Lynne Walker

Home Making: An Architectural Perspective

contribution to the inderdisciplinary rethinking of the

home from an architectural perspective that was presented at the
conference in Cambridge to clarify for nonspecialists in architecture
how architects understand and use the concept of home and related terms,
such as the house, dwelling, and domestic space. In this essay I want to
provide a critical account of these concepts, drawing out relationships
between architectural language, space, and social dynamics in order to
consider how ideas and assumptions about social relations around gender,
class, and race get translated into domestic space, embodied in the
home, and represented in its spatiality. To give a sense of the historical
and cultural specificity of domestic spaceconcepts and representations
of home differ and change over time and placeI will consider briefly
the Victorian home, the modernist house, and the postmodern dwelling.
Architectural language and thinking about domestic space are partly
structured around a series of gendered binaries in which the preferred term
privileges the dominant forces within architecture and society and has masculine connotations: designer/design, architect/occupants, production/
consumption, and so on. Domestic space is, moreover, the lesser, disadvantaged term in another series of gendered binaries that also structure and
inform architectural thinking and building. For example, architects traditionally value the design of public buildings over private homes, the design
of the buildings exterior to its interior, and the buildings structure to its
decoration. Susanna Torres Women in American Architecture (1976) and
Dolores Haydens The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist
Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (1981) were among
the earliest and most powerful subversions of these oppositional categories.
Their work and further feminist analysis, intertwined with Derridean deconstruction, has broken open the hierarchical orderings (Beckett and
Cherry 1992, 2; see also Hughes 1996; Rendell, Penner, and Borden 2000).
As Jane Beckett and Deborah Cherry point out, feminist analysis has shaped
engagement with material and popular culture as sites for the contestation
of meanings, arenas where new identities are forged, contesting subjectivities
his essay is a

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 27, no. 3]

2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2002/2703-0017$10.00

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Walker

formed. Fashion, design, architecture are intermeshed, interconnected in

an analysis of the material relations between production and consumption,
the social spaces where goods and desires are produced and consumed
(Beckett and Cherry 1992, 2).
It is at just these intersections of things and spaces, of form and culture,
and of design and use that some of the most important work on the home
is currently being conducted in the burgeoning, interdisciplinary area of
material culture, which is closely related to architecture and architectural
history. Developing theorized models of gender and architecture, studies
in material culture offer home history (Schlereth and Foy 1992) and
mine the rich veins of everyday architecture that encompass housing, the
home, and its objects and occupants. The discipline of material culture
favors a more inclusive, fluid approach than conventional academic architectural history in terms of ethnicity, gender, and class, investigating
issues and themes such as slave housing, gendered spaces, and decoration
and identity (Cromley and Hudgins 1995; Grier 1996; Martinez and
Ames 1997).
However, architectural history, especially when allied with social history,
has provided substantial research resources for interdisciplinary scholarship. The discussion here concentrates on those aspects of nineteenthcentury house design and planning, first studied by architectural historians,
that most readily reveal how dominant middle-class beliefs about proper
social relationships and the different roles and capacities of men and
women in culture and society were coded (architecturally and linguistically) and built into the fabric of the home through the two essential
elements of Victorian planning, segregation and specialization. Bear
Wood, a vast house designed and built between 1865 and 1874 (fig. 1)
by the English architect Robert Kerr, illustrates the way in which the
doctrine of separate spheres, with its assumptions about womans nature
and role, as well as dominant ideas about correct social relations, was
inscribed in domestic architecture. Kerr also wrote a book about planning
houses that instructed architects on how to install architectural and social
propriety according to the gendered ideals of public and private that
associated women with the home and its limited, private world while
privileging, in spatial and cultural terms, the male as head of the house
and actor in the wider world ([1864] 1871). Kerr, like other Victorian
architects, (re)produced spatial and social hierarchies by shaping material
boundaries and laying out spatial divisions according to the status, role,
and (asymmetrically) perceived needs of the homes occupants and visitorsthe husband, wife, guests, children, and servants, in that order.
In keeping with proper social relations and gendered architectural

Figure 1

Ground plan, Bear Wood, Berkshire, England, 186574, Robert Kerr, architect. Used with kind permission of RIBA Library Photographs Collection

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Walker

theory, rooms and their use were identified according to the gender and
rank of their occupants, with womens rooms placed at the back or, as at
Bear Wood, on the garden side of the house, protected from the street
and the gaze of strangers. The rooms of the male head of household were
near the front of the house, off circulation spaces or near publicly accessible
entrances that had connections to or contact with the more diverse public
world. These gendered distinctions between (masculine) public and (feminine) private, and the use of gender as an organizing principle in architecture, have been the tools of architects since antiquity (Vitruvius 1960;
Wigley 1992). Nurseries were the exception as the most common domestic
space that was not divided according to gender into male and female
territories, and a few rooms and auxiliary spaces, such as the late Victorian
living hall, were gender-neutral zones. However, most rooms in the home
were considered the territory of one gender or the other, to be used on
occasion by the other, but with permission rather than as of right (Franklin 1981, 43; see also Kerr [1864] 1871; Girouard 1971).
Essential to the concept of the Victorian home was the presence and
work of womans body, which both produced and was partly produced
by the home and its special atmosphere of domesticity, characterized by
family life, cozy intimacy, and a sense of comfort and well-being, a middleclass ideal that affected all social groups (Forty 1986, 94119; Rybzynski
1987, 7475). The Victorian home itself was associated with the female
body and its enclosed interior (Adams 1996; Gordon 1996; Garber 2000,
4899). Woman in her role as wife and mother was the keystone of the
moral Victorian home; her position there was considered essential to
the maintenance of social and even political order, the starting point of
the moral regeneration of the family whose children were taught, among
other things, the necessity of adapting their demeanor, tempering their
behavior, and developing a sense of duty and cordiality to their social
inferiors in order to adapt and survive the turbulent social and political
changes of the Victorian era.
Although the Victorian home was feminized and endlessly depicted as
womans place, it was nevertheless heavily patriarchal in terms of territory, control, and meaning. The largest proportion of overall space and
accommodation, the prime public rooms, and the most convenient position were all allocated to the male head of household. Manliness and
social status were embodied and constituted, in part, through spatial
boundaries that produced and upheld dominant gender definitions and
relations and provided privacy for the family and guests. Rooms identified
with and for the (male) owner included office or business room, cloakroom, billiard room, smoking room, study, gun room, gentlemans work-

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room, dressing room, gentlemans bedroom, and the dining room. In a

separate spatial sphere, not in direct communication with the male suite,
the ladys quarters consisted normally of the drawing room, morning
room, boudoir, and ladys bedroom. In addition to spatial zones, sexual
and social differences were formed and structured through furnishings,
decoration, and ornament that were gendered in terms of color, style, and
detailing (Kinchin 1996; Bryden and Floyd 1999).
Gender and class were also organizing principles in the design of the
servants quarters, although privacy, the central aim of the Victorian home,
was not an option for servants. Particular attention was paid to the segregation of servants and to the surveillance of sleeping arrangements
through the separation and placement of lavatories and the assignment
by sex of workrooms, ideally involving different staircases and corridors.
Servants worked and slept in an architecturally separate sphere within the
household, typically in a service wing or in marginal spaces in the basement
and attics as well as in outbuildings and in the grounds.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of the home
as nation, a representation of national identity, and a site of social and
moral regeneration was not lost on architects, residents, or observers (Muthesius [1904] 1979). But modernist architects, most importantly Le
Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, strongly rejected the
homey values, national character, and decorative aesthetic of the Victorian
period and defined modernism against domesticity. The modern home
was reconceived as a machinea machine for living in: standardized,
impersonal, and scientific (Le Corbusier [1927] 1998). Modernist architectural language was itself objective, stripped of any lingering Victorian
sentimentality or domesticity. In contrast to common usage, home was
not a term generally used in mainstream architectural discourse in the
twentieth century. Its scientific (male) terminology and rational spatial and material practices were considered more appropriate for the modern house than the idea of home with its connotations of femininity, emotionality, and decoration. Like the words that architects used to describe
them, modernist houses, such as Le Corbusiers canonical Villa Savoye of
1929, near Paris (fig. 2), were also stripped of ornament and domesticity.
In the so-called new architecture, decoration, traditionally associated with
the feminine, became a hallmark of bad design. Although purportedly
gender neutral and universalist in its values, modernist domestic space was
implicitly masculine, defining, and controlling, operating through surveillance and the domination of the gaze (Colomina 1992, 112; Forty
2000). At the Villa Savoye, a pristine boxlike house is elevated above the
ground on piers (pilotis). Here, the traditional symbiotic relationship be-

Figure 2

Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 192830, Le Corbusier, architect. Used with kind permission of RIBA Library Photographs Collection

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tween house and garden is finessed for a selective view of landscape in

which the site becomes a sight. In Beatriz Colominas influential reading,
the mobile viewer defines space and place by looking out to the landscape,
which is framed by the house and screened like a camera image by horizontal windows. Nature is overpowered and placed in the house, domesticated by the defining gaze (Colomina 1992, 98128). Thus, the
traditional sense of domestic space is disrupted and displaced, and domesticity is suppressed.
As Christopher Reed observed, root and branch modernist architectural
theory and practice have been anti-bourgeois as well as anti-domestic,
embodied most fully in the heroic, peripatetic male figure of twentiethcentury architectural masters, such as Le Corbusier, who railed against
the sentimental hysteria surrounding the cult of the house (Reed
1996, 9). Nevertheless, as Gwendolyn Wright has observed, Domestic
architecture, whether mass-housing or single-family house, has been, it
seems, the favorite design problem of 20th century American architects.
Here they can explore personal visions, proposing formal innovations, and
often as not, symbolic expressions about concepts like the family (Wright
1987, 13). However, most architects remained less concerned with livedin everyday spaces than with architectures imaging codes of photography
and architectural drawings that represent in a reductive and abstract way
physical delineation manifest in measurable dimensions and boundaries.
Architectural discourse was and continues to be skewed self-referentially
toward the words and buildings of architects who are generally indifferent
to issues of gender and domesticity in spite of their work on houses.
Whereas traditional architectural discourse focused primarily on form
and style (Leach 1997, xiv), space is the central concept of modernist
architecture and architectural theory. Modernist architects developed as
axiomatic the nineteenth-century notion that architectural form should
represent interior spaces and therefore generate a buildings external appearance. In modernist architecture, space, not mass, is the structuring
principle, while open plans without dividing walls give full play to the
dynamic spectacle of flowing space or, in more recent terms, achieve
transparency. In fact, architectural space is thought of as the medium
for artistic expression, the site of architectural statement, and both the
means and the justification of the status of the architect and the basis of
architecture as an art. Most significantly, the unspoken role of space is
that it tells people where they can and cannot be, which, in part, defines
what people feel about who they are and how they feel about each other.
It is not surprising, therefore, that this cultural power, linked to the design
of spaces both domestic and public, is the most valued, most jealously

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Walker

guarded activity of architects, although, as Henri Lefebvre made clear,

architects are not acting independently but participate in the dominant
discourse of power that serves the interests of modern capitalist societies (Lefebvre 1991, 360, 286, 370; Forty 2000, 275).
The modernist approach that proposed the architect as a manipulator
of seemingly neutral, abstract space also pursued the home as laboratory,
a site of social and formal experimentation that failed most significantly
and visibly in the large-scale, socially disastrous superblocks of postwar
public housing but succeeded most fully in tailored private houses, such
as the Eames House in California (194950). Planned as a civilized home
and workplace for its designers, Charles and Ray Eames, the Eames House
marked the return of domesticity to the modern house. Domesticity, playful and productive, made a comeback in the Eames House, which introduced decoration through marks of human habitation and character, like
the artful accumulation of a collection of folk toys, but it is postmodernism
in architecture that has most recently and most fully accomplished the
return of domesticity in two competing versions (Foster 1985, ixx; Haar
and Reed 1996, 26973; Kirkham 1998). First, and perhaps most familiarly, the home is portrayed as a symbol and vehicle of traditional values
and nostaglia, a quest for comfort and security, accompanied by a return
to conservative Victorian values. Domesticity, tradition, and convention
become conflated in the nostalgic postmodern dwelling, manifested on a
large scale in Disneys new town in Florida. In Celebration, Florida, cultural continuity is built into Disneys private homes through the revival
of historical styles and the use of traditional images and materials, such
as the use of simplified classical colonial forms and the provision of all
modern conveniences, thus borrowing from the past to invent a traditional, unthreatening present, glossed by modernity. Second, it has been
argued by both feminists and others that the postmodern house can be
viewed in another lightas a potentially politically and socially subversive
site (Robbins 1994; Reed 1996, 16; Friedman 1998, 184211). Provocatively, even the unhomely embedded in the domestic, the uneasy sense
of the unfamiliar within the familiar (Wigley 1993, 108), which is linked
to art and literature, has been identified as a site for readdressing political
and social issues (Vidler 1992).
Since the 1980s, the architectural implications of the needs and voices
of a culturally, ethnically, and sexually diverse population have been recognized by architects, curators, and the varied occupants themselves.
These departures from the nuclear family norm, which are often developed
around the typical suburban house (Haar and Reed 1996), range from
single-parent households to extended families, from older womens hous-

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ing to queer space. They respond to and constitute new ways of living,
such as teleworking and home shopping, complicating the relationships
of public and private worlds. In postmodern culture, architectural approaches that link theory to practice have also flourished within the conditions of urban domesticity. In a housing project in gritty Hackney in
London (fig. 3), the all-black womens practice, Elsie Owusu Architects,
addressed issues of cultural identity, race, and architecture in a housing
project of 1997, built for and with Kush, a black housing association
(Lokko 2000). Their cultural approach produced a hybrid (interview
with Elsie Owusu, October 2, 2000) that signaled the multiethnicity of
their clients, architects, and eventual users through pattern making, choice
of colors, and the use of traditional materials with imagery inspired by
African textile design but modeled on the conventional individual terraced
house with its own front and back garden, the ideal home of English
culture. Within the severe constraints of space for public housing, and
through the cunning of the designers, the kitchens were fattened into
flexible family rooms, making it possible for people to compose themselves within the house around either a garden view or a courtyard view
(Owusu interview, October 2, 2000).
As a strategy and central project, feminist architects and historians of
architecture and design have considered, and consequently reevaluated, the
importance of the home and its occupants, with particular attention to
womens experience, identity, and role in consumption and production
(Hayden 1981; Matrix 1984; Attfield and Kirkham 1995), while increasing
attention is paid to the relationship of the home and the world outside
(Adams 1996, 5; Walker 1992, 2001). Subverting computer and media
technologies that provide models and means for the avant-garde un-private
home (Riley 1999), the feminist possibilities of technology are interrogated
for domesticity and elaborated through the half-human, half-machine figure
of the cyborg (Haraway 1991; Bloomer 1996). Most significantly, since
Beatriz Colominas groundbreaking Sexuality and Space in 1992, interdisciplinarity has transformed discourses of gender and space, bringing into
architecture theoretical issues, debates, and practices from other disciplines
that draw on a wider range of cultural theory and often focus on the
problematic of the house (Wigley 1995; McLeod 1996; Ruedi, Wigglesworth, and McCorquodale 1996). Investigating the home from an architectural perspective, it is clear that it is no longer possible to speak of
architects understanding of the home without reference to interdisciplinary
approaches and discourses outside architecture. By the same token, the
concept of the home, produced at intersections of language, space, and
social dynamics, is not fixed but changing over time. As this essay has shown,

Birds eye view, Rendlesham Road housing scheme, Hackney, London, 1997, Elsie Owusu Architects. Used with kind permission of Elsie Owusu
Architects.

Figure 3

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833

at different historical moments, the home has been considered a regenerative

and adaptive moral and political force by the Victorian upper classes, an
antidomestic modernist polemic by modernist architects, and a site of cultural regeneration and a potential force for positive social and political
change from a position of postmodern diversity and difference.
Architectural historian, London

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