30 User Comfort, Functionality, and Sustainability as (Early?) Modern Architectural Concerns
Session Chairs:
Giovanna Guidicini, Glasgow School of Art
Anne-Françoise Morel, KU Leuven
User comfort, functionality and sustainability are predominant concerns of contemporary architecture, related to the complex physical and sensory interaction between the user and the building. They include aspects of thermal and acoustic comfort, a healthy indoor environment, accessibility, and siting. They also depend on the choice of construction techniques and materials as well as the availability of consumable resources. Whilst these issues are studied by historians in the fields of economy, philosophy, environmental studies, and cultural studies, they remain rather unexplored in the study of early modern architecture (16th-18th C.). They even seem to exist in opposition to the cultural concepts of representation prevalent in the study of architecture before Enlightenment (DeJean, 2010).
These concepts were not yet standards, let alone clearly defined, in early modern architectural design and theory, in which domestic amenity gave priority to social status over personal comfort. Yet, they played an increasingly relevant role in a period climatologically described as the Little Ice Age (1550-1720), during which technical innovations, practical experimentation, Newtonian physics and a developing culture of sensibility shaped attitudes to material culture (Mukherjee, 2014).
The aim of the session is to investigate how concerns regarding the built and natural environment operated as catalysts for innovative technological and architectural responses, and to demonstrate the connection between the well-known notions of status and representation and the new concepts of personal comfort and convenience.
Discussing the role of these topics in the early modern architectural discourse and design can bridge the perceived gap between what is often superficially considered a practically-driven, socially conscious modern period, and its architecturally unrestrained, environmentally carefree and user-unfriendly predecessor. On the contrary, this panel will show remarkable similarities in identifying and investigating architectural solutions aimed at user convenience. Furthermore we seek to cross the disciplinary poles of the technological and scientific versus the historical and humanistic, bringing to the fore how the complex relationship between people and the environment informs the construction of equally complex architectural responses.
Paper Abstracts:
A Country Full of Palaces? Functionality of Space and Comfort in Dutch 17th and 18th Century Residential ArchitectureWhilst discussing the residential culture of the 17th century Helen Searing (1997) remarked that: ‘arguably, the very concept of ‘home’ as we know it was invented by the Dutch’. The meaning of home is still widely up for debate, but a pivotal role for the Dutch in its creation has a long history. Already in the 17th century, foreign visitors to the Netherlands were highly observant of the differences between Dutch residential culture and that of their homeland. Four characteristics of Dutch architecture seem of key importance to them: highly developed interiors, relatively high standards of comfort, cleanliness and innovative urban planning. One visitor branded the Netherlands as ‘a country full of palaces’, an opinion that at the time does not seem to have been rare.
These characteristics will have mainly been brought forth by the layout of Dutch houses. They not only point to outward notions of status and representation, but also refer to private life within the home. This paper will demonstrate how through typological analysis of floor plans these characteristics can be illustrated. By analysing floor plans of Dutch premodern residential architecture, it can be argued that Dutch homes were standardized relatively early on and designed with user comfort in mind. Current scholarly discourse on Dutch premodern residential architecture has mainly focussed on the development of the floor plan in relation to the construction (Meischke 1969; Prak 1991). How social characteristics like residential culture, high standards of comfort and cleanliness may have interacted with the development of floor plans is hardly discussed. With a new typological analysis, the layout of the Dutch home may be further explained in the context of the city and society.
The connection between coal and comfort was commonplace in British culture by the late eighteenth century. In his 1789 treatise on coal mining, The Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom, John Williams wrote that ‘No country in the world depends so much upon the productions of the mineral kingdom, for the means of comfortable accommodation, wealth, and power, as the island of Britain.’ Similarly, large-scale historical studies—beginning with the foundational account of E.A. Wrigley—have emphasized connections between demographic growth, urbanization, industrialization, and coal.
How did these immense changes play out inside? This paper looks at schemes by architects, natural philosophers, and other interested actors aimed at ‘improving’ the household hearth in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain. For instance, in 1714, when Newtonian experimentalist J.T. Desaguliers translated a French treatise on the fireplace into English, he added a series of descriptions recounting his trials with coal-fired hearths. Later in the century, Count Rumford and Scottish polymath James Anderson proposed ways to improve the circulation of heat, while they simultaneously explored the management of citizens and resources in parallel tracts on political economy. By 1845, the two-volume On the history and art of warming and ventilating rooms and buildings compiled the above schemes alongside many others, now recast a history of interior comfort as the course of civilization, itself (culminating, naturally, in the coal-fired homes of the British Isles).
These texts and others show how the problem of the fireplace attracted thinking across multiple scales, drawing the individual interior and its ideally comfortable inhabitants into a web of connections between fuel, comfort, national identity, and historical change.
The eighteenth-century has long been associated with a ‘culture of consumption’ through which a growing swath of the British population had access to new goods and services. Did the consumption of domestic fuel resonate or diverge from more visible modes of consumption? Who, in the end, was allowed to be comfortable as coal became Britain’s fuel?
Situated south of Leuven, within a one-day travel distance from Brussels, the castle of Heverlee was one of the main residences of the Croÿ dynasty. It was Anton of Croÿ who purchased the seignory with accompanying hereditary title of sénéchal of Brabant in 1446. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, William of Croÿ and his wife Mary of Hamal built a new residence on the site, supplementing the existing uncomfortable living tower with a fully-fledged L-shaped residence. Three generations later it became one of the favourite residences of Charles III of Croÿ (1560-1612), duke of Aarschot and Croÿ, count of Beaumont and prince of the Holy Roman Empire. As one of the highest noblemen in the Low Countries Charles was considered a patron of the arts and architecture, as well as a military commander. During his lifetime he developed an obsession with the recording of his heritage for his posterity, even though he died without children. Part of this obsession were the so-called besoignés and specifications, describing the domain of Heverlee to an amazing level of detail. This extraordinary source covers everything in the castle – even the collection of linen at the disposal of the duke – as well as the entire surrounding domain with gardens, orchards and a private hunting forest. The content of this description hints at an amazing level of technology, with – for example – fountains spraying water to seven or eight feet high. In this paper, we will explore how these descriptions, in combination with iconographic sources of the castle and its surroundings, give insight into the level of comfort concerning food, personal hygiene and technological advances.
Sanne Maekelberg, KU Leuven Waste, Water and Warmth: Regulation and Comfort in Early Modern EdinburghThis paper focuses on Edinburgh in the seventeenth century and considers the efforts made by the civic authorities to improve the safety and amenity of the domestic architecture of the city by attempting to improve, in particular, water supply and waste disposal (infamously, a problem in Edinburgh right up until the nineteenth century).
Using the existing legal structure of the Dean of Guild Court to oversee and enforce, the city gradually developed a regulatory framework, partly in response the threats of fire and disease, which gradually shaped the appearance of the city and the structure of the new buildings within it. By the end of the century, the High Street as the main thoroughfare had taken on a more unified, lithic appearance and the wealthier burghers were living in housing that was more spacious and better serviced. Those changes, however, whilst the civic input was important, were at least as much due to the private enterprise of the members of the various trades organisations, who developed the modern flat and tenement block, partly in defiance of the city’s regulation.
Building upon the ‘urban decline as opportunity’ argument, this paper departs from the notion that the early modern shrinking town should not only be studied from a decline perspective. Instead, I would like to examine the argument that the urban transformation was also deployed by house
owners to ameliorate their living environment and increase the user comfort of their property, focusing on a case study of the shrinking Dutch town between 1750 and 1840.
In the long eighteenth century the exceptional urbanisation of the province of Holland, the main urban centre of the Dutch Republic, slowed down. Many towns, including Amsterdam, Leiden and Haarlem, had to contend with economic and demographic stagnation or decline, resulting into a
declining real estate market. Rather than the construction of new buildings and subsequent infilling, renovation, conversion and demolition became the central building activities. Parallel to an urban ‘demolition-wave’, many country houses in the west of the Republic were demolished from the end
of the eighteenth century.
Seen from the urban decline as opportunity perspective, vacancy and demolition opened up the tightly-packed seventeenth century town, offering the possibility to enlarge houses and rear-gardens and re-use vacant plots as gardens, orchards or meadows. Through the analysis of archival documentation, maps and contemporary sources I will discuss the spatial make-over of the shrinking Dutch towns of Leiden, Haarlem and Enkhuizen, focusing on the renovation of the rear part of the town house and its garden and the redevelopment of vacant plots. I will argue that this transformation can be contextualized within a longer tradition of the use of greenery in Dutch towns, both as embellishment and functional necessity, with the shrinking town offering a new opportunity to increase user comfort and live the ideal country life close to home.