I feel that domestic life previously was smelly, cold, dirty and embarrassing — but that we have much to learn from analyzing it.
I usually spend my times in historic buildings, indeed in Britain’s grand historic royal palaces, where I act as a curator. In recent years, though (exploring If Walls Could Talk: A Thorough History of the Home), I have seen a huge number of ordinary people’s houses, from all levels in society, relationship from the Normans to the current day.
I have concluded from my experience that the homes of the past have a huge amount to educate us concerning the future. When the oil runs out, I believe our homes will get more similar to those of our reduced technology, preindustrial ancestors.
Lucy Worsley
The first point to consider is that the era of technical rooms is long since over. In Britain today, the legislation regulating the design of new homes contains echoes of the remote past. It means that, once again, rooms ought to be able to multitask. The living room must have room for a bed in case its owner becomes incapacitated and can’t climb upstairs — and medieval people lived, ate and slept in just 1 room. (So do I, in my contemporary open-plan flat.)
Lucy Worsley
Photo:”Chimneys” lift surplus heat and stale air out of a growth at BedZed, Wallington, Surrey.
The sunlight is also becoming more significant in house design. Once on a time, individuals selected sites with good”atmosphere”; today well-thought-out homes are situated to minimize solar gain in summer and to optimize it in winter. Most homes need to face south, which will prove hard to conventional street structures.
Next, various architectural features from the past will start to reappear in house layout. The chimney appeared from the 13th century before starting to disappear in the 20th. Nevertheless, it’s coming back, as wood-burning stoves make a welcome return.
The chimney also serves another function, and you’re going to come across chimneys even in contemporary buildings with no fireplaces. It enables natural ventilation, lifting stale air out of the house. Mechanical air conditioning uses valuable energy and will soon become just unaffordable.
ZeroEnergy Design
Windows will grow bigger once again, and homes will comprise much less glass, not only because of the high energy cost of the glass , but since it’s such a thermally ineffective material. I myself live in a tall glass tower, built in 1998, also agree with Francis Bacon, who condemned the fantastic glass-filled palaces of the Jacobean era. At a house”filled with Glass,” he wrote,”you cannot tell where to become out of the Sun or Cold.”
ROTHERS Design/Build
Upon the medieval model, walls are becoming thicker. Medieval buildings had thick walls since they were easier to assemble, but they also possess the helpful purpose of providing insulation.
Lawrence Architecture, Inc..
We’ll also experience the return of this shutter: It’s the ideal way to keep heat out of a house.
Along with a warmer climate, we will also experience water shortages. The daily water consumption per person in Britain today runs an average of 160 liters. The government expects us to get down to 80 liters — that the contents of just one deep bath — from the end of the decade. The easy ground or midden toilet is already revived in the kind of the sound composting loo.
Feldman Architecture, Inc..
Water will become a far more valuable resource, just as it had been when you needed to carry every fall into your house by hand. We’ll need to develop as water thrifty since the Victorians were, with their ordinary use of 20 liters a day. The Victorian cook was also a great recycler and wasted no waste of meals.
Notice how this contemporary home captures the rain
Britannia Joinery
More significantly, however, than the yield of dividers, chimneys and middens, we will observe a change in our attitude toward buildings. There has already been a revival of the natural building materials used previously, breathable materials with low ecological footprints, like wood, wool insulation and lime mortar. At the previous ten years, timber-framed homes have once again begun to sprout up throughout Britain.
FABRE/deMARIEN
We’ll likewise become more medieval in reusing, adapting and producing additions to our homes. On the space-short island of Great Britain, it’s been calculated that we need to build 200,000 new houses annually to cope with the population increase. According to the Empty Homes Agency, there are currently 700,000 homes standing fresh. It’s really obvious that we need to bring them current and have them occupied. Medieval and Tudor people recycled buildings and didn’t disdainfully cure these as a semidisposable source like we do.
Tour this converted garage in Bordeaux, France
Union Studio, Architecture & Community Design
Perhaps most controversially, we also need to believe again about what makes a community. Now’s builders and city planners believe that individuals do not just live in homes, they inhabit”places” Medieval towns were great examples of what planners hunt: densely populated, walkable communities where people ate local, seasonal food, and rich and poor lived in close proximity.
An effective”place” combines the various groups in society. In this sense, a fantastic Elizabethan mansion like Hardwick Hall was powerful social housing: Bess of Hardwick, its chatelaine, slept within meters of the heaps of people in her employment. It was a lifetime of enormous inequality, but Bess had personal responsibility for the poor and the sick, and all of them belonged to a frequent endeavor.
This sounds conservative, but it’s radically so. Today we live lives of vastly varying degrees of luxury, unaware of these with alternative experiences. We’ve spent too long within our very own cozy houses, looking smugly outside the window at the world.
The dwindling of the natural resources which have fueled our lifestyle because the 18th century will induce us to change. But I really don’t think that change need us. Throughout history, individuals have believed their own age wildly novel, deeply violent and sinking into the utmost depravity.
But it’s comforting to believe that the pleasures of domesticity are perennial. As Samuel Johnson put it,”To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.”
Lucy Worsley
If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home is a publication and also a four-part BBC TV series.
It is also possible to see Worsley at these discussions in 2013.
Photo of Lucy Worsley by Stuart Clarke
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