Rybczynski continues documenting the ongoing rationalization of domestic space in the 18th and 19th centuries. Chapters 6 and 7 of his book concern themselves with the development of lighting and ventilation technologies and the process of making the home increasingly efficient. Compared to previous eras, the home was becoming increasingly densely populated with objects. Furniture and books for example were becoming easily available to the middle classes, not only the elite.
Science was increasingly brought to bear on the development of control of systems within the home. Lighting received a big boost with the discovery first of kerosene and shortly afterward of petroleum. Gas lighting made fast inroads both within public spaces in the city as well as within the home. The clean and reliable light provided by gas made reading and other activities at night possible, encouraging literacy and a heightened awareness of cleanliness. (Rybczynski, P. 142) Gas lighting may be seen as the first successful mass technology in some way: it was a product of science and technology and was financed by businessmen. Private funding for the development of the products and the dissemination of the necessary infrastructure paved the way for the development of urban technologies. This process took off with the discovery of electricity. Not only did electricity provide improved lighting, but it also provided the ‘missing link’ for the mass development of urban technologies: the ability to provide power for other devices. By providing power for fans for heating and ventilation systems, as well as other products over time changed the interior landscape. “The greatest saving produced by the new electrical devices was not time but effort; they allowed household tasks to be performed in much greater comfort.” (Rybczynski, P. 154)
The increasing technologization of the home reduced the need for domestic help and drove the move to smaller homes which could be managed efficiently by the homekeeper and the help of new technologies. Smaller homes were easier to maintain and therefore more comfortable. Principles of scientific management were applied to housework in the same way as factory work was analyzed and made more efficient. Comfort and efficiency became almost interchangeable terms. Domestic interiors were being designed from the standpoint of efficient housekeeping rather than on visual principles alone. The habitability of the home became paramount. The home as place of leisure came increasingly to the fore.
Arguably a book like Bachelard’s Poetics of Space could not have been written before technologically mediated comfort came to the home. Bachelard’s home is one of comfort and leisure to allow daydreaming and the unfettered flight of the imagination. His chapter entitled Shells, continues with themes concerning the workings of the imagination. “An empty shell, like an empty nest, invites daydreams of refuge.” (P. 107) He subdivides the home in this chapter, or at least has the home occupied by a single tenant. The shell is the personal refuge, the personal space: both physical and internal to the psyche. Bachelard’s home and his shell is an inhabited one: it is multi-sensorial, not merely visual. The shell (liek the nest) is a haptic refuge. “The shell confers a daydream of purely physical intimacy…[and] expresses the function of inhabiting in terms of touch.” (P. 131)
Bachelard’s is an embodied habitation echoed by Ingold in his paper Building, Dwelling, Living. It is a continually made and remade thing, always becoming, never in a static state of simply being. Ingold states that “…it is through being lived in, rather than through having been constructed along the lines of some formal design, that the world becomes a meaningful environment for people.” (P. 58) He refers to this as the ‘dwelling perspective’ where the subject is not separate from the environment but rather that they are mutually constitutive. He elaborates on the notion of the home as an organism: something that has a history and develops in various ways through time with its interaction with dwelling inhabitants. Like Bachelard, Ingold also understands imagination as being central to humankind’s existence.
Human beings do not construct the world in a certain way by virtue of what they are, but by virtue of their own conceptions of the possibilities of being. And these possibilities are limited only by the power of the imagination. (P. 63)
It is only through actively using the imagination in engaging with the world that we can dwell in it.
Foucault, in his paper Of Other Spaces, Heteroropias see our current era as almost making dwelling in the sense that Ingold uses the term as no longer possible: or at least not common or simply possible. He says that we are in the “…epoch of space.” (P. 1) He see this as an era of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, where we have the primacy of the visual, of abstraction, of universiality and stasis. There are echoes of Virilio here with suggestions of an accelerated culture where time is not a lived time, where the acceleration of events compresses to to an experience of simultaneity, where the world is reduced to a set of spatial relations. In Foucault’s words: “…we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites….”(P. 2)
Heterotopias, in Foucault’s conception are hybrids of ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ spaces: spaces that are simultaneously “…mythic and real.” (P. 4) ‘Crisis’ heterotopias are privileged, sacred, or forbidden places (boarding schools, military service, honeymoon) that are being displaced in our time by heterotopias of deviation (rest homes, psychiatric facilities, prisons) and others. Can a heterotopia of deviation be inhabited and experienced as a home? There are interesting ties with Aaron Wilson’s article regarding the notion of home at a half-way house in Vancouver. Interviews with some of the residents showed that the answer could run either way. Many felt that ‘Horizon House’ couldn’t be home while others felt that it gave them the security and freedom necessary to inhabit the institutional heterotopic space in a way that feels like home. Home seems to be most certainly more than merely the built geometrical form of architectural space.
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