Brideshead and the Tower Blocks

Patrick Wright

  • Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynski
    Heinemann, 256 pp, £12.95, March 1988, ISBN 0 434 14292 1

Witold Rybczynski introduces his book with a telling anecdote. During the six years of his architectural education, ‘the subject of comfort’ was only mentioned once. He finds this ‘a curious omission’, since comfort should surely be central to architecture – like justice to law or health to medicine. The point is a strong one, and Professor Rybczynski duly piles it on. Bitterly deprived by his own education, he can only write from a position of ‘ignorance’. As he sets out to discover the ‘meaning of comfort’, he is at pains to differentiate his own ecological approach from the high-rise proclamatory style, full of arrogant expertise and alienated technique, with which his profession still tries to hide the ‘fundamental poverty’ of its modern ideas. Here, then, is another architect going all human on us, eating humble pie and sending himself on a remedial course to find out what everyone else has always known.

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[*] As Lynn Pearson shows in a fine new study, The Architectural and Social History of Co-operative Living (Macmillan, 274 pp., £33, March. 0 333 40620 6), women have not just ‘broken out’ of the home: they have attempted to re-design it with a different distribution of domestic labour. At least 15 co-operative housekeeping developments were built in England between 1874 and 1925. The co-operative living movement was concerned with working women’s housing (the ‘ladies residential chamber’) but also experimented with the more affluent family home. Arts and Crafts or ‘Queen Anne’ architects like Woysey and Godwin were involved, but there was also a Fabian interest in buildings which combined ‘flats’ with communal kitchen, dining and nursery facilities.