]See
Home portal Home improvement portal

[20]

provides

also

Building House-building Index of construction articles

Functions Building science Mixed-use development Visitability

Types Summer house Boarding house Tiny house Earth sheltering Home automation Housing estate Housing in Japan Hurricane-proof house Lodging Lustron house Mobile home Modular home

Lists List of American houses List of house styles List of house types List of human habitation forms

List of real estate topics Open-air museum

Economics Affordable housing Housing bubble United States housing bubble

Housing tenure

Miscellaneous Domestic robot Housewarming party Squatting

Institutions U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse HUD USER

[edit]References

1. 2.

^ Shelter By Lloyd Kahn. Shelter Publications, Inc., May 1, 2000. ^ American Shelter: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the American Home By Les Walker. Overlook Press, July 1, 1998

3.

^ Schoenauer, Norbert (2000). 6,000 Years of Housing (rev. ed.) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company).

4. 5.

^ "housing papers". Retrieved 18 December 2012. ^ "Online Etymology Dictionary". Etymonline.com. Retrieved 2012-01-04.

6.

^ Sacks, David (2004). Letter perfect: the marvelous history of our alphabet from A to Z. Random House Digital. pp. 65 66. ISBN 0-7679-1173-3.

7.

a b c d e f g h i j k l

Hill, Jonathan, Immaterial Architecture, New

York: Routledge, 2006.

8.

^ Tabor, Philip, "Striking Home: The Telematic Assault on Identity". Published in Jonathan Hill, editor, Occupying Architecture: Between the Architect and the User.

9.

^ "Manor House". Middle-ages.org.uk. 2007-05-16. Retrieved 2012-01-04.

10. ^

a b

Evans, Robin Translations from Drawing to Building:

Figures, Doors and Passages London: Architectural Associations Publications 2005 11. ^ Summerson, John The Book Of Architecture of John Thorpe in Sit John Soan's museum: 40th Volume of the Walpole Society England: The Society 1964 12. ^
a b

Pratt, Sir Roger Sir R. Pratt on Architecture 1928

13. ^ Rybczynski, Witold (1987). Home: A Short History of An Idea. London: Penguin. p. 56. ISBN 0-14-010231-0. 14. ^ "National Register of Historic Places" (PDF). Retrieved 201201-04. 15. ^ "Energy Performance Certificates - what they are : Directgov Home and community". Direct.gov.uk. Retrieved 2012-01-04. 16. ^ neesit (2007-04-27). "YouTube Testing of a New Line of Seismic Base Isolators". Youtube.com. Retrieved 2012-01-04. 17. ^ James M. Kelly, Professor Emeritus Civil and Environmental Engineering. "Base Isolation: Origins and Development". National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering, University of California, Berkeley. 18. ^ http://www.unicef.org/philippines/reallives_12171.html 19. ^ Nossiter, Adam (2009-05-02). "In Senegal, Building on Perilous Layers of Trash". The New York Times. 20. ^ http://www.mcgill.ca/files/architecture-theory/olshavsky.pdf

[edit]External

links

Media related to Houses at Wikimedia Commons

[show]

Real estate developments

[show]

Rooms and spaces of a house

Categories: Houses Structural system

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