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CHAPTER ONE

What is your engineered house?

1. It's too good for chickens

Building houses for people to live in is the largest single business in this world. The basic human requirements are food, clothing, shelter, and reproduction. In terms of money, which means effort, shelter heads the list. We spend more of our effort for our shelters, our touchable environment, than for anything else, with shelter cost approaching a third of all human effort.

We spend more for shelter than for food, child-rearing, personal adornment, transportation, government, or guns. The very size of this effort seems to have kept it from critical attention. In terms of getting our money's worth we are least critical of shelter, spending more time worrying about entertainment, the destiny of man, skirt lengths, and internal combustion engines.

This book will examine our expenditures for shelter. I believe that most of us are getting about half as much as we should for every dollar spent. This makes me angry, but I have no one to be angry with except myself.

I believe that few houses are as comfortable, as spacious, as pleasant, as handsome, as economical as they might have been had more thought been put into their creation, but who is to do the thinking? The spectacle of a million new houses a year being either inadequate, or too expensive, or both, is an impressive but impersonal tragedy. A million of anything is beyond my comprehension.

One poorly conceived house is something to grieve over, particularly if it happens to be mine. The place where my concern properly begins is with my house. If my house turns out to be less rewarding than it might have been, or more expensive than it should have been, this is not the fault of a professional builder or architect or banker or real-estate salesman. It is my fault.

This book will tell you how to avoid my mistakes. When you build a house, the professional skills may come from others, but the thinking has to be done by you. Your house is a very personal thing, yet it is an expensive and permanent thing, the largest expenditure you will ever make. It is as intimate as your bathrobe, but it can not be thrown away or sent to the laundry. The mistakes in it are yours to live with or to correct at your expense. The successes in it are yours to enjoy. Your house is worth thinking about before you ever start to build it.

With thought, you can have a house that is distinctively yours. It will be a good house, a fun house, a year-round house, a life-time house. It will be your shelter, your tool for living, and your statement of belief.

Your house, for the same money, will be bigger and better than an equivalent stereotype. The reason for this is simple. In our enormous expenditure for shelter, we are taking an enormous beating. With this kind of money at stake, cheating is not only inevitable but compulsory. A house is the assembly of many things from many vendors. Assuming that each vendor is honest, he still seeks a larger share of our money for himself. Millions of expensive words are thrown at us to explain what we should buy. No dollars are available from anywhere to explain what we do not need to buy.

Although I will explain to you what you do not need to buy, it is not the purpose of this book to persuade you to spend less money. That would be economic heresy. The purpose of this book is to explain to you how, through thoughtful choice of plan and materials, to get more house for the same money.

If each house consumer can get a better bargain for his money, more houses will be consumed, that is, more people will have houses to live in, more money will have been spent, in total, and the houses themselves will be fit to live in.

At this point I want to tell a story. Some years ago, in West Groton, Dick Bissell was putting up a house. I stopped to look the place over. Dick, a friend and fellow carpenter, rested while I looked.

After a while, when I hadn't managed to find anything very flattering to say, Dick remarked, "You have to admit it's too good for chickens."

I admitted it. He frowned. "But not" he said, "quite big enough for cows."

In that moment I started to write this book. Dick had reminded me that chickens can be persuaded to lay eggs in chicken houses, and cows to give milk in cow houses, but the functions required of houses for humans are more complex. In criticizing his own handiwork, Dick expressed his sorrow that most human houses are less satisfactory than they might and should have been. Somehow, in this largest of human expenditures, we are not getting our money's worth.

The way for you, as one family, to get your money's worth is to decide for yourself, without regard for style, type, sales pressure or advertising, what you want and what you need. In doing this, you will be helped by some knowledge of what it takes to make a house work. This is the function of an engineer, and I propose to help you engineer your house.

There isn't any name or type for your engineered house, no pigeon hole to put it in. For one thing, it most emphatically is not "modern." The first modern architect was a man who looked at his family, his needs, his location, his available materials, his tools, his strength, his resources, then built accordingly. He lived a long while ago.

No one has successfully applied a name to his architectural method. I hope no one ever does. Once a design has been named, the name becomes a style and takes precedence over thought. Having become a style, it stultifies the use of new technology to satisfy old desires. It transforms engineers into draftsmen, and honest carpenters into nail drivers. It inhibits our sense of place, our awareness of the weather, even our knowledge of whether we are comfortable or not. Worst of all, it makes us pay for things we neither need nor want.

The world is strewn with examples of misapplied style. If we like, we can call these houses "non-engineered." The fact of non-engineering, that is, the absence of thoughtful appraisal even in such simple matters as location and orientation, is obvious at a glance.

You can't tell an engineered house by looking at it, at least not from the outside. What may be right for one person/place combination may be wrong for the man next door. An engineered house is a subtle thing. You have to live in it to find out.

If engineering sounds like a difficult process, let me explain how you go about it. I was raised in Iowa to be a journalist. The principle of this profession was stated for me in Rudyard Kipling's jingle:

I have six faithful serving men,
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who.

When, in pursuit of regular meals, I switched from newspapering to engineering, I retained Kipling's what-where-when-how-why-who prescription as a good approach to any task requiring decision. It fits the thinking of an engineer, who hopes to be at once disciplined and creative. It approximates the way in which the first architect-builder-craftsman-head-of-the-family reached his decisions. It will help me help you approach the problem of getting a pleasant house at the lowest cost.

Kipling's chapter headings now become:

WHAT Is Your House?
WHERE Shall It Be?
WHEN Shall It Be Built?
HOW Will It Be Built?
WHY Will You Build It?
WHO Are You?

To begin this book, and the day, what does it take to get morning sunshine into the kitchen?

2. East, west, north, south

The sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west. Your engineering must begin with this obvious but all-governing fact. If bacon is to be fried by daylight, the kitchen will look towards the sunrise. If shaving is to be by daylight, the bathroom will be close by.

Two vital work areas have been located on your previously blank piece of paper. You spend crucial morning minutes at lavatory and stove, and you have given the southeast sun a chance to make those desperate minutes as warm and cheerful as your own nature may permit. The house, at least, will begin its day pleasantly.

A cry, "The eggs are boiling," can be heard through the bathroom wall. Your house, while pleasant, is also efficient.

Since both kitchen and bathroom run on running water, the closer together they are, the shorter the pipes. Your house, already pleasant and efficient, is on its way to being inexpensive.

As the day progresses, your planning follows the sun. By noon it is high in the sky, dead south. Whether you eat lunch, dinner, feed school children, or swallow arthritis pills, the dining table begs to be in the middle of the south side. Next to the kitchen, of course, and at noon the brightest spot in the place.

The sun moves on, and so do you, westward into the living room for a meeting of the garden club. Your guests remark on how warm and sunny the house is, while you smugly refrain from answering that it was planned that way. When the sun glows pink through the southwest windows, the garden club knows that it is time to go home.

Perhaps it is you who come home, unloading in the carport to the west, pausing to admire the sunset.

In the fading light, the living room is being transformed from a part of the outdoors to a place of shelter. You dine, still on the walls warmed by the sun, then in early dark the fireplace is waiting.

When, after a while, the children go to bed, it could well be in the northwest corner. They are rugged creatures, better off in the cold, and they like to sleep a little later in the morning. So do guests, if you have guests instead of, or besides, children.

Finally, off to bed yourselves. A logical place is the northeast corner, where it is moderately warm, moderately quiet, and where the glancing blow of tomorrow's sunrise will tell you it is time to get up and start the day.

Wielding a pencil on the now not-so-blank piece of paper, you will find that the sun has provided your first tentative house plan, or rather not so much a plan as an arrangement, laid out east, west, north, and south something like this:

Compass points on the sketch are for the Northern Hemisphere. South of the equator, south and north are reversed, but east and west remain the same.

This rough beginning is based on what the sun does, and you do, from morning to night. The next consideration is what the sun does from June to December, and what you would like it to do for you in the process. In this sketch again the compass points are for the Northern Hemisphere.

The difference in angle between winter sun and summer sun is a tool which remains unchanged, costs nothing, and can work enormously for your comfort. The amount of difference in angle depends on how far north or south of the equator you live, but for almost all of us there is a useful difference which can be put to work keeping us cool in summer and warm in winter. The angles sketched here are for an average location in a temperate zone--say, Pennsylvania.

There is nothing mysterious, or even clever, about it. In summer we want to keep direct sun out of the house. In winter we want it in. This is exactly what will happen if you put the high side of your roof, and the most glass, facing south in Indiana, and facing north in Peru.

Use of the sun can be checked against an ambitious list of goals. You hope that your house will be warm, dry, light, quiet, clean, useful, spacious, pleasant, and paid for. These goals are points of departure in every decision on what your house shall be.

Some decisions will involve compromise, that is, they will contribute strongly toward one goal but at some expense to another. Use of the sun involves no such compromise. All goals win. No goals lose.

I believe that proper orientation to the sun is the most important of all decisions to be made. It's easy. It helps with everything. It costs nothing. All you need do is observe the sun's behavior and put it to work.

The next step in engineering your house is to see what else you can get for nothing.

3. Uphill and downhill

The behavior of your first bargain, the sun, is predictable. Your next big bargain is scenery, which is whatever you choose to call it and thus not definable. Scenery can be anything from a fine view of the neighbor's wash to a peek at a mountain. To many people scenery is something they see when away from home. This is expensive scenery. The bargain kind is the stuff which is all around you.

Scenery may include the long view from a mountain top, and then again it may be a tree or a bush or a boulder. From the outside looking in, it can be an arrangement of house and hillside and grape arbor that makes you want to meet the people who live there. From the inside looking out, it can be the window-framed view of a maple tree that makes you happy to be where you are.

Scenery is the aggregate of features that give character to a landscape. As was the case with "non-engineering," scenery can best be appreciated when we see it being destroyed. To observe non-scenery, watch the bulldozers work on a "housing" development. With all features gone, the sense of place is gone, and with it anything definable as scenery.

Dollars have been spent to destroy scenery, as if, having cost nothing, it was of no value. The bulldozer is a wonderful tool in the hands of a master craftsman. But to get valuable scenery at no cost, we will keep what we have, disturbing it as little as possible. We will use the bulldozer to build roads, not destroy scenery.

Scenery is two-directional: from outside looking in and from inside looking out. Since even the hardiest of us spend more time inside than out, the inside-looking-out scenery is the more important.

In saying this, I have said that you will worry first about how the world looks to you, then later about how you look to the world. This tells you where to put your scenery, or rather, where to put yourself in relation to the scenery which was there before you came.

If there is scenery all around you to look at, that's wonderful, but if there is only one thing you want to see, let it be outside the kitchen windows. If there is a second thing of pleasant aspect, let it be seen from the living room; if a third thing, from the sewing room, and so on, bearing in mind that the function of scenery is for the visual delight of your waking hours, wherever they may be spent.

If there are things you positively don't want to look at, you can always hide them behind the carport.

Like the sun, scenery can be put to work, but whereas sun-use emerges from known and constant facts, scenery-use benefits from your own imagination. No two desirable house locations are exactly alike, and certainly no two families are alike. Given a beloved site which does not conform to the ideal assumptions of this book, scenery may influence your plan more than anything else except the sun.

You will begin by thinking about scenery from the inside of your house, looking out. Which parts of the environment do you prefer, and which do you want to see at different times of the day? For instance, one decision which everyone must make is what to do about the sunset. It can be a gorgeous part of the scenery, and you get it for nothing. It happens at family time. But the west may also happen to be where the best and the worst of the weather comes from. One way out of this dilemma is to create a sunset place, which will let you take the west when it is wonderful, or leave it alone when it is dangerous.

Trees are bound to influence your house plan and its location. They take a lifetime to grow or a fortune to move. With your pencil poised over a second sheet of paper, it is easier to move yourself. Here are some of the things you might be thinking about as you locate yourself among the existing trees.

No shade wanted in the morning, just trees to look at. A graceful tree to filter the ten o'clock sunlight. No trees obstructing the long view. Solid shade against the mid-afternoon hot time. A gap through which the sunset can be seen, then windbreak trees located accordingl to your location. Since in your dreams you can have anything you want, let there be some really big trees in the background, just to bring everything down to size.

A sketch of this situation would work out something like:

This is a dream, to be sure, but dreams are lying around everywhere, waiting to be realised. Starting with this particular batch of scenery, the house located itself. There is full sun on the terrace for morning coffee. Full sun again at eleven o'clock, the best sunbathing time. Shade is available against the afternoon heat, and naturally there is a breeze from the west. The arriving guest at sunset time quickly feels at home.

If you are gregarious, you have the reassuring nearness of the road. If you are retiring, you have a screen of shrubs. If indolent, you have at least three good places for a hammock, and if athletic, there is a lawn and a croquet set. If you are hungry, the kitchen is handy, and for those who just can't stand it anywhere very long, there is a waiting automobile.

Scenery is what you see from where you live. If your scenery is to cost you nothing, you will leave it where it is, and if that scenery already has character, you will make only minor modifications. You will move yourself around, move the house around, but you will not move the scenery around until you have lived with it for a while as it is.

4. Goals

You hope that your house will be warm, dry, light, quiet, clean, useful, spacious, pleasant, and paid for.

Warm means that you can control temperature rather than put up with it. Warm when and where you want it warm and cool when and where you want it cool.

Dry means not only that the roof doesn't leak, but the floor doesn't either. It means that condensation will not be destructive. It means that your house will take the trouble out of wet weather and leave only the fun of it.

Light means the enjoyment of dawn, daylight, dusk, and darkness, as they occur. It means maximum use of natural light and effective control of artificial light.

Quiet means freedom from irritating noise. It means that assorted noisemakers may live together in peace, and that desired sounds may be well heard.

Clean means freedom from undesired clutter and unwanted foreign material. It means relative ease in keeping your house that way.

Useful means that you, the occupant, will be more important than the house; that you will be able to work and play as the owner rather than the servant of the building.

Spacious means that the controlled portion of the world which is your own shall be somewhat larger in proportion to your dimensions than a bird's nest is to the bird, or a fox's den to a fox. It shall seem less crowded with occupants than a chicken house is with chickens, or a barn with cows.

Pleasant means that the joint can jump with jive or dream with Debussy, that it will be so nice to come home to, that it will have warmth beyond function, and satisfaction beyond reason.

Paid for means that the realisation of these goals has not imposed a crippling sacrifice upon you, such as staying too long away from home in order to get home paid for. It means that you will get your money's worth, and that the initial cost of your estate will be low enough to let you begin to build it now.

Here we have specified what the structure is required to be and do. In designing a machine, I begin with a "specification," which is nothing more than a set of goals. Frequently the goals contradict each other, with one goal saying that the machine's base be heavy and another goal saying that it be light. These contradictions result in compromise.

Successful house planning also involves some compromises, but most of your goals will aid rather than defeat each other, provided you do not try to force them into a preconceived architectural style. To show how goals may aid each other, here is a sketch drawn with just about as few lines as possible.

If you had to live in one room, nothing much simpler than this could be devised. The basic structure includes a high wall and windows facing the equator, a single roof plane that slopes upward, again towards the equator, a low wall with smaller windows facing the polar region, two end walls, and heavy curtains which may be drawn across the southern windows.

Several goals have been met already. Your house is warm when you need warmth; cool when you want it to be cool. When rain falls, it is pleasantly outside your windows. In any season, available sunlight is used or not, as you please. Because of its shape, your house, or rather, your room, is acoustically excellent. That's four goals down and five to go.

To make the house clean and useful, further work may be required, but nothing in the design so far has done these goals harm. The room, in any size, has a built-in feeling of spaciousness. Night-closed or day-lit, winter or summer, the room is pleasant. As for the last goal, because the structure is simple, it will be easy to pay for.

Perhaps if you were a hermit, the design of your house would be complete right now. Since your requirements are probably more complicated than those of a hermit, more decisions must be made. As your decisions become specific, one goal may be satisfied but others harmed. You may be forced to retreat from a decision which in the beginning seemed brilliant.

It saves time to test each decision against all goals at once, rather than work first toward one, then another. However, a start must be made somewhere. I choose to begin thinking about the hard facts of the structure itself, in this order:

5. Upstairs and downstairs
6. Arrangement for use
7. Shape
8. Heat
9. Light
10. Air
11. Noise
12. The inside
13. The outside
14. Flexibility
15. Efficiency
16. Pleasure
17. Where do you go from here?

5. Upstairs and downstairs

How many floors is your house going to have? Before you give your answer, let me remind you that the simplest answer to any such question is inevitably one. If your answer is to be any number other than one, there will have to be a reason.

A decision to have more than one floor can be reached for any one of several reasons, but the number of such reasons is shrinking. About all the reasons left are site use, orientation, special family needs, special hobby needs, special emotional needs, or, the plain statement that you want it that way, if you honestly know your own mind, is as good a reason as any.

Unfortunately, the how-many-floors-question is so fraught with built-in notions that, in the argument, reason gets left behind. Architects lose their clients, and clients their architects, in heated debate over the difference between reason and prejudice, or rather, who is doing the thinking and who is just sitting there.

What is a floor? The usual choices for domestic structures, one, two, three or more floors, are called different names in different countries. So that we may communicate with each other, I will lay down some definitions.

A "ground floor" will be taken to mean any floor level which gives access directly to or immediately above ground level. By this definition, a house built on a hillside might have two or even three ground floors, depending on the steepness of the hill.

An "upper floor" will be any floor level reached by one or more flights of stairs from a ground floor, that is, any floor where in case of fire you have to jump out a window to reach ground. The phrases first floor, second floor and so on are variously interpreted and will only confuse us.

A "basement," or, to be specific I should say a "full basement," is located in a hole dug in the ground, from which stairs must be climbed to reach ground level. Most of a basement's vertical dimension is below ground, though it can admit light by the device of raising the "ground" floor somewhat.

A "semi-basement" is a type of ground floor which has an earth-retaining wall on one side, but appears at ground level on the other. The definitive difference is that water which runs into a semi-basement will run out again, but water which runs into a full basement will not.

An "attic" is the interior space created by the combination of a steep roof and a flat ceiling below it.

So much for the definitions. Your next concern is how much space you need on each of these floors, if there are to be more than one. I have tried this for myself. Estimating space requirements for all activities of the day and year, and listing the most efficient location for each, I find that everything has gone into the ground floor. In terms of most convenient use, all other floors are blank.

If you will make a list for yourself, I think you will find that anything you want to do can be done more efficiently on a ground floor. Therefore, moving anything off the ground floor will involve compromise between goals. Thus a square foot of space on the ground floor can be called standard, or value one, and a square foot on any other floor is sub-standard, or value less than one. To repeat, if your house is to have more than one floor, there will have to be a good reason.

Depending on circumstance, there can be lots of good reasons. An obvious reason is a building site so small that multiple floors are required to make enough room. This reason applies only to urban centers where land prices are staggering.

A second good reason involves a site where the view is improved by placing the viewer nine feet higher up. In this case the daytime rooms probably belong on the upper floor, a fact which may or may not represent compromise.

Another reason is the conviction that a high house carries more prestige value than a low one, and thus more satisfaction to the owner. This is purely a feeling and is not debatable. The feeling comes with interesting variations. A friend of mine, clergyman by trade, told me that he enjoys living and working on an upper floor, because it lets him look out over the rooftops of his neighbors. I myself enjoy looking out of my office windows into the tops of trees, which is quite a different emotion, especially since ground level is on the other side. I believe that the best answer to these height wishes is to put the house on rising ground.

The most common reason for an upper floor is an emotional need to walk upstairs to bed. There are people who have no trouble in a ground-floor motel but find it difficult to sleep "downstairs" at home. The structural reasons for placing bedrooms "upstairs" are historical and have all vanished. All the remaining reasons, such as fire safety, to mention only one, indicate that if there are to be multiple floors, the bedrooms should be on the lowest floor.

Fire does not even begin to approach the automobile as a taker of life, but it remains a good sound thoughtful and emotional reason for sleeping downstairs. Firewise, if you must have multiple floors, put the waking hour rooms upstairs. It is a journalistic convention to say that the fire victims were "trapped by flames." The words have a dramatic ring. In most cases, let's say nineteen out of twenty, that isn't what happened. What happened was that the victims were suffocated by smoke before they woke up. Smoke rises, and the higher up you are sleeping, whether in hotel, mansion, or tenement, the smokier it gets. Flames burn upward too, but the smoke they make gets there a lot quicker.

With all reason telling us that bedrooms should be downstairs, emotion remains a hard fact. We spend a third of our lives in bed, though asleep most of that time. I know a man who worked out his own compromise. He admits the validity of all this reasoning, then walks up four steps to his bedroom level, and is content.

Small departures from a single floor level are useful in many ways. Three steps up to an office or two steps down to a living room contribute much to the desired mood. They represent compromise in moving pianos and wheel chairs, but otherwise not much harm is done. An area broken by minor changes in level remains, by my definition, a single floor.

The multiple-floor house is one in which one usable floor is built directly above another. At best this is a compromise, involving extra work in building it and extra work in living there. There has to be a reason. In my opinion the best reason of all is to take advantage of terrain. Here is an attractive and not uncommon example:

An abrupt hillside has been put to work, providing three ground-level floors. If the garage is to the right, or facing the equator, the public entrance is on the lowest floor. Two stairways later, the world has been well lost. If the road and garage are toword the pole, the situation may be even better, with all floors well lost, and stairs for the tired home-comer to walk down instead of up. Either situation can be delightful, with the choice depending on terrain, road location, and the preferred scenery.

The so-called split-level house, a combination of two ground floors and one upper floor, when properly sited makes use of a gentle slope, like this:

The design of this house is suited only to a small, sloping lot. Regrettably, the design became a style. Millions of split-levels have been forced upon level ground, where the arrangement makes no sense at all.

A medium slope suggests an inherently simpler and more useful design with two ground floors.

If the road is on the left, the passerby sees a single-floor house, and if on the right, multiple floors. The living room can be on either floor, according to mood, scenery, compass directions, and the occupants' desire for privacy. There is a house next door to me, built in 1735, which has two living rooms, one up, one down, one north, one south, both exactly at ground level, and the happy owner can take his choice.

In each of these three multiple-level sketches, use of a hillside, steep or gentle, has been the motivating reason. Each sketch shows the ground dug away to some extent, though later on I will suggest that no digging need have been done.

Having explored some reasons for multiple levels, let's take a look at non-reason. The full-basement house, built on level ground, looks like this:

You are looking at the most common of all multiple-level designs, and the one for which I can find no reason whatever. I have stared at this design from every angle. I have tried to find some justification for it--structural, technical, useful, cultural, emotional, or economic. Why anyone, nowadays, should dig a big hole in the ground and then put a house in it escapes me completely.

I know what the reasons used to be, but the historical and technical reasons for basements have long since disappeared. There is not one single thing on my list of day-round and year-round activities that I would put in a basement unless the basement were already there. To be sure, you can use a basement if it's yours and you're stuck with it. Once the potato bin, coal bin, and jam shelves have quit working, it's better to fix up a basement for something else than to let the rats move in. But it's expensive. I wouldn't do it again if I had the whole job to do over.

The full basement violates every one of our goals. Only with effort and expense can it be kept anywhere near as warm, dry, light, quiet, clean, useful and pleasant as the same amount of space on a ground floor can be for less money.

The cost of a basement keeps adding up in many ways. First the builder has to dig a hole, overturning gravel and rock which were better left undisturbed. He casts that material aside, covering good topsoil and making a mess of everything, then comes back later and wonders where to put it.

The builder then has to line the hole with earth-retaining walls, which to be of equal quality are more expensive than walls above ground. Having dug a well, the builder now hopes that the walls of his well will keep water out. He also has to figure a way to get light, air, and people in, and such furniture and equipment as the basement is supposed to contain.

He winds up with space which is sub-substandard, or value far below one, yet it has cost more, all told and by the time it has become usable at all, than equal room above ground. I'm stumped. The emotional need to get onto an upper floor I can understand, but when it comes to basements, I can't even think of an emotional reason.

The visible evidence seems to point toward a house which is all or mostly ground floor, possibly an upper floor, and certainly no basement, but I'm still not quite satisfied. It is not safe to abandon any widespread practice without trying to understand how it got to be that way.

The history of upper floors and how they acquired their present inertia is easy to understand. The first houses were set high on tree trunks or posts, for safety. When man learned to build fence, he could make a larger area safe from tigers, and his house came down to the ground. More convenient that way.

Some time thereafter man started building his houses higher in a race for prestige. Prestige-hunting has been around a long while, and a castle is higher than a hut. Though castles attract the enemy, they make nice places to watch for his approach.

At various times upper floors have also been used for methods of defense, such as shooting arrows, throwing rocks, and pouring boiling water. In fact, the hot water method of discouraging unwelcome visitors was the origin of the second floor overhang which persists in many houses. I still get an uneasy feeling down the back of my neck when standing before one of these places. The dropping of garbage from an upper window was another popular method of indicating disapproval.

In these gentler times, with defense no longer an object, many people continue to refer to the first upper floor as the "first" (meaning important) floor. The owners live there, in genteel inaccessibility. The servants live on the lower floor, where the kitchen is, and it is the servants, where there are any left, who do most of the stair climbing.

This situation became exaggerated back when well-to-do men lived in cities, where they chose to stay as close as possible to others of the well-to-do. They built like this:

Here the servants cooked in the basement, lugged the food up two flights to the boss's dining room, and from the kitchen, late at night, climbed five flights to their well-earned rest. Roughly a third of the volume inside the house was devoted to stairways. Another third was devoted to servants, all of whom had bulging leg muscles.

Unable to tolerate the airlessness, lightless-ness, and general discomfort of his town house for long at a time, the well-to-do man fled to the country. Taking his habits with him, he continued to build high houses. A common rule of behavior is that in "getting away from it all," a man finds or creates an environment as much as possible like the one he seeks to escape.

Another man of prestige, the working sailor turned shipowner, built his house high for a view of the ocean on which he spent most of his life. There was even a special room at the top from which his wife, and after retirement he himself, could watch for the vessels' safe return. Thus began still another architectural style which was lifted out of context and carried far inland.

Generally speaking, men of prestige have built high houses for one reason or another. Perhaps the universal reason was that they could afford to do so and didn't mind having other people know it. Though this attitude has become less fashionable, it is not surprising that prestige and height are firmly associated in the minds of many people.

Men of less prestige also built high houses, for a more practical reason. They wanted to keep warm. A tall house, roughly cubical in shape, exposes less of its surface per unit volume than any other form. This fact was important when no thermal insulation was available, and fuel to be had only with axe or pick.

It was nice to build a cooking fire in the kitchen, which was the only room used much in winter, and have it take a bit of the chill off the room above. There is a popular notion to the effect that "heat rises." Heat doesn't rise, it goes in all directions, but warm air rises, and a hole in the ceiling will let a little warm air through from the stove below. Notice in passing why the bedroom came to be upstairs. There was just enough heat up there to let you get safely under the covers.

With technology and availability of manufactured materials, practical reasons for height have vanished. Prestige remains, if you think so, and the desire to create landmarks, or perhaps simply to reach for the sky.

Historical reasons for wanting to go underground are somewhat harder to trace. When man first discovered that he possessed the technology and tools to emerge from his cave, he was probably glad to get out of it, though I imagine many felt homesick for water dripping from the roof. In any event, the cave man had not dug his cave. It was there, he found it, and its entrance was in the side of a hill. It would not have occurred to him to dig a hole in level ground and live in it.

Possibly the first basement was designed as a dungeon for the purpose of storing political prisoners where their shrieks could not be heard, Succeeding generations, running short of political prisoners, found the old dungeons a fine place to store wine, where it was protected against theft and against sudden temperature changes. In the meantime the wineless and prisoner-less peasant got along fine without a basement.

With more people and thus more crime, basements acquired purpose--for the criminal to hide or plot in with no light showing, for the honest man to hide either his valuables or himself when outnumbered by criminals, for the general purpose of doing anything which for some reason it were better that other people didn't know about. Notice, please, that all basements so far have been completely below ground and the farther the better. The basement with windows defeats any point one might have for being underground.

North America, with its potatoes, may have provided the first practical reason for a poor but honest man to have a basement. The fairly constant low temperature which never goes below freezing, the high humidity which keeps the spuds from drying out, the dim light (one tiny window is permissible) which deters them from sprouting--all are exactly right for the storage of potatoes, whose earliest charm was that they could be kept all winter and still leave something to eat next spring.

The potato cellar began modestly, with a hole dug inside one corner of the house's foundation. These conditions were not right for smoked meat, which could stand freezing and was left in the smokehouse, but when the science of preserving fresh vegetables and fruit came along, the potato cellar had another occupant. Under pressure from hundreds of glass jars containing a winter's balanced diet, the cellar began to grow, and now there had to be a stairway in order to get there conveniently from the kitchen.

The idea behind central heating was to have one stove to tend instead of many. In the absence of any means of circulation except the fact that warm air or water will rise and cool air or water will fall, that one stove, now called a furnace, had to be down below. Once again the potato cellar was enlarged, becoming less suitable for potatoes, in order to make room for the furnace. Some of the early furnaces burned wood, which had to be carried downstairs from the woodshed, but coal keeps all right underground, so the coal bin was added, then later a mechanical stoker to feed coal into the furnace. Petroleum fuel took care of that rather quickly, with the oil tank sitting beside the now unused coal bin.

With all of this machinery to be serviced, you need more light in the basement to see your way around, and you need room to add pipes from the furnace, so you keep digging and add some windows to the dungeon. Presently--to everyone's delight--the washing machine arrives, but with no place to put it upstairs, the laundry sits incongruously between oil tank, furnace, coal bin, a few leftover potatoes, and the now empty jam shelves.

Then along came forced circulation of heat. The principal function of the basement had been to put the stove below us, but with forced circulation you can put it anywhere you like. Grocery stores already have left the jam shelves and the potato bin to gather dust, and the basement has lost any function it ever may have had. My personal conviction is that the basement never had a particularly good reason, but sort of grew on us with one thing leading to another.

In any event, as of now I no longer store a year's supply of potatoes. I have not yet had to defend myself from attacking savages. My natural eagerness for prestige is not affected by distance above ground. I do not depend on one stove to keep me warm. I do have an attractive hillside, but there will be more on that subject later.

For the moment, I commend one floor to your attention as the right number with which to begin planning your house, though more may be added as we go along. For the sake of simplicity our thinking and sketching will continue with one floor as the point of departure.

6. Arrangement for use

This is the horizontal arrangement department, or which-end-is-which. With one floor to deal with, you can visualise what goes next to what on one piece of paper. How can your house be useful to you, as well as warm, dry, light, quiet, clean, spacious, pleasant, and paid for? Briefly, what is your house supposed to do?

We are not yet looking for a precise floor plan showing dimensions of walls and partitions. What we want now is an arrangement of uses. The number of uses to which your house may at one time or another be put is unpredictably large. The number of possible arrangements of these uses is infinite, but that's all right because all you need is one good one. To find it, you begin with the predictable uses, emphasising those which you believe most important, and arrange them in a pattern where their relationship will be agreeable to you.

Your problem is exactly opposite to that of the architect who is hired to produce, for mass consumption, a house plan suited to the average family. He is inhibited by the knowledge that the average family, even as the average man, is a statistic. It doesn't exist. Through its life and growth the living family engages in an enormous number of activities, with no two families ever being more than very superficially alike.

The number of requirements placed upon houses has grown so much that no one house can possibly include them all. Fortunately, neither you nor anyone else wants them all, but what you do want, you want all the way. You want it to be good. You can afford to have it good if you're willing to decide between the uses you want and the ones you can do without.

It will help us to remember uses if we look at where they came from and how they developed. What happened to houses, not in terms of how they look, but in terms of what they are used for, was this: The one-room hut, cabin, or tepee had one function, shelter from the weather. Within this shelter the family cooked, ate, sat, and slept. The outdoors was used for everything else.

As it grew, the cabin was divided into four use areas called kitchen, dining room, living room, and bedroom. The four-room, four-use house was established as a basic pattern. All other functions were met either by the outdoors or an assortment of outbuildings. With each new function a new outbuilding arrived, specifically designed for its task, until the standard four-use house was tiny beside the barn and its growing brood of useful shelters.

Then several things happened to increase the importance, size, and use-density of the house. Water under pressure, plumbing, and the flush toilet created the bathroom. Here vanished one outbuilding which, though inconvenient, had served as a useful retreat.

Later a dramatic shift from farm to factory as a way of earning a living destroyed the barn and most of the other outbuildings, leaving no place for the host of side activities which they had sheltered. The demise of the barn served to overcrowd the house, with all part-time activities from carpentry to trumpet practice being attempted first in the kitchen, from where they were forced into the ever growing basement. The obvious solution of adding a low cost, barn-style utility wing to the house had trouble getting started, possibly because it looked "countrified," or because while people had to walk to the factory, urban lot sizes were much too small.

Central heating brought even more tasks inside the house, where they could be performed close to the furnace, not to mention away from the neighbours' curiosity. The mass move from country to town had eliminated even the outdoors as a useful place, until the automobile rolled people out of the jammed city, increased lot sizes and brought the outdoors back to feeble life.

The house, once required to provide only areas for cooking, eating, sitting, and sleeping, must now provide suitable quarters for almost everything we feel like doing. In an attempt to define more use-areas, architects call them playroom, mud room, workshop, hobby room, rumpus room, family room, studio. All of these names are epitaphs on the tombstone of the barn. Many of these uses are now jammed most inconveniently into existing attics and basements. I contend that the use of attics and basements for these purposes is a device of improvisation; that they get used not because they are suitable, but because they are there.

Not only are the old needs still with us; more have been added. For one thing, since we now live by numbers, made out in triplicate, an office is required. Sound by electronics has made it difficult for the family to sit together in the living room, therefore a noise room is advisable. The world's love affair with the automobile has led many people to believe, though I do not, that the auto need be housed in greater luxury than the horse ever was. Hence the built-in garage. Last, a machine room is needed for convenient housing of all the pumps, motors, burners and blowers that make the house run.

The obvious conclusion is that houses aren't big enough. Where most houses have shrunk in floor area, they should have grown in order to accommodate the demands placed upon them. Therefore your house must be designed so that you can have plenty of room to use at a price you can afford.

The how of that will be explored later, but the basic idea has already been suggested. We are in the habit of discussing building costs in terms of dollars per square foot. This ignores the fact that some of the square feet in your house will be very expensive; many others can be very cheap. The trick is to get more room by holding down the expensive footage while splurging on the low-dollar areas.

Let me now pretend to be the head of an average family, which I have already said doesn't exist, and try to arrange a house for myself. I would prefer the exploratory mistakes to be mine, rather than yours. The eventual successes of your own special arrangement will be yours.

To see how much room may be required, I will try a simple arrangement of obvious uses. By the rules of the game, this is pure speculation. I do not know where the road is or the scenery is. The only thing my sketch can relate to for sure is south. I know where south is. It's always at the bottom of the page, with north at the top, the way maps are drawn.

The first lines do not represent walls. They indicate family movement and relationship of function. Beginning with kitchen to the south, the first try turns out to be a sort of rough oval, like this:

Stepping back to take a look, I notice that every function seems to want at least a corner sticking into the sunlight, and at least the possibility of an outside door. This left a hole in the middle, where the living room, which I had forgotten, became a hallway between other functions. Going round the oval, the sequence of uses is fair for a starter, but only fair.

One thing looks good. The kitchen is the command post, the pilot's cabin, with sunshine all day long. Even so, it may be too far from the carport, for lugging groceries. Much else is wrong. Eat is in the wrong place, because it separates cook and wash. Play doesn't need that choice afternoon area. Move it to where work is now and move work to where it can touch both car and mud. I forgot the machine room, which wants to be somewhere not too far from the plumbing. Sleeping areas are too close together for my taste. Plumbing areas are too far apart. If the road is to the west, where is the front door? Pretty bad, now that I look at it.

From studying this not too successful sketch, what did I learn about my own feeling for arrangement? I learned that the barn functions (vehicle storage, outdoor clothes and gear, physical work, physical play) tend to group themselves, as if they belonged in a separate or semi-separate building.

I found that the word bedroom is too limiting. What my pencil keeps wanting to draw could better be called private room, a sort of apartment, whether large or small, in which the comparative privacy desired for resting the mind in sleep can be extended to using it in work.

Pursuing the private room idea, I found that to be effective it must be repeated for each generation to be housed. Assuming the presence of either children or parents, I will love them more if their private rooms are some distance away from mine.

I learned that if too many activities abut my living room, it becomes overflow space, a hallway, a battleground rather than a meeting ground. With the privacy function and the play function removed to separate apartments, the living room can stand comfortably between, getting back to its proper social function, a pleasant place for people to sit and enjoy each other.

I now realise that the name living room has not been helpful. We live all over the place. Let's call it social room. Now that I know what this area is for, what other functions can be left in close relationship?

The most social thing we do is eat. From camp-fire through banquet hall and back to breakfast nook this one fact of society has never changed. The social status of the cook, however, has had its ups and downs. Now it's up, possibly up to stay. With no servants left for most of us, and with cooking regarded as a social art rather than a menial task, it is difficult to draw hard lines between the functions of cook, eat, and sit. In terms of dividing the house into use groups, we're back to the big stove-warmed kitchen, where it seems they had the right idea after all.

I'll try a sketch of how the use groups shape up now.

From this sketch I have learned that what I really want is four houses, or semi-houses, with the four probably, although not necessarily, in contact with each other. I observe that the social house is the old basic house, less outbuildings, and with bedrooms enlarged into semi-houses of their own.

I also observe that all four houses enjoy both north and south exposure, and that no house seems particularly willing to give up either. For a moment I am convinced that the arrangement I seek will run east and west, a hundred yards long and one room wide. It might come to that, but for now I will elect to favour the social house with both north and south exposure, then see what I can do with the others.

In order to pull the four houses back into one, some compromises will be needed. I'll give up my rights to the physical playroom, letting the children own it. I will undertake to carry groceries to the kitchen, and I will then walk back to my own workshop, with the resulting arrangement something like this:

Here the four houses have been joined almost without alteration. I moved the playroom from the barn into private house Two, and I compromised by calling my own office the library. Placing the forgotten function of read next to eat is not a bad idea. I know one family that combined the two, placing four walls of books around the dining table so that points under discussion could be settled almost without getting up.

Though it isn't fair to show detail this early in the game, I couldn't resist sketching back-to-back fireplaces in social room and playroom. The opportunity was too good to miss. Obviously the playroom now becomes a junior grade social room, not too far from the food supply, and is available in case of an overflow crowd.

The machine room's noisemakers are handy for servicing, but I don't like the expensively spread out plumbing. Also I'm not too happy about my own workshop being on the extreme northwest corner. I do have some question about placing the adult section farther from the road than the non-adult section.

Leaving the road to the west, reversing private houses One and Two, and juggling a little, I come up with this suggestion:

Not too bad. Hot water now gets to the kitchen quicker than before. Night traffic doesn't disturb the children. The cook can see who's coming to the front door. However, by being cramped back to the social house, private house One has lost most of its charm and character. Sewing, for instance, has to be done in the coldest corner, or moved completely to the guest room.

Now I'll try one of the tricks of the game. If, without changing a line, I move the road from west to east and turn the whole thing mirror image end for end, here is what happens:

The effect or morning sun and afternoon sun has been reversed, to the benefit of many uses. Kitchen on the southeast, children northwest, social room at its best in the afternoon. Carport gets morning sun. Private house One is only a little improved. It continues to suffer by the loss of southern exposure.

Leaving the road to the east, I'll try once more. This time I'll grab the good spots for myself, assuming that I want to be next to the road, have the most sunshine and the most room to work. It might turn out this way:

There are use arrangements here that I rather like. What I did was put my own office in the barn, where it has room to grow and is well removed from the social house, yet convenient for fixing teeth or selling insurance.

The general symmetry of this layout has its advantages too. I can move the road back to the west, turn the house end for end, with nothing much changed as long as north and south are not disturbed. Thus far it would seem that a clear division between the four use houses works out well.

These exercises in arrangement could go on and on, but to no point, because the sketches here all assume the same non-existent average family and the same set of obvious uses. All these arrangements result in houses of about the same size and shape. The game begins to get interesting when the house being arranged is specifically yours, with you supplying your own special use list.

Special uses have so far been omitted: the music rooms, sun decks, greenhouses, studios, dark rooms, which make your life something more than a matter of survival. If you think so, a special use can be more important than cook-eat-sit-sleep, causing your planning to begin with a different set of assumptions. We will look next at some of the ways in which special uses might affect your house.

7. Shape

I believe that the shape of your house will best be determined by what you want to do in it. Please do not arbitrarily select an exterior style, then force your family into it like butter into a crock. I have little patience with those who begin a house plan anywhere other than from the inside.

I have even less patience with the opposite extreme, which is the business of doing something unusual for the sake of being different. This practice is bound to be expensive, and, because it didn't start with a pattern of uses, it accomplishes nothing.

Design from use treads most of the time down the middle of the road. It is neither conformity nor non-conformity. It ignores both. In this frame of mind, you are willing to undergo the risk of being different only if it is going to get you more for your money. If you admit to a special interest, here is a solid reason for shaping your house accordingly. If the desired shape remains essentially buildable, your house will cost no more, yet it will be more useful to you and therefore worth more to you.

For what do you live? You might be an outdoor gardener, orchid grower, interpretive dancer, gourmet, party-giver, musician, photographer, or painter in oils. You might be a gymnast, wood-carver, bibliophile, botanist, butterfly collector, or the best billiards player in town.

In the interest of earning a living at home, you might be a lawyer, accountant, optometrist, real-estate salesman, or manufacturer of special-purpose ball bearings. As a sideline, you might cut semi-precious stones, cast dentures, make and sell horse-radish sauce, assemble audio amplifiers, or deal in tropical fish.

You probably prefer to eat and sleep at home, yet you want to do something else there too. The list of special things you might want to do is remarkably long.

To take a non-strenuous example, let's say you are an addicted sunbather. You're in a fairly cool climate where the family sometimes needs protection from wind, and you prefer to sunbathe unobserved by the general public. Your house might work out like this:

It's a small house and hasn't cost much, yet its shape lets you indulge your favorite pastime in comfort and privacy. Granted a suitable terrain and water supply, you can have a swimming hole too, but that subject comes later.

Here is another small house. In this instance you are semi-retired, with children long gone. Your two reasons for staying alive are gardening and entertaining.

When you started out forty years ago, with less money than you have now, you put some plumbing and glass in an old workshop, like this:

You had north light and south light, used according to what the plants needed. You ate and entertained in the middle of your greenhouse, then slept after the company went home. You have a little more room now, but your domestic inclinations haven't changed much.

If at the same age and the same state of poverty you had been artists, working at it, you might have arranged the same building like this:

Your ingenuity paid off, you've made a little money, and you're still working. What you have now is:

You had to do a bit of thinking on this one. In building your house, you made the studio almost a separate structure. That let your studio roof lift towards the pole, a professional requirement, and your house roof to the equator, a comfort requirement. Better light was provided for both uses, while your painting and living habits remained about the same.

Not everything has to run east and west. Here is what you might build if you were an insurance agent with eight children. You're a good family man, you're crowding the dollar, you want to have your office at home, and you can't have the kids around bothering the customers.

You do a lot of work here, and you have a lot of fun. Often there are two parties going at once, but with back-to-back fireplaces and back-to-back bathrooms your big, useful house didn't cost nearly as much as your customers think it did.

I know a movie enthusiast who has his own projection room, and a member of the theatre group who has his own rehearsal stage. There is a small arms expert who built his own indoor firing range. There is a musician who likes to record jam sessions in his own sound studio. I know a man who just likes to watch people have a good time, so he built the only room in town big enough to throw a dance.

In talking about shape, arrangement for use cannot be forgotten. All of the easy-to-say tag names, Colonial, Garrison, Modern, Ranch, Early American, Split, Rambler, or whatever else the advertisements happen to be currently misusing, attempt to impose a preconceived shape upon what happens inside your house. If you plan from the inside out, you can have what you want, yet the result need not look very much different from the house next door.

Whatever shape you build, you can be sure that someone will hang a tag name on it and tell you what it is. A master carpenter friend of mine, under whose gentle supervision I learned the trade, had the right answer for this one.

We're laying boards on a roof, saws and hammers working away. In comes the curious driver, who always says, "Hey Frank, what'r'ya buildin'?"

Boss Frank, anxious to get on with it, always says, "Started out to be an eight-holer, but we're licked. Can't find a big enough board."

8. Heat

The subject of heat comes early on our list of what to build, because heat is expensive. Heating equipment is expensive. Fuel is expensive. Whenever there is money to be spent, other people--manufacturers, advertisers, salesmen, installers--are understandably anxious to advise us how to spend it. Whatever is expensive thus becomes controversial, with strong men coming almost to blows over this or that method of heating a house, not realising that most of their arguments are unrelated to heat itself, which is where the discussion should have started in the first place.

Heat is a rather complex subject technically, but that need not worry us here. The principles of heat flow are simple, and do not change. There is a lot of money to be saved by ignoring controversy and looking instead at the principles.

In a house, what do we want to heat? "Heating a house" is not quite the correct statement. What we want to heat is ourselves, or more correctly, to keep ourselves losing heat at the desirable rate.

We are all food-burning stoves. Our built-in thermostats keep our insides warmed to 98.6° Fahrenheit, or thereabouts, with almost any variation therefrom causing discomfort.

To keep the thermostat in control, we lose heat constantly through our outsides. This constant loss is essential to a feeling of well-being. We all want our outside to be cooler than our inside, but how much cooler depends on many things. Choices as to desirable skin temperature can range all the way from 50 to 80, or even wider under special conditions. The choice of the moment depends on our disposition, mood, physical make-up such as depth of capillaries and amount of fatty layer beneath the skin, contents of the stomach, and probably most important of all, amount of physical exertion.

With all these variables, if one person says he feels too warm while right beside him another is feeling cool, they may both be correct. Another complicating factor is that many people don't really know whether they are warm or cold: That will be discussed later. This section is concerned with what it takes to keep our bodies losing heat at the desired rate, whatever that may be.

There are four and only four ways of keeping a human body desirably warm. The first is clothing, which serves to slow down the loss of the body's own heat. The second is to place it in contact with warmed objects, such as going to bed with a hot water bottle. This is called conduction, and is not practical for those who want to keep moving about. The third is to surround the body with warmed air. This is called convection, which reduces the rate at which the body loses heat by conduction to the air which touches it. The fourth method is the most common of all. That is to environ ourselves within warm solids such as walls, or else stand in the sun, which amounts to the same thing. This reduces the heat loss from the body by radiation, since the human body, being warm, radiates heat constantly to all surrounding bodies which are cooler than it is.

What complicates the discussion is that all of these factors--heat retention by clothing, convection through air, radiation to solids, and to a small degree conduction--are going on all the time. What saves money is to arrange the house so that it has more or less of one or the other, according to taste.

Obviously the cheapest way to keep our skin at the desired temperature is to put on or remove clothing. This method controls heat loss at the source. In public places, social convention frequently limits us in this regard, but at home we can make effective use of dressing for comfort.

Since the addition or removal of clothing has its reasonable limits, some heat control has to be added to the house. There are just two ways a house can help keep us warm; by convection and by radiation. Every house ever built uses both of them in some combination. They are both going on all the time, although in varying proportions.

Most heating equipment offered for sale is somewhat misnamed. For instance, a "radiator" is not primarily a radiator, or source of radiant heat. It is mostly a convector, or means of warming air. Most of its heat reaches us by air movement and not-by radiation. For another example, the often repeated arguments between "hot air" and "hot water" heating systems are frivolous. Both systems refer simply to the manner of conveying heat from a single furnace to remote locations. The end result of both systems is to fill a room with warm air. Thus they are both convection systems and you can take your choice.

Having filled a room with warm air, the walls and ceiling get warm eventually, and the radiation loss from our bodies to the surrounding enclosure is diminished. It takes time to heat up a cold house because air is a very poor conductor of heat. If the sun is shining, however, we are instantly warm, because there is no time lag in radiant heat. You feel it right now, just as you can tell with your eyes shut whether your hand is in shadow or in sun.

Heating a house, and by heating the house, heating you, always involves some combination of convection and radiation. Indoors, neither can exist in pure form without starting up the other. The difference lies in which happens first, and most.

Convection begins by heating air. Radiation begins by heating solids. Emphasis on the latter method is more comfortable to the human body, which exists in a state of well-being if the air around it is cooler than it is and the surrounding solids slightly warmer.

Unfortunately, the equipment for heating the solid part of your house costs more than the equipment for heating the air inside it. Artificial radiant heat is comfortable but expensive. The radiant heat which comes to us from the sun, if and when the sun is shining, costs nothing.

All of this has a direct bearing on the shape of a house, as well as the method of heating it. I mentioned earlier that at one point in time and technology, houses were built in cube shapes to cut down on heat loss. With technology, manufactured materials, and machines to keep a slow fire burning all night, we can go back to some earlier methods of keeping warm.

For thousands of years the sun was man's only source of warmth. It cost nothing then, it costs nothing now. I've already sketched a way to take advantage of this bargain. Here it is again:

This shape of house lets the sun warm us in winter; avoids its heat in summer. A longish structure, facing south, picks up a lot more free heat than a cube-shaped house. Granted this fact, our next problem is to keep the place warm when the sun isn't shining.

Primitive man preferred his cave or hut to face toward the sun, for both light and heat. His wife complained that those shady-side caves were damp and gloomy. Man became somewhat less primitive the night he learned how to build a fire. Not only did it scare off the tigers; it maintained warmth built up during the day before.

In the cave he slept close to the fire, keeping a warmed stone wall behind him and thus getting a little radiant heat from both directions. If the cave wasn't too drafty, he got a bit of convected heat from warm air. Some time later, in the country store, he put his feet on the stove rail, roasted on one side and froze on the other, emulating the King of England, who once wore furs on his back, while exposing his noble chest to the radiant heat in front of him.

People who wanted to use several rooms built a fire in each room, a simple scheme but not very warming, because almost all the heat went up the chimney. Very recently, someone got tired of building and tending fires in every room. He invented central heating, which was a great time-saver in that one fire took care of everything. As long as fires had to be fed with solid fuel, central heating was demanded because of this one advantage. With the coming of fuels which could be piped or wired, central heating lost this advantage but has been hanging on ever since through habit.

What are the disadvantages of central heating? The first is expense; it is costly to install a furnace and costly to provide the pipes and ducts to distribute the heat throughout the house. It is obviously much easier and cheaper to pipe fuel than to pipe heat. The second major disadvantage of central heating is that unless elaborate control equipment is installed, adding still more to the expense, the house will probably be heated to one constant temperature.

For many reasons this uniform temperature is not a good idea, the most obvious being that how warm we want to be, or how cool, depends on what we're doing. Central heating does not adapt itself quickly to the variety or location of our activity. There is no reason for a room to be kept expensively warm if no one's in it. It seems obvious to me that to live, move, work and play in a variety of temperatures is natural, healthful, stimulating, and psychologically and economically correct. Constant temperature for everything is both stultifying and expensive.

Further technical development has let us go back to area heating, back, if you like, to the stove in each room, except that now the "stoves" take care of themselves and do our bidding. This system is much less expensive to install and to operate.

Area heating means that in one way or another we control the temperature of the various parts of our house, up or down, to fit the occupants, what they are doing, how they are clothed, and what time of day it is. For an example, let's take the insurance salesman's house and put some numbers on it.

He works at home, makes average money, has eight children, wants the family to have all the fun they can afford. In this fairly big house they do many different things, and get maximum comfort at the minimum expense for heat. The temperature figures on the sketch are not intended to be exact. They indicate a possible range which one family might elect.

First the reception room. It is a winter's day, temperature below freezing. Customers arrive in heavy coats, which they by habit do not remove until invited to do so. Anything above 60°F in this room is a discourtesy, and the colder the day, the lower the temperature should be.

In his office, the agent is all dressed up in jacket and vest. His mind and personal comfort are both at their best below 70°F, and he shades his own preferences toward the low side, remembering that the customer has just come in from the cold.

Going on around the house, the family eats at 70°F. Food in the stomach makes us feel a trifle cooler on the outside. The kitchen, however, wants to start out much cooler. Not only is there physical activity, but also localised radiant heat from oven and stove. The after-dinner drowse on the sofa wants to be conducted in the warmest temperature of all.

If the bedroom becomes a sewing room during the day, 68°F, to keep the mind clear but the fingers nimble, is about right. Sleeping temperature is a matter of individual choice and I won't argue, except to point out to the habitual window-openers that the body requires less ventilation when it is asleep than when it is awake.

In the enclosed breezeway, where the kids are having a winter-time cookout, it will be warm enough to keep their breath from showing.

Children's bedrooms vary to taste. Study is best at around 65°F for most youngsters, but since I am not a youngster, my own office is held a little lower. The old bean, or the young one, begins to slow up at anything over 70°F. Sleeping temperature, once again to taste, and let the kids fight it out.

Fun room, for ping-pong, 50°F. Wrestling or gymnastics, 45°F. Darts, 60°F. Bridge party, 65°F and be careful. Remember that as soon as a room gets full of people the temperature will overshoot even with all heat turned off. And don't forget to turn the fun room way down at night.

Last, the automobile. You have noticed by now that I never sketch doors on a garage, preferring to spend my own money on other things. I depend on the morning sun coming into my equator-facing carport to help me get the car started. If, as in this sketch, my garage faced west, or if my profession required me to go traveling in the middle of the night, I would put doors on, leave plenty of ventilation, and set the temperature at 20°F. If the car won't start at 20°F, it needs fixing anyway.

Why is all this important? Because artificial heat is expensive. Getting more for your money is the principal reason for this book. Having paid for artificial heat, you would like to keep it around.

Heat loss through a barrier speeds up as the square of the difference in temperature from one side to the other, as shown here:

This diagram says that with the outside temperature at 30°, the cost of heating any given enclosure to 80° is about three times the cost of heating it to 60°, and twenty-five times the cost of heating it to 40°.

A well-insulated structure changes the dollar amounts but not the relative amounts. The rate of heat flow, that is the pennies per minute per square foot going from the warm side to the cold side, gets less as the insulation is improved.

For any given building, large or small, poorly or well insulated, if the outside temperature were assumed to stay at 30°, and it cost you a hundred dollars a month to heat it to 80°, it would cost you thirty-six dollars a month to heat it to 60°, and two dollars and fifty cents to heat it to 40° during that month you spent away from home.

A discussion of heating methods comes later. The merits of gas, oil, coal, electricity for fuels; the convenience of area versus central fuel consumers; the benefits of automatic as opposed to manual control; these things are matters of how, not what. They are fascinatingly debatable details, more fun to argue about than whether to use steel or aluminum nails in the siding/outside cladding.

Further, a discussion of the psychology of heating, that is, definitions of conduction, convection, radiation, and what they mean to your comfort and pocketbook, will be found in the Notebook section at the back of the book. Technology is a great money-saver. The farther we go, the more important it gets. For the moment, I want to show you the relation between what we call heat and what we call light.

9. Light

All non-nuclear energy used on this or any other planet arrives here now, or arrived some time before now, from the sun. All of this energy is heat.

It arrives by a process which we do not as yet clearly understand. We call it radiant energy. The only thing we know for sure about radiant energy is the speed of its arrival, which is a hundred eighty-six thousand and some odd miles per second. We believe that the energy arrives in a fashion which for convenience we choose to call "waves." It now becomes convenient to describe the speed with which these waves travel, divided by the number of waves arriving per second, as the wave length, and the number of waves per second as the frequency.

It is in frequency that you, the potential housebuilder, are interested. The arriving heat, or energy, covers a very wide range of frequencies. A narrow range of frequency is visible to the human eye, and we call this light. The range of frequencies included in light is about one octave. An octave means double at one end what it was at the other end, which is to say that the waves at the blue side of the rainbow are half as long and are arriving twice as often as the waves at the red side.

Beyond the blue side of the visible octave are still higher frequencies and thus shorter waves which we call ultraviolet. These stretch out over many octaves. Most of this high frequency energy is absorbed by the atmospheric air and does not get through to us. Coming down in frequency from the red side of the visible octave are many more octaves which for convenience we split up into various bands called by various names. The frequencies just below red, which are most successful in penetrating the air and bringing us useful heat, we call infrared.

As you lie on the beach, wearing sunglasses against the visible light, it is largely the infrared which is making you feel warm, and largely the ultraviolet which is making your skin turn brown. If, instead of going to the beach, you relax behind glass on a sun porch, you will feel almost as warm as if you were outside, but you will not get a tan.

The reason is that the things we call transparent--glass, clear plastic, air, thin clouds--are more transparent to low frequencies than to high ones. To put it the other way around, more of the high frequency and thus short-wave stuff is absorbed. That barrier which is transparent to a low frequency may not be transparent to a high one, and that's why the sun looks red in the late afternoon.

The significant difference between light and the rest of the heat spectrum is that light, which by definition is for seeing, cannot be stored to be seen with later. Once its energy has been converted and then reproduced outside the light octave, we can no longer use it to see by.

On its first arrival from the sun, light is free. As we did with heat, let's being by investigating how much we can get, if and when it is wanted. Once again the best solution seems to work out like this:

In summer we want to keep out the heat, because there's too much, and also that part of the heat which we call light, because it's too bright. In winter we welcome both. The sunlight, having come through more miles of air, has lost its high frequency side. We welcome whatever brightness it can manage.

To get the most light for nothing, we want a house which is all equator-facing side and very little else. In the case of heat, we had to decide between a longish structure, which will pick up more natural heat, and a squarish one, which will retain artificial heat better. In the case of light, there is no argument. The long house wins.

We can retain heat with insulation, but light is either on or off. We can not insulate against light loss. Therefore we try to get all the light we can while the getting is good. As a house nears cube shape, it has less light admission. Parts of it are farther away from a window than we would like. By stretching out the shape of the house, we move ourselves closer to a window.

For an at-hand example, here is where my typewriter and I are sitting at this moment:

The room is twelve feet wide and eighteen feet long. The triple lines indicate windows. You can see that no point in the room is more than six feet away from at least two sources of natural light, from north and south. The drawing board and reference table have west light as well. It's difficult to cast a bothersome shadow.

The two lozenge-shaped objects behind me are two Saint Bernards who have decided they like it here too. That makes three of us.

The most natural light for a given area is to be had in a slender house shape, such as this:

Or perhaps, better still, if you prefer the courtyard shape, this:

Whereas what retains heat the best is this:

Many people compromise the issue by stretching out a little:

This compromise has been built a good many millions of times, varied by placing the car at either east or west end. It lets in quite a bit of light for its size, and as a starter, is a good buy for limited dollars, I can't quarrel with it much.

But here I am talking about shape and economy, when the subject was supposed to have been light. It would seem that no one subject in house design can be completely separated from all the rest.

There is day, and there is night. Back in the days of the cave, artificial light came from the fire, thus:

Much later came the Coleman lantern, which we put on the kitchen table and had this:

Then Mr. Edison's lamp arrived, which we at first used, without changing our habits, this way:

Naturally, it was quite a wrench when some brave soul suggested that the source of artificial light should be put back over our shoulders, sun-wise, like this:

The improvement is apparent. Two light sources enable us to work or play with efficiency and comfort. We can use the whole room rather than a little bit of it in the middle.

As long as artificial light involved fire, whether the fire were from pine knots, candles, whale oil, kerosene, or gas, we had to be careful where we put it. Electric light is more tractable, permitting us to locate multiple light sources where they will best imitate daylight.

The cave would have been a better place in which to skin tigers if it had been equipped with indirect light. Having moved out of the cave, we wish to retain the option of cave illusion. Notice that the candles on the table need not be lit until the roast is done, the dog combed, the last stitch drawn, the homework put away. Then we switch off our artificial daylight and return to the inefficient cave, which is not unpleasant.

10. Air

The subject of ventilation is tied to that of light only because for many years we have used the same hole in the wall for both purposes.

When--according to how rich or energetic a person was, and also according to what materials were handy--the walls of the house were made of mud, or sod, or stone, it was troublesome to put holes in them. A hole left in the wall for the admission of light also used to let in air.

The problem of how to let in light without air was eventually solved with pieces of glass, which we put in frames, hanging the frames on hinges or slides so that the glass could be pushed aside. Anyone who has tried to open a swollen sash in wet weather knows this solution to be of dubious merit.

Recently we started objecting to flies and mosquitoes, and we put screen cloth over the holes. The screen kept out the mosquitoes. It also kept out a third of the light.

When you stop to think about it, the best place for admitting and releasing air is almost never the best place for admitting light. Air and light are not governed by the same laws.

Light, traveling in straight lines, will go along those lines as far as we let it go. When light strikes something it can't get through, some of it bounces off, the amount and direction of the bounce depending on whether the surface is black or white, rough or smooth.

When there is no wind blowing, air is sluggish stuff. It won't move at all until something pushes it. When the wind is blowing, we generally want less ventilation, not more. In winter we go around plugging cracks to get less ventilation.

That's one kind of ventilation, but the kind we were talking about is what there isn't enough of on a summer day when we wish a breeze would stir up. Before you start buying electric fans, let's see how much breeze there is to be had for nothing.

Breezes are caused by differences in air pressure. That is to say, air weight. And that is to say, air temperature, because warm air is lighter than cold air, and when it rises, starts a whole sequence of motion.

Starting with the basic shape, and thinking about warm and cold air, I can sketch a simple way to stir up a breeze.

The idea is to open a hole above the windows, as high as possible on the warm side, and open another as low as possible on the cool side. In neither case would there normally have been a window where these holes are located.

If the house is oriented so that it has a warm side and a cool side, you will get a surprising amount of free breeze for a given area of ventilator doors.

If, for some reason, you had to depart from the ideal arrangement to some extent, you can still get plenty of breeze by adding more ventilator doors.

If some other factor makes it impossible to come even close to the correct orientation, you can help the cause along with two power fans, one at the highest point, pushing out, and another at the lowest point, pushing in. You will, of course, always try to draw in from shade and push out to sun.

So far no windows have been opened. The screens which keep the mosquitoes out--and if they are over the windows also keep out about a third of the light and heat--are now over the ventilators instead. And they can be left there, too, in winter and summer.

The reason we haven't opened any windows is that they are fixed in place. If you have trouble digesting the idea of a window that won't open, I may be able to help you by talking about money some more. We all want lots and lots of windows in our houses. They have become, in most cases rightly, the symbol of a pleasant place to live. But the cost of a manufactured window frightens us, and we wind up including fewer than we would like, or else doing without something else.

It is expensive to put glass in a frame, put that frame in another frame in such a way that it will open, supply and fit complex hardware, weatherstrip the whole thing so it won't leak too badly, make and fit removable screens, pack it carefully so the glass won't break, and get it from factory to house. At the house, our carpenter has already built still another frame--that makes three frames in all— into which he fits the store-bought window and seals the joints, inside and out.

I'm not criticising the window manufacturers. It's amazing that they do as well as they do. As a machine designer, I say that when we treat the window as a machine, asking it to perform multiple functions--admit light, admit air, or exclude it according to the weather, keep out bugs in summer, never mind the bugs in winter--and do all this at the twist of a crank without leaking or sticking--the window is bound to become expensive.

If we give the window one function and one only, to admit light, we can have all the windows we want at no extra charge. It is inexpensive to fix panes of glass permanently in place. Any smart carpenter can build a wall of glass about as quickly as he can build a wall of anything else.

As for the ventilator, it's a wooden door on the simplest of hinges, rigid, unbreakable, easy to weatherstrip, easy to screen. One frame does the whole job.

If we keep windows and ventilators separate, we wind up with more light, better ventilation, less trouble, less maintenance, and lower cost.

I found in my own house that I had provided for more ventilation than I needed. Many of the vents included in the original plan will never be built. Some parts of a house need less ventilation than others, and under normal family use, all parts need less than most people think. Given a moderate family density of, let's say, one person to a room, a breeze in your face is a source of pleasure, a psychological rather than a physical necessity.

Imagine a domestic structure, comprising perhaps 15,000 cubic feet of air enclosed by twenty windows, three doors, and 1,400 square feet of far from airtight wall, all permitting air flow whether we like it or not. In this building put five people, one dog, two cats and a canary. You can see that it would be expensive and difficult to make this house tight enough to discomfort its normal residents. We open up mainly to feel the wind in our hair.

If, however, we plan to put twenty people in one room, the volume of air flow required for their physical comfort goes up by a factor of twenty-plus. Normal air leakage into one room will by no means keep that many people happy.

The factor becomes more than twenty because you also have cooling to consider. You would like the room to be warm enough so that the first guest to arrive will not feel chilly. Then as you add nineteen more people, each one a little furnace giving off heat, your problem is not heating but cooling. Once again we see that the problems of a domestic structure can not be considered separately. The meeting of the bridge club, with no joke intended, needs some air.

Some special problems around the house also deserve an airing. Cooking odors are stimulating, but too much can be too much. Kitchen ventilation is to be had for nothing. You notice that all sketches thus far have put the kitchen on the side facing the south side.

The situation shown here provides ideal ventilation. Warm air rising from the stove goes up and out, with no fan required. If the arrangement were less than ideal with respect to warm side and cool side, a screen can be dropped from the roof to trap a pocket of warm air above the stove. From here it will flow out, winter or summer, when the ventilator is opened.

By now we have seen that the living room, with its possible concentration of heat and scent-producing people, and the kitchen, with its broiling mackerel, need extra ventilation. There are other problems. The woodworking shop with its sanding dust needs an extra blast. The party room needs a way for the smoke to escape. The mud room, where wet clothes and bathing suits hang, feels damp without ventilation.

Even without added moisture, any room which is allowed to remain much cooler than the outside temperature is, if not ventilated, subject to condensation and will get uncomfortably wet. Air in contact with a cooler solid invariably deposits some of its moisture thereon. For example, if your unventilated workshop remains cooler than the outside temperature, your tools will get damp and rusty. Any such room needs to be ventilated.

Take, for another example, an automobile sitting in a closed garage. As the air warms up outside in the morning, all metal parts of the car, not to mention the steering wheel and upholstery, get wet. Any closed garage should have a ventilator open near the top. Lack of air flowing past a shut up automobile is unpleasant, dangerous, and an invitation to suicide. Worse, it makes the car hard to start.

On the other hand, there are areas which we are inclined to ventilate excessively. The lower our level of physical activity, the less air we need. In all conscience I am compelled to point out that two people asleep in a bedroom require less air than they do at any other time.

11. Noise

Most things work together to produce a pleasant house, but sometimes what is right for one reason may not be right for another. Hence we compromise.

One of our goals requires no compromise. The house design which is right in all other respects will keep your ears comfortable.

We all have a sound level which is comfortable to us. That level, as with heat and light, varies with mood and with the time of day. The dime-in-the-slot juke box is carefully engineered to make as loud and disagreeable a noise as, in the opinion of the engineer, people want to hear inside the corner tavern. Not for a moment does the engineer imagine that his people would put up with the same racket at home.

Absolute quiet can be as disturbing as absolute darkness. Excessive noise and excessive light are equally disturbing. The quiet house, or rather the one which is comfortably alive but free from irritating noise, costs less than the worst noisebox ever put up. Ear comfort can be built into the original design for nothing.

After your house is built, it is too late to correct the damage. Ear comfort comes from the shape of the boxes within which you have housed yourself. Once the wrong shapes have been built, the cost of correcting them acoustically, of changing shapes so that they dissipate rather than amplify noise, is prohibitive.

It just could be that the sound of a house does not seem important to you. If so, you may not realise what is causing those headaches. Light you can see and warmth you can feel. Warm, dry, light, clean. We like those words and we're willing to work to get them. Yet we often fail to do much about sound, the one inescapable phenomenon.

If you're cold, put some clothes on. If too warm, take them off. If the house is too light, drop the curtains, and if too dark, turn on the lights. Close your eyes, pull up the covers. Everything has vanished except sound. The ear remains open and receptive, light or dark, cold or warm, awake or asleep. Humans are not equipped with "ear-lids."

We undertake to survive, comfortably, in an environment which is usually too warm, too cold, too dark, too dirty, too wet or too dry. It would seem that all nature is against us. The natural environment of sound is almost always pleasant. Man-made sound is all too frequently unpleasant. To take a mild example, compare the sleep inducing effect of surf or waterfall with the wakeful irritation of a dripping faucet. As the examples become more violent, we can compare taxi horns with wind, and gunfire with distant thunder, although I admit that any of these can become an acquired taste.

Though it is hard to acquire a taste for radio announcers, we have wind in trees, bird song, rain on the roof, all easy on the ulcers. We make most of the irritating noises ourselves, with our gregariousness, our communications devices, and our machines. Most irritating noises are made inside the house.

It is very simple to minimize the unhappy impact of our own noises. The first rule is to avoid squareness of room shape and of angle. Here is why.

At the left we have exploded a firecracker or beat on a drum, or uttered an angry word, inside a square box. At the right the same thing happened inside an odd-shaped box. The lines in each case trace just two out of many possible sound paths as they bounce back from the walls of the box.

What makes a sound irritating is not so much its original occurrence as its persistence, that is, the number of times it comes back to your ear before it dies away. Some persistence is desirable. Too much is irritating. People who sing in shower stalls may sound wonderful to themselves, but not so wonderful to other people.

In the sketch at the left, the square room, you will see that the sound pattern keeps repeating itself. Whether a sound is desired or undesired, its excessive repetition is always unpleasant. In the non-square sketch at right, you can find no place where the repeated sound keeps beating at you without mercy.

The next time you find yourself in a new house, square and true, walls all parallel and smoothly plastered, vertical windows, hard-finished ceiling and floor, try an experiment. Walk to the middle of the room and snap your fingers. If nothing happens, move six inches and try again. Pretty soon a little man will say snick snick snick snick in your ear for two or three seconds after the first finger snap. You have located a "standing wave" which is caused by the finger snap reinforcing itself every time it comes around.

Then try your finger snap in a room with an irregular shape, one with halls, openings, corner cupboard, beams, bookshelves.

I think you will not be able to find a snick snick snick anywhere.

I'm sure the builders of this room were not worried about acoustics. They built what they felt like building. As a no-cost by-product, their ears were kept happy.

All of the sketches so far have been in plan view, looking down. Tip your acoustics up on edge, and there has been no change. The preferred basic shape, which I keep sketching over and over on almost every subject, turns out to be a splendid noise de-irritator. It is nothing more than the out-of-square box shown above, except that the roof is used as the one out-of-square side.

If you take a pencil and keep following those two lines around, you will find they take a long while to come back on themselves, by which time the noise is too weak to matter.

The noisiest house you can live is has been carefully built by a master carpenter, straight and true. Ceiling and floor, opposing walls and windows, all are square and parallel. Nothing, says the master carpenter proudly, is a quarter inch out of line.

Furthermore, the walls are plastered, the carefully leveled ceiling is plastered, the floor is of carefully laid hardwood. At worst, each room approaches a cube in shape, as high as wide as long. I can't help calling this kind of thing an acoustical prison cell.

In the acoustic sense, squareness, the demon to avoid, means perfect symmetry of almost any kind. The so-called cathedral ceiling has acoustic problems which in some respects are even worse than the cubes.

Built with the roof dead center, it's worse than a flat ceiling. As you can see from the sketch, there are in this shape three concentrations of noise, a big one right in the middle, slightly smaller ones about a third of the way out on either side.

The remedy is simple. If the walls are almost unnoticeably off-center with the vee of the roof, or if one wall is built two or three degrees out of parallel, the room will quiet right down.

The nicest sounding room you could live in would, in theory, have no two of its six sides parallel with each other. Fortunately, there is no need to go that far. Throwing any one of the six sides out of parallel will be a wonderful improvement. Failing that, any departure from the square, the flat, the symmetrical, is, for any given volume of noise, easy on the ears.

I have not as yet mentioned specific dimensions, or talked much about the effect of materials. That comes toward the back of the book. Also we have been talking more about how to make noise tolerable, than about how to reduce it.

The only free-for-nothing sound-reducer I know of is distance. Here is a sketch of three noisemakers:

The trumpet upstairs, the mixer in the kitchen, the power saw in the basement, are forty feet apart as the walker walks--and I'm throwing in vertical feet at no extra charge--but eight feet apart as sound travels. Now let's rearrange:

Using a reasonable translation of the interior spaces shown above, the noisemakers are now twenty-four feet apart as the walker walks, or a sociable sixteen feet closer together, but are also twenty-four feet apart as the sound flies, or three times as far as they were in the other house.

Since, with all other things being equal, sound volume reduces by the square of the distance, the noise reaching one from the other is one-ninth what it was before. That is one more good reason for the single-level house.

12. The inside

Every domestic structure, no matter how it is built, creates an enclosed space. That space is its reason for being. The enclosure inevitably has an inside and an outside. The appearance of the inside and the appearance of the outside depend largely on how the structure is put together.

A structure reveals itself whether you like it or not. Attempts to conceal structure are always expensive, often aesthetically absurd, and usually fail because they wind up fooling almost no one.

In deciding upon the appearance of the inside of your house, then later of the outside, it will help to begin with structure. Here is what the first one may have been:

Two or three such logs propped against a tree would hold up branches to keep out the wind.

Much later a genius propped three or more logs together, thus creating more room inside.

To make still more room, his twentieth great-grandson created the first post-and-beam structure.

Durable roof and walls were probably the next concern, with the elements of domestic structure evolving into these parts:

The builder then discovered that a roof beam which is heavy enough not to break in the middle is too heavy to lift into place. To increase the size of his house, he began to put together pieces of wood which were small enough for him to handle. He invented the superbly logical A-frame,

using two pieces in compression and one in tension. He doubled the size of his house, fortunately, but unfortunately for later technology he established the idea that if the roof doesn't slope two ways it isn't a house.

The architect has been working from hut to mansion with these same basic parts, and struggling with this same problem, ever since.

You will notice that as the structures became larger, they became more difficult to erect, more permanent in nature, more difficult to destroy or to leave behind. This might be read as a description of home, a place to come back to.

In most times and most places, people have felt that being able to see its structure makes a house more home-like. In time of danger, or more often just plain bad weather, it is comforting to be at home and see the post holding up the beam, the beam supporting the roof, the wall keeping out the wind, and, for refinement, the floor lifting us out of the mud. Most people have found comfort and beauty in creating handsome structures of obvious strength, and they didn't try to cover up sturdy working parts.

Unfortunately, for a hundred years or so we have been struggling with a style concept called decoration, which teaches us to build an obviously inelegant framework, then hide it behind non-structural skins. This is a very expensive way to go about building a house.

It has been fashionable, though I hope decreasingly so, to separate the tasks of mason and carpenter from the task of decorator. In this procedure we first ask the carpenter to build a box, the function of the box being to keep out wind and rain. Then the carpenter goes away and the decorators arrive; plasterer, paperer, and painter. Last the "finish" carpenter comes back to square up all the frayed edges and lay "finish" floors which could not be put down until the "decorators" were through. Before these artisans leave you alone, the cost of the place is more than double what it was when they arrived.

It is not the fault of the decorators. If we ask them to do expensive things, they are willing to comply, for hire. The fact remains that in the frame-then-decorate method of building, more than half of the cost is in decoration.

The decorators may have made you happier, if you think so, but they have not made your house any stronger, or more durable, or significantly warmer. They have not made it any lighter, dryer, quieter, or more spacious. What this means is that if you started out with a fixed (upper) figure on the total amount of money to be spent, the decorators, at your behest, have shrunk your house to half the size it might have been.

The non-decoration concept begins with the selection of structural materials which are in themselves decorative, that is, good to look at. Once they are in place, you have paid once, and you pay no more. The materials we think of as purely decorative do no useful work other than to cover up something we didn't want to see. Some of these materials can be used, in limited quantity, with great success, but they are expensive. Use them where you will, always with caution, and never on the presumption that their use is unavoidable.

Here are some comparative costs to illustrate my point. The weather surface roofing on a house is an important part of structure. If it fails, you're miserable. The cost of a square foot of laid roofing is about one-third the cost of a square foot of lath and plaster. Add two coats of paint to the plaster, or one layer of paper, and its square foot cost has become four times the cost of the roof.

What makes it worse is that the surfaces inside a house add up to an incredible number of square feet. Let's go over in one corner and build a conventional closet. Never mind the cost of the walls, let's just figure the cost of covering the inside of the closet, which no one ever sees, with the cheapest possible plaster and one coat of paint. Assuming that the closet is 6 feet long, 3 deep and 8 high, the inside surfaces come to about 160 square feet. Then, if we peg costs at 55 cents per square foot for plaster and one coat of paint, the price tag comes to about $90. Personally I would rather spend the money for an overcoat and struggle along without painted plaster inside the closet.

As one more example of the cost of interior surface coverings, let's look at tile walls in the bathroom. I admit that in this case the tile has merit, whereas the plaster inside the closet had none. You can see tile; it's a symbol of luxury; it looks reassuringly waterproof (though why this point is important I don't know); and it is easy to clean. The catch is that it's expensive, about ten times the square-foot-cost of a roof.

You have to decide for yourself. If your bathroom is to be 10 by 12 feet, tiled floor and tiled walls to a height of 5 feet, that comes to about 360 square feet. Without specifying the quality of tile, we can figure about $2 a square foot, or $720, which sum would equip you with both automatic washer and dryer. If you don't do your own laundry, one bathroom temporarily deprived of tile will buy you a fairly decent fur coat. Three bathrooms so deprived will put a second car in your garage. The choices are yours to make.

The structural purpose of a floor is to hold us up. Softwood boards will hold us up and are pleasant to walk on, at an undecorated cost of about twice the cost of the roof, or two-thirds the cost of a plastered wall. If you want to save money, stop right there. If you want a decorated floor, the possible materials include hardwood, which adds some structural stiffness at 60 cents a square foot, asphalt tile, a bargain at 30 cents, rubber tile at 50 cents and vinyl tile, the most durable of all, at anything from a dollar up. Carpeting starts at a dollar and goes up as far as you like. Paint and varnish, which contribute nothing to the quality of your floor, are down at the bottom at 20 cents a square foot, or about the cost of the roof.

Having looked at the cost of non-structural decoration, we can now look for the alternatives. What do you want to see on the inside of your house? This is an aesthetic question, difficult to answer, impossible to debate. Is a stone wall beautiful? Certainly, unless you happen to be a prisoner sitting inside four of the darn things.

Four walls all made of anything--plaster, brick, or wood--can be just as confining to the mind, if not to the body. One wall should be different, suggesting escape. At the other extreme, if all four walls are different, escape becomes compulsory.

The recommended middle of the road solution is to use some variation in materials, with accents of color and texture against a dominant theme. Properly selected, all of these materials can be structural, with none being purely decorative. A great many structural materials are pleasant to look at if used in moderation and erected with skill.

Within any given enclosure, one material should dominate, but not too much. I have always chosen wood as my dominant material. It makes a good post, a reassuring beam, an excellent skin. It mellows, unfinished, to warm colors. Visually it presents a soft and graded texture even though it is smooth to the touch and thus easy to clean. Wood doesn't need much cleaning because it is good at not showing dirt. Because of its low heat conductivity--about the lowest of any truly structural material--it contributes to insulation. Because wood surfaces are seldom exactly in plane, it is not bad acoustically. Wood is hard to break but easy to change. It lends itself to modification and to repair. If well-ventilated, it requires no other maintenance. Pound for pound, wood is more expensive than many other strucutral materials, but a pound of it goes farther. If you avoid exotic and expensive veneers, wood will build you a structure about as cheaply as anything else.

As the dominant material, wood pleasantly accepts accents of almost anything--of stone, glass, fabric, plaster, paper, pictures, bookshelves, display cabinets, brick, or cinder block.

In my own social room, I have used accents against dominant materials to the point where the accents dominate and the base material becomes background. Each of the six surrounding surfaces has its theme, with little feeling left of any finite room boundary. One wall, the south of course, seems to be all glass, although it isn't. With the curtains closed on a winter night, this wall converts and now seems to be all fabric, although it isn't. An adjacent wall is dominated by a massive block of masonry which houses back-to-back fireplaces. It is broken by a heavy mantlepiece, accented by a beautiful oil, and pleasantly littered with colorful objects of no particular artistic merit. The effect is one of warmth.

The north wall is dominated by high windows, never curtained, which look out upon greenery. In daytime the windowed hillside is all you see. At night the working tools below come into view--books, desk, piano, bull fiddle. A harp would look nice if I had one. The actual wall is effectively invisible.

The remaining wall isn't a wall at all, but a complex of things: bar, cabinets, doorways without doors, and the shoulder-high view through distant windows. The dominant impression is simply one of distance.

The floor is of random width pine boards, all fairly wide. To keep the floor from becoming too much of a conversation piece, and to break the effect of parallel lines, there is a scattering of large and small rugs. The rugs dominate, and also vary the picture. After each house-cleaning they seem always to appear in somewhat different places.

The sixth enclosing surface, the roof, is made entirely of wood, but is actually the most varied surface of all. There are many reasons why this is correct, from aesthetic, technical, and practical considerations. The roof, seen from the inside, exhibits its structure of beam, sub-beam and skin. The variation lies in shape, color, light and shade. Technically, acoustic considerations, which demand variety in shape, are completely satisfied. Practically, in another plane this variation in shape would present an intolerable number of dust catchers, but an overhead surface doesn't catch much dust. Aesthetically, at eye level these shapes would seem inexcusably restless. Well above eye level, they are in peripheral vision where the light and shade patterns are restful.

Several goals have been achieved. Reading around this room as described I find surfaces which speak of light, warmth, work, and distance. If I want to change my mood, I don't have to move to another room, I just turn around. Though the room contains a vast number of tools for living, it does not seem cluttered, simply because it is big. It is big because it can afford to be big. I built the area for four dollars a square foot, or about one-quarter of the conventional cost. It can afford to be big because there is not one ounce of material anywhere which could be said to have been put there for the purpose of decoration.

The room is decorated with structural materials and useful things. They try to tell me my house is "modern." I deny it. My house is the exact opposite of the well-known magazine picture showing one coffee table glittering in the middle of an acre of polished terrazo, with the last spot of dust having been mopped up just before the picture was taken. For living efficiency, my house is a much closer relative to the widely admired colonial kitchen, with its big and little skillets hanging in a neat row on the wall.

I grant that you may not want to go quite as far as I do in eliminating formal decoration entirely. Before leaving the subject, I would like to make some specific points.

The decorative value of a material bears no relation to its cost. For instance, the masonry end of my living room is made of cinder block, the cheapest of masonries. All of this masonry, including three chimneys, two big fireplaces with heat ducts, and two sit-on-able hearths, cost eight hundred dollars. Built with the conventional fireplace brick, the cost would have been three times as much. A few observant people have noticed the absence of brick and asked why. The answer is sixteen hundred dollars. Most people just don't notice. The thing is massively but unobtrusively there, and it works. Who cares what it's made of?

Textured materials are almost always pleasanter and easier to maintain than shiny ones: more pleasant because they diffuse light rather than reflect it; easier to maintain because they don't show dirt. Many housekeepers make work for themselves by insisting on status-slick materials from which dust can be easily wiped. I prefer materials, textured either in color or in surface, which don't have to be wiped at all. If I were compelled to use a purely decorative material on a wall, my first choice would be colored burlap. Though not cheap in first cost, it comes in any color you like, meets all of our goals well, and lasts forever.

As of this writing, the plastics industry is beginning to think about molded chemical products for interior decoration. These materials, offering any color you like, any texture you like, a growing range of physical characteristics, opacity or translucence as you like, reluctance to support combustion, total unattractiveness to insects, no affinity for either oxygen or dirt, willingness to be formed into almost any shape whether plane or convoluted, may soon take care of much of our interior decor. As of this writing, they're on the way.

My last reminder is, don't forget about the roof. A flat, plastered ceiling does everything wrong. The underside of a working roof, exhibiting its structure, does everything right. Not walked on, comparatively dust-free, half-consciously seen, eloquent as to its own strength, the underside of your roof is the easiest place to make home a little better than what other people have.

13. The outside

Interior decoration may have begun with pictures drawn on the wall of a cave. Mr. and Mrs. Cro Magnon, burnt sticks in hand, were fixing up the place.

A long time later their descendants became concerned about what houses looked like on the outside. Their first concern was to remain as inconspicuous as possible, so as not to attract the attention of the enemy.

Still later a conspicuous house became desirable. The local landlord built his house at the very top of a hill, so that everyone could see how important he was, then hired as many bodyguards as he could afford, to keep someone even more important from knocking him off.

A house on top of a mountain is expensive, and so are bodyguards. Nowadays we prefer a location about halfway up the hill, striking a delicate balance between being visible to our friends and invisible to tax assessors, bill collectors, and encyclopedia salesmen.

The exterior appearance of houses has always shown what their builders believed themselves to be. From the castle on the hill to the hut in the valley, the external appearance of these structures has spoken not only of the occupants' economic status, but more eloquently of their social intentions.

We want our houses to look the way we ourselves would like to be. In building them we have a slowed-down opportunity to make a statement about ourselves. Most of us do not wish to appear in public as flamboyantly big, bright, colorful, tall, wise, handsome, and successful.

We wish instead that our acquaintances will peek around the veil of our becoming modesty, and through their own powers of observation perceive us to be big, bright, colorful, tall, wise, handsome, and successful.

Your prestige no longer depends on the apparent size of your mansion. You want your house to be big and useful on the inside, yet look deceptively small on the outside. You want your house to show that you are successful but modest about it. Solvent but not loaded. Hardworking but fun-loving. Friendly but reserved. Original, of course, and different in a nice way, but with no intention of giving offence.

These contradictions add up to quite a large order, impossible for any one person to convey while walking down the street. A house can be made to speak for you, untiringly, day and night, to the passerby as well as the friend. Boards and stones and trees can present almost any impression you wish. Even while walking away, you yourself can look back and say, there now, that's the way I want to be. This is the best reason I can think of for worrying about what a house looks like on the outside.

How do you accomplish this marvellous compromise between beauty and invisibility? An ideal exterior will be visible from the road, allowing your friends to find you, but not so visible as to block the view. Your house will not present its longest dimension to be seen easily. Its bulk will be away from, not parallel to the road. The arriving guest, entering through a convenient front door, will discover your house, bit by bit, and find out for himself that you are big, bright, handsome, colorful, and so on.

Your house will ornament the landscape but not obscure it. Your house will arouse envy in the breast of the passerby, but an envy that makes him want to know you for his own betterment, rather than harm you for his own satisfaction. This delicate balance between ostentation and humility can not be lived by a human being, but your house can say it for you with no trouble at all.

There are two principles. The first is orientation to the road, from which an attractive portion, but only a portion, of your house should be discreetly, but only discreetly, visible.

The second principle involves economy of purpose. From the outside looking in, economy of purpose is difficult to describe. It involves what you don't do at least as much as what you do do. Never put up a board without making it do work. If your stone wall keeps horses in the pasture, the passerby approves. If it serves no purpose except to keep him out, he questions your motives.

The passerby enjoys a glimpse of a big house that looks usable. He dislikes the sight of a big house fronted with useless ornamentation. He also dislikes a little house which has spawned some useless boards in an attempt to look big.

The passerby dislikes gateposts without any gate. Fences which go nowhere and keep nothing in or out. Grape arbors without grapes. Terrace coverings that obviously don't keep out the rain. Shutters which obviously can not be closed to cover the windows they hang alongside. Stone pillars which hold up nothing, and balconies with nothing holding them up. Doors with no footway leading to them, and tiny patches of lawn on which no one has ever trod.

The passerby is important because he sees the outside of your house more often than you do. You don't really care what the outside of your house looks like. By the time you have come home three times you hardly see it any more, but you do care what the passerby thinks, and you want to please him.

I believe that if the inside of a house fits the needs of a going family, if the skin surrounding the inside is honestly and economically built, and if the business of building the house seems not to have disturbed its setting, the result can hardly escape being quietly approved by the passerby.

The outside appearance of a house is subject to infinite variation. Without knowing either you or your house site, I can not presume to tell you what it should look like. What I can do is suggest some dollar savers to help you with your own planning.

Just about the biggest dollar saver of all, both in first cost and maintenance, is to dispense with paint. If you don't want to dispense with paint entirely, at least know why you are using it.

Paint on wood is a cosmetic, not a preservative. Paint is pure decoration. Its only purpose is to make something a different color from what it was before. Paint does not extend the life of any building material I can think of except steel. Paint does slow down the rusting of steel, because the oxidising (rusting) of steel has to begin at the surface.

Paint is most emphatically not a preservative for wood. If anything, paint probably speeds up such rotting as may occur, because it slows down ventilation. If the piece of wood is poorly ventilated, rot can begin anywhere, front, back, or in the middle. Paint a red brick yellow, and you have done no harm to the brick, except that you have to keep on painting it.

Once you have painted something, the endless process of maintaining that paint job has begun. Removing paint is more expensive than putting it on in the first place. Therefore, if in doubt about painting, don't. For the outside of your house, save yourself a lot of money, now and later, by choosing materials you think are handsome in the raw.

If you later decide you want to make a black thing white or a yellow thing blue, go ahead. Paint used as a decorative accent can be most effective, but keep the painted areas small. Don't in any case start slapping paint around under the impression that if your house isn't painted, it will fall apart next week.

My second big dollar saver, again both in first cost and maintenance, concerns shingles. Shingles are ghosts from the past. The cabin builder, working with the materials at hand, split pieces of wood and put them side by side on his roof. He staggered each succeeding row to cover the cracks in the row below. It was an improvement over pine boughs or grass.

The small size of his wooden shingle had created a pattern of horizontal lines crossed by staggered vertical lines. Many people came to believe that if this pattern were not exhibited, it wasn't a roof. To satisfy this belief, manufacturers take perfectly good roofing material, cut it up into little pieces, then cut slots in the little pieces so that the end result will look like little pieces of wood. It doesn't, but they've done the best they could.

The imitation shingle, with holes cut in it, has used twice as much material, burdened your structure with twice as much weight, taken twice as long to lay, cost twice as much, and will require earlier maintenance. This is a heavy price to pay for an imitation.

The general rule is that any attempt to make one material imitate the appearance of another material is expensive. The imitation shingle is only one example of good material, misused.

Expensive misuse of materials gets into our building habits for several reasons. Three major causes are:

1. Misapprehension
2. Anachronism
3. Accident

Misapprehension can be illustrated with paint. When our very great grandfolks fought back the Indians and built their first barn, it housed a cow. From her milk they made butter, and had some skim milk left over. Skim milk is casein. Casein is a fine paint.

They also had bricks, cheap ones, as will be seen later, hence brick dust, which generally came in red. They mixed the brick dust with the skim milk, and painted the barn, creating the dearly beloved dusty red barn of American history. Very great grandma thought it real pretty, and so it was, because the sight of it made her different from the Indians, who painted their faces, not their barns.

Naturally there came a paint manufacturer, eager to turn a fast shilling. He observed that if you leave a piece of wood lying on the ground, it will rot. He quietly kept his mouth shut about the fact that if you put the same piece of wood up in the air, not in contact with ground or masonry, it will not rot. He sold paint. There arose the misapprehension that paint is essential to the preservation of wood.

Wood in contact with masonry or subject to insect damage requires a chemical preservative. We have fine preservatives and should by all means use them. They have no effect on the looks of a house, only on its longevity.

If you want your house painted blue, or mauve, or shocking pink, that is your privilege. If you think it has to be painted to keep it from falling apart, you are under a misapprehension.

An anachronism is an error in time. Our ancestors covered their roofs with whatever was handy--evergreen branches, bundles of straw, pieces of slate, mud, sod, tile, anything that would shed water.

The American colonial settler had to get rid of trees anyway, so he split the best trunks up thin and made shingles. The arrival of many kinds of manufactured roofing has made the shingle an anachronism, an error in time, and an expensive one, at that. It seems to take anywhere from one to ten generations for a building anachronism to die out. It would appear that the imitation shingle, a piece of roofing paper cut up to look like shingles, is slowly vanishing. Soon we may quit trying to copy the roof picture created by great grandpa who was, many years ago, only doing the best he could with what he had.

It was an accident of history which gave great grandpa his brick dust with which to paint the barn. The big operator of American colonial days was the shipowner who hauled grain to England and brought back manufactured goods.

Since a thousand dollars worth of manufactured goods weighed less than a thousand dollars worth of grain, he looked around for something to ballast his ship on the return trip. Something more profitable than rocks.

England had little wood but plenty of clay. Poor folks were building their houses out of bricks, the only material they could afford. So bricks became the ballast of choice and the ships sailed home, full of bricks and calico. When the shipowner wanted to build a house, he used bricks. I would have done the same. When other folks saw that the richest man in town lived in a brick house, they wanted to live in brick houses too.

The brick became a symbol of wealth, stability, permanence. It got written into bedtime stories, with the third little pig laughing at the wolf from inside his house of bricks. Worse, the one-time humble brick got written into municipal building codes as being desirable and in some cases compulsory.

The symbolism of brick for the well-to-do persisted as brick walls became ever-more expensive. Higher cost led to the so-called brick veneer, a structural nightmare consisting of one layer of brick against a wooden frame. Some folks built just one brick wall, that facing the street. Finally came the ultimate travesty--bricks printed on paper.

There is delicious humor in all these events stemming from the historical accident of a shipowner's ballast. The joke is that for any structural purpose I ever heard of, brick is not one of the better building materials and never has been.

14. Flexibility

What are you going to build? The many decisions which must be made in answering this question seem desperately final, unchangeable, unfixable, so permanently wrong if they are wrong.

Yes, you're going to build your dream house. Once built, for a little while it may remain just that. Then your dreams change. They change because you change. Your family changes. Your income, your physical strength, your interests, your friends, all change.

Do you stay the same, think the same, do, act, behave, want and plan for the same things now and forever? Of course not. The house is to fit the family, I have said, but what family, and for how long?

In addition to meeting all of your goals for the moment, your house should be built so that it can be made to meet them as your interpretation of need changes. Unless you plan for change, the business of pulling nails and rebuilding your house can be very expensive.

I suggest three economical ways to prepare for inevitable change; choosing an arrangement with possible change in mind; using a construction technique adapted to change; and building in installments.

If you were a pair of hard-up but working artists, you might have begun with the arrangement shown in the solid lines. Some years later both eugenics and economics have smiled upon you. Two additions later your minimum arrangement of studio, kitchen and sleeping alcove has grown to hold four children, two baths, two cars, an office, and a display room.

The arrangement is not ideal. It is not what you would have built had you started it today, but the growth was without backward steps. No money was spent in removing something which was there already. Outside doors have remained on their hinges to become inside doors. Windows stayed where they were. When a new room was built, the old outside wall was left undisturbed. With the north light a necessity, the children's rooms went south. The plumbing needed to be extended only a few feet from where it was before.

Fortunately, you decided to start out in a longish house. Between long-type houses and square-type houses, the long house is easier to modify. Here is what happens when you try to enlarge a square house.

Everything you add covers up something else. Room areas, already too far inside, become more so. It would have been better to leave the original building alone and start over, like this:

Having stretched out, perhaps to the eastward, you will find that you have engineered yourself into a long house after all. I recommend the long house as being easier to build, easier to change, and the type you will probably wind up with in any case.

Whatever you do, the important consideration in making additions is to spend as little as possible in backing up and tearing away. If a room is too small by four feet, don't tear down the wall and rebuild it four feet away. Change he purpose of the old room, and build another which this time is big enough.

If your old roof is all right, don't touch it. Don't even try to add to it. Keep the new roof headed in the same direction, but higher or lower, and leave the old roof alone. In making any physical change to your house, add but don't subtract. Don't pull one nail or remove one board that isn't standing in the way of what you want to do.

The construction technique best adapted to change is "post-and-beam." In one form it comes out like this:

Here are footings, posts, and a roof structure supported thereon. The roof skin goes on first, then wall skin and floor skin can be finished at your leisure, rain or shine.

The wall skin keeps out the wind, but does not hold up the roof. Neither do such partitions as you may choose to have inside. With the walls and partitions holding up nothing, they are easy to move. This architectural concept is possibly the beginning of building by reason: the idea that you could stand up some posts, put a roof on them, and add to the structure in the same manner as your family grew. It predates history. I don't know when the idea was invented, but it was old when Solomon ordered cedars from Lebanon.

The technique of building walls and partitions to hold up a roof is wrong for many reasons, the first of which is that a house built that way is not adaptable to change. In a domestic structure, never build a wall that you can't move if you decide you want to.

The most flexible house of all is the one which will grow as you would want it to grow, and are able to make it grow. I choose to call this, in the current idiom, installment building. It is the oldest technique of all, to build what you can and add as you need. Many people use it now through economic necessity. Assuming that you are strong, eager, and adaptable, the story goes like this:

You are poor but honest, willing to work and impelled to dream. You would like to own your own house, a beautiful, different, exciting home. Mr. Roe, at the bank where you apply for a construction mortgage, is a thoroughly nice fellow, but he doesn't see eye to eye with you at all. Your ideas sound like opium-smoking to him. Besides, Mr. Roe will get fired if he fails to worry about resale. He wants you to spend thousands of his loaned dollars for things you don't think you need.

In fairness to the many alert and imaginative bankers, I must say that the stodgy Mr. Roes are slowly dying out. However, even the most helpful banker still isn't you, and he still has to charge interest. There is a way to bypass mortgage and interest charges entirely. That is, if you are willing to camp out for a while. It sounds tough. It might be the happiest time of your life.

This sketch is the shell of a house. It has a lot of roof, a minimum of wall, some running water, and not much of anything else. Its shape represents, at best, an accurate prediction of the future; at worst, an educated guess. You don't know for sure what the final arrangement is going to be.

The conventional financier insists that a house be completed. He also insists that you have some amount of money of your own before you start. With that same amount of money you can put up a building shell which is plenty good enough for a couple in love to call home.

With that amount of money the original needs can be met in a not too primitive manner. Your requirements will include one roof, one floor, one wall skin, one heat supply, one water supply, one kitchen stove and sink, and one bathroom with a door on it if you insist. Otherwise, skip the bathroom door.

As soon as there is light to see by and water to drink, move in. The moment you stop paying rent somewhere else your first saving begins. Now if you are handy and so inclined, you can take this king-sized love nest from there, building the kitchen counter while your other half hangs muslin curtains to arrange rooms at will.

If you are not handy or not so inclined, and can earn more money in the same time doing something else, don't try to find out which end of a hammer gets hot. Hire a well-adjusted carpenter, off hours, a little at a time. He'll build your love nest faster than you can, while you earn the money to pay him.

With either of these plans going for you, not only do you duck the mortgage and have fun doing it, you are living in a state of maximum flexibility. You see where the sun comes up on a June morning, and on a December morning. You find out which corner is going to feel right for company, which for your own bedroom. You learn which direction most of the rain comes from, where the snow drifts are deep, and where the bird-feeder should be located.

Best of all, you learn what to do without. Starting with no partitions, a partition is built only when its need has become pressing. Most of them never will be built. Since you have to find the money to pay for each new door, no door will get hung until you positively can't do without it. Most of them will never happen, and for the price of the doors that never got hung, you can hang a painting or build a workshop.

Your family habits will form patterns within the enclosure. Use areas will locate themselves. Shelves and movable closets will become room dividers. Artificial light will be located where you find you need it. The dining table will inevitably come to rest in the most desirable location.

When the need for more structure arrives, it will not be imagined, but real to you. By then you will know exactly where to put it. This is the best way I know to keep a house flexible, the best way to design a house from the inside out. By way of bonus, you will come to know yourselves, to find out what you really like and need, as individuals and as a team.

Though you embarked upon this plan from necessity, the end result will contain surprisingly few compromises. You will wind up with a better house than you could possibly have planned in the beginning, and it will have cost you a lot less money.

15. Efficiency

I know a woman who spends her life taking care of a four-room apartment. Every morning except Sunday she begins at the beginning, washes everything, straightens everything. By nightfall she is gratifyingly exhausted. The problem of finding books and papers never arises, because there aren't any books and papers to find. The one concession she makes to dust is to let it sit there, all day Sunday.

I know another woman who spends her life collecting books and papers. Every day a fresh layer goes on top, thus keeping the ones underneath from collecting that day's layer of dust. With the accumulation covering every horizontal surface, stair treads, mantel, chairs and floor, she keeps room enough on one corner of the kitchen table to rest a doughnut and a glass of milk.

These women happen to be sisters. Most of us fall somewhere between the two extremes. A little time spent taking care of your house is fun. Too much is too much. The breakover point between fun and too much depends on who you are. Wherever that point may be, the work or fun involved is called housekeeping.

The time used for housekeeping varies widely from one housekeeper to the next. All use much the same words to describe their tasks. All housekeepers do three things. They remove dirt, they restore order, they cause the house to function efficiently.

Now try to define dirt, order, and efficiency. These meanings are subjective. For example, you feel that there is dirt on your floor. Take a broom and sweep. Open the door and sweep dirt out. Do you at that moment cease to think of it as dirt? Or does it not cease to be dirt until you have swept it off the flagstones outside?

Contemplate your kitchen counter full of "dirty" dishes. The party ran a little late and spoons, cups, glasses, anchovy cans are stacked up every which way. If you stack all the used spoons in one place and the used glasses in another, do you feel sufficiently orderly to go to bed with a clear conscience? Do you wash the dishes and leave them in the rack? Or do you also dry and put them all away and then go to bed?

If you walk a mile through the woods to get water, naturally you will bring back two buckets rather than one. Easier to carry and twice as efficient. Efficiency becomes subjective when the problem concerns the number of steps required to reach the kitchen tap. Do you insist on one step only, or are you willing to take three? Do you think that a mixer tap is easier to manipulate than separate taps for hot and cold? Efficiency is entirely a matter of what seems easiest to you.

Dirt, to begin with, is the housekeeper's generic swear word for anything undesirable, such as a pair of clean socks left lying in the wrong place. In a discussion of how to keep your house "clean," we had better exclude philosophy and define dirt as the presence of foreign bodies you did not invite and which to you are undesirable.

One man's dirt is another man's patina. If a table has dust on it, as all tables do, it's dirty or not depending on whether or not you can see (or feel) the dust. Let the light shine in such a way as to make the dust visible and the table is dirty. We can all agree to that. Now mix the dust with furniture polish, rub in well, and presently you have patina, which everyone agrees is very nice. How quickly you can convert dust to patina depends on how much dust you have and how often you rub it in.

Almost all of the dirt with which the housekeeper deals was once airborne. Six children stamping their muddy overshoes on the kitchen floor bring in only a small fraction of the dirt volume delivered by a good brisk breeze. The dirt deposited by the children on the kitchen floor annoys you more because you can see it, but it is easier to deal with because you can sweep it out. Airborne dirt, arriving in greater quantity, creates a subtler but more widespread annoyance.

Airborne dirt has one thing in its favor. It makes better patina. Much depends on dirt particle size. If the breeze is gentle, it can carry only small particles, not big ones. Small particles are harder to see, harder to feel, and they rub in nicely. A violent sandstorm brings in large, unusable dirt particles which are pure annoyance and no good to anyone.

Airborne dirt also differs in quality. The particles resulting from fuel combustion, while small enough, are in most cases greasy. Though not seriously objectionable in creating patina on horizontal surfaces, greasy dirt is difficult to remove from clothing, wallpaper, and paint.

To recapitulate; almost all of the dirt with which the housekeeper deals has been air-delivered. When the air movement slows down, the dirt settles out, larger particles first, then smaller ones. It collects on top of horizontal surfaces, with much less sticking to vertical surfaces and minute amounts on the underside of anything.

Still recapitulating; to be housekeeper-style dirt, the foreign bodies must be undesirable. If the dirt does not make its presence known, that is, if it can be neither seen nor felt, it isn't dirt at all, because you don't know it's there.

We have arrived at two housebuilding rules for dealing with dirt. First, avoid unnecessary horizontal surfaces. Second, use materials which don't show dirt.

Here are some of the horizontal dirt-catchers, necessary and unnecessary:

Many of them are unavoidable, of course. The horizontals you need to stand on, sit on, put things on, also catch dirt. The horizontals you can get rid of are those built into decoration. The wall and door panelings are serious offenders, because they present their accumulation of dirt at or just below eye level. If the decorating horizontal is above eye level, you don't care how much dirt is on it.

Window sills, with light falling on them, are particularly bad. Here is a way to get rid of window sills:

We have moved the window sill outside the house, where dirt ceases to be dirt.

Getting rid of dirt on the baseboard is easy. Don't have any baseboard. That board was put there in the first place because dirt accumulates in a wall-to-floor corner, where the board made it both easier to remove and harder to see if not removed. The obvious solution is to make the whole wall, at least up to window level, of a single damage-free and dirt-camouflaging material.

Try as you will, most of the horizontal square feet in your house can not be eliminated. So the second rule, keeping dirt invisible, becomes the more important of the two because it can be applied in some degree to any surface.

It may be difficult for you to accept this idea if you have been brought up to believe that smooth, shiny, uniform surfaces are symbols of quality, and are therefore to be preferred to surfaces which are textured in either color or smoothness. The linking of shinyness with prestige dates from the time when rich folks could afford enough servants to keep their glossy surfaces looking clean.

The servantless housekeeper finds that texture makes life easier, provided thought has been given to the degree and kind of texture on any given surface. A sub-rule for dirt control can be stated this way: a horizontal surface should be smooth to the touch but textured in appearance; a vertical surface can be textured to touch, to the eye, or both; an overhead surface can be just about anything you like.

For example, a table top, unavoidably touchable, should be smooth, both for touching and for wiping, therefore it has to be textured in appearance so as not to show the unavoidable dirt. A floor is slightly different. It need not be smooth to the touch. If anything, it should be slightly rough to keep you from slipping, yet not rough enough to impede the sweeping away of dirt. As with the table top, it must not be shiny or uniform in color, but textured in appearance, to keep the unavoidable dirt from showing.

Walls do not collect muddy footprints, and they need not be smooth to the touch. They do collect finger prints, but not much airborne dirt. Insofar as you want your wall to be light in color, you need a more heavily textured surface in order not to show dirt. A light-colored, surface-textured wall also makes an excellent diffuser of illumination.

As with walls, overhead surfaces diffuse illumination well if they are light-colored and rough, the rougher the better. There are no footprints, no fingerprints, and very little airborne deposit. A rough-textured overhead surface has defeated dirt. So has an overhead surface made of wood, preferably unfinished, but it doesn't diffuse light as well. That's an example of compromise between material, cost, and function.

Fortunately for housekeeping, the appreciation of textured materials is growing, a trend brought about by the demise of the domestic servant. Once the owner and the housekeeper become the same person, the housekeeper begins to get smart. The trend is followed closely by materials manufacturers, who are offering an excellent variety of textures. Their advertising states, in this case correctly, that the materials are made that way in order not to show dirt.

Even the periodicals dealing with domestic architecture, which normally follow rather than lead their advertisers, for once are out in front. I was astonished to read in one such magazine that the easiest wall surface to take care of is unfinished wood, a statement which, though offensive to almost all of that magazine's advertisers, is exactly correct.

Orderliness is even more subjective than cleanliness. Dirt is largely a natural phenomenon. Clutter is entirely man-made. Having created our own clutter, it is up to us to sort it out, or to live with it. Here are some characteristics of clutter:

A certain amount of clutter--and you must decide how much that is--is both more efficient and more home-like than complete orderliness.

We all are less annoyed by our own clutter than by someone else's. I can clear up, or at least push around, my own junk. I don't know what to do with your junk.

Clutter being personal, it can be reduced but not eliminated by mechanical aids such as shelves, desks, cupboards, filing cabinets and closets. Such repositories become nothing more than clutter containers, if this is your habit. My own filing cabinet is full of roughage. The important papers are out in the open where I can find them.

Most of us work best at our own clutter quotient, which I will call One Cee, then proceed to create about twice as much as we like, or Two Cee. It is only to bring Two Cee down somewhat closer to One Cee that we worry about clutter control.

A house can help you by classifying clutter in designated rooms or areas. You keep your overshoes in the mud room, your used clothing in the laundry, your ping-pong balls in the playroom, your unanswered correspondence in the office, your unread magazines in the library, your cherished dry goods in the sewing room, and your screwdrivers in the workshop.

This system of clutter classification allows the kitchen to be happily cluttered with nothing more than food, the dining room with dishes, the sitting room with chairs, and the bedroom with shoes. By classifying clutter areas, there is a place for every kind of clutter.

With enough clutter areas, you can safely go ahead with the desired quantity of closet, cupboard, shelf, and storage space. Though this system does not guarantee that shirts will be found in the clothes closet, bank statements in the office, condensed milk in the kitchen, and hammers on the tool rack, at least it's a step in the right direction.

The best way of all to live with your own clutter is to have plenty of room for it. If your own clutter quotient is One Cee, and you consistently surround yourself with Two Cee, try working in a room twice as big as before. Though you still have Two Cee clutter, the clutter density will have dropped back to One Cee Dee. This is still another plea to save money where you can, then spend it on bigger rooms and a bigger house. A little house is harder to keep looking clutter-free than a big one.

Dirt removal and clutter control are subheadings under the topic of making a house efficient. Your life is full of many things which, though part of living, are not particularly pleasant, take up your time, and produce nothing.

Bugs, for instance. The housefly got his name because he likes to come in the house. The architectural trend which eliminated the screened porch made life much easier for the housefly, and all the other flying undesirables.

The screened porch has many virtues, the greatest of them being bug control. The porch has only one door, but the bugs don't know that. They sit around all over, thus lowering their population density. The screen door opens out, and the bugs don't know that either. The porch light, properly located, is not at the door, adding to bug confusion. These devices make the human smarter than the bug, enabling the human to enter without bringing swarms of insects with him.

The screened porch is wonderfully efficient. It is a welcoming roof over the head of the arriving guest. It keeps the rain from dripping down his neck as he stands at your front door. It gives him a place to scrape his feet, take off his overshoes and stash his umbrella. If necessary, the screened porch can double as mud room, play room, summer night bedroom. It provides a semi-hospitable place for those doorway conversations where you don't feel like inviting the other guy all the way in.

A relative of the screened porch, simply many square feet of roof over some part of the outdoors, is another efficient device. A roofed area is better for some purposes than complete enclosure and just as good for many others. Yet it costs a fifth as much for its size.

A roof is the basic requisite of shelter. It offers quick hospitality. It breaks the transition from completely unsheltered outdoors to fully sheltered indoors. It gives you a place to stamp your physical and mental feet. It shelters those things which can stay outdoors without harm, yet need to be available for use indoors.

Take firewood, for instance. It makes an attractive fence at the back of the breezeway.

A cord or two of fireplace wood is a low-key, modest symbol of wealth, warmth, and friendliness. Why use enclosed space to hide your firewood? Let your guests enter past a neat woodpile, and perhaps they'll feel inclined to carry in a stick or two.

Washing textiles and washing people are related functions. Both are made easy by soap, drains, and running water. In the absence of domestic servants to do the wash for you, the bathroom and laundry belong together.

Here is the equivalent of great-grandma's bucket, dipper, stove, washpan, tub, and clothesline. She worked harder at home, but we work harder somewhere else to pay for the replacement.

		Hot water	Cold water	Drain to soil pipe	Vent	Electric power
1	Sink 1.5 grinder	l	l	l
	Waste grinder		l	l		l
2	Dish washer	l	l	l		l
3	Washing machine	l	l	l		l
4	Drier				l	l
5	Toilet		l	l	l
6	Hand basin	l	l	l
7	Shower	l	l	l
8	Bath	l	l	l
	Totals	6	8	8	2	4

I have to tell a true story while it's fresh in my mind. Last night at town meeting, the moderator was explaining a proposed ordinance concerning the payment of plumbing inspection fees.

He said there was to be a fee for each house, plus a small additional charge for each plumbing appliance. Enumerating these, he found the water closet, the lavatory, the bath tub, the kitchen sink, even the rich man's dishwasher. "Oh yes," he said, "I forgot the washing machine in the basement."

Though habit is strong upon us, Caroline found the courage to place her washing machine and dryer within arm's reach of the dirty towels. The plumbing inspector was not in the least disturbed.

Having eliminated running up and down stairs to the laundry, let us also eliminate snow shoveling. Whether you run your own snow-plow or hire someone else to do it, here is the way to let the plow get rid of it all:

The plow goes right on by the garage without pushing up a dead end for you to shovel away. Then, if teh garage roof has a big overhang, like this:

the plow leaves nothing behind. You have already arranged to walk from garage to house under continuous roof. All outside doors are protected by roof overhang. Even blowing snow has been kept away by screened porches. You have abolished snow shoveling. You might live to see your grandchildren get married.

One thing bothers me. In order to want to live that long, you'd better leave yourself a little bit of snow to be shoveled as a token; a few knives to be sharpened, to show you know how; some underwear to be carried to the bedroom, for domesticity; and some fires to be lit, for fun. Don't make the place too darned efficient. It might not seem like home.

16. Pleasure

What good is all this talk about efficiency and arrangement and plumbing and heat control if it isn't fun to be there? Some things you have for no reason except the best reason of all--you want them.

Feeding the psyche is as important a function as feeding the body. A favourite picture isn't making any money as it hangs there. It isn't doing the cooking or sweeping the floor, but if it is helping you cook and sweep, there's function enough.

Prime example of a lovely though unjustifiable monster is the fireplace. Woefully inefficient as a source of heat, splendid as a source of dirt, expensive to build and possibly troublesome to maintain, the good old drafty fireplace stays right in there as the focal point of our sit-down leisure. Personally I wouldn't dream of being without one, and a good big one at that.

If you are thinking of a fireplace not for pleasure but for prestige, as something which all good houses are required to have, as decoration, as something to be ornamented with two yellow andirons and three white birch logs, as something never to be lit because it might put spots on the wall, then leave it out. Skip the expensive monster and spend the money on something you do want.

Spend the money on something in your house which is absurdly and wonderfully non-productive of anything but your pleasure. If you like to make your own music, have a music corner, and a clear area with plenty of room for dancing. The money you saved on rugs can go toward a better piano.

If, instead of making music, you are addicted listeners, the room layout should be built around the location of phonograph, speaker, and you. Further, if you really know and are concerned about high fidelity, you will want your speakers built in, located in the right acoustic places, not the right decorating places.

Perhaps flowers are the big thing with you. Knock off on something else and have your own greenhouse. It needn't be hidden out back, either. Have it right up front, and live in it.

The serious craftsman and the serious seamstress, both taking pleasure in their work, deserve equally good accommodations. The seamstress needs good light, storage space, dozens of drawers, a six-foot table on which to spread her work, an ironing board, and wall sockets for iron, sewing machine, and close-up illumination.

The craftsman also needs good light, storage spaces big and little, heavy duty wiring, room to swing a twelve-foot board end for end, and a set of double doors for bringing lumber in and taking the boat out. The craftsman, especially if his craft produces bulky things, wants to work at ground level. Fortunately his pleasant ground-level shop costs no more than the same space anywhere else.

If instead of boat building, your craft is photography, you would sooner do without a bathroom than a dark room. The requirements for a dark room are special, but imperative to your pleasure. Plan your dark-room sink on the other side of the bathroom wall, using the same water pipes and drain, and you can have both without noticing the difference in dollars.

The reader has his books available. While they sit waiting for him, they look good too. The gunner has his guns in gun racks, where he can admire them. Perhaps his shell-loading bench is also on display. The fletcher's work table, where bright feathers are fitted into arrows, is something to behold, as are the paraphernalia required to tie trout flies. The good cook's kitchen is ablaze with vari-colored spice shelf, pewter bowls, black skillets and ruddy copperware. The pianist never closes the lid on his ever ready keyboard. The cellist never puts his instrument away.

In planning your home, do not be ashamed to admit that the people who live there do something besides grow old.

Your house is a safe, irreproachable place to loosen your mental corset. The juiciest pleasure of all is the pleasure of having something different.

Conformity in dress, in speech and manner, in expressed thoughts, in the shape and size of automobiles, in the right time to work and the right time to play; these conformities are important to .most of us, convenient to all of us. Conformity keeps us comfortable away from home. But when you say, "Drop by my house some evening, I'd like to have you look it over," the unspoken translation is, come by and find out what I'm really like.

Conformity can be ignored at home. Not rebelled against, just ignored. There are few of us who do not cherish the dream of a house distinctly and purely our own. Most people are afraid to pursue this dream because they have been told that anything different will cost too much.

Some differences cost more, others save money. Begin with the money-saving differences, which are the things you find you can leave out. To suggest a few: fancy light fixtures, plate glass, trim boards on rafter ends, vertical footings, garage doors, hardwood flooring, varnish, moldings and mill-worked interior trim, wall tile where it does no good, paint, shingles, wallpaper, plaster, false ceilings, brick fireplace facing.

By now about half the cost of a conventional house lies in the wastebasket. You have found a lot of money to "waste" on differences in which you find pleasure, such as that dark room, and more windows, and a greenhouse.

But with all that money in hand waiting to be spent, proceed with caution. There are two kinds of differences, difference in detail and difference in plan.

Striving for difference in detail can be expensive. Be careful about the unusual in non-structural things, store-bought items such as faucets, bathtubs, doorknobs, hinges, ceramic tile. These are small things, making little difference in the over-all impression. Spend your money, if need be, on big differences.

Difference in plan--that is, in structure--can usually be had for nothing. You can be impressively and pleasurably different in locating and shaping your house. Provided the roof lines are kept simple, structural components can be put together to produce any one shape just about as cheaply as another.

This allows you to plan what you want on the inside of your house. The outside will design itself from what goes on inside. Build what you really want, and the result will be different from other houses because you are different from other people. Do not attempt to be different for the sake of being different. The result will please no one, not even you.

If you don't put anything in there you don't need, the result can hardly help but be pleasurable, both inside and out, both to you and other people.

The money you saved by omissions may now be burning a hole in your pocket. If so, build bigger rooms and a bigger house. Here is a real difference which is bound to bring pleasure. With little elbow room left elsewhere, at least you can enjoy the difference of having elbow room at home.

I am not so much interested in helping you get the same house for half the money, as in helping you get twice the house for the same money, or stopping wherever you like in between. Most houses are too small. Whatever else you do, engineer yours to be big enough.

17. Where do you go from here?

The subject of this first chapter has been WHAT you are going to build. I have not told you exactly what. I can't. At this distance, no one else can. Even to try, in detail, might mess up everything. I have tried to help you decide what to build. You're on the scene of action and it's up to you.

What I don't want you to build is any shape, size, style, color, type or location of house because you imagine that society forces it upon you. I don't want you to use any details or materials because you imagine that society requires them.

I am trying to suggest ways of thinking about what you want and need and can afford. Along the way, I hope to disabuse you of some widely held fallacies which not only would cost you unnecessary money, but may be standing between you and what you would like to have. I hope to convey a few technical facts which will help you, not only to have a better house, but to be more comfortable at home.

The meat of this chapter is, in one sentence: What a house should be cannot be decided on any terms other than who is going to live in it, and where it is going to be. No architect should attempt his first sketch for you, and you shouldn't ask him to try, until he knows your family and stands on your proposed site. That is why the discussion part of this book cannot and will not include specific, detailed house plans. I don't know you as a person, I haven't met your family, I have never stood on your site.

The discussion will include specific structural details which are of use anywhere. I have built these details with my own hands. I have refined them through my own mistakes, paid for with my own money. They work. Some of these pet notions have crept into the discussion already. Two of them are important enough to explain now.

First, the built-in, slightly slanted window-panes. I don't mean the heavily slanted windows used by some architects in an attempt to be different. For years I've been building all my glass with the top leaning out at an angle of about one inch in twenty. I've never happened to run across this detail in any other house, or in a book or magazine. Yet at one look the benefits of this detail are there to see.

The glare is strikingly less than from a vertical pane. This is the first thing you notice.

The glass stays clean longer on the outside, which collects more dirt and is less convenient to clean. The dirt it does have, either inside or out, is less noticeable.

The acoustic improvement is tremendous.

Tipping the panes slightly, not in itself noticeable unless your attention is called to it, removes what some people feel is the glacial unfriendliness of large expanses of glass.

Second, and very very important, are the manifold virtues of a single-slope roof with its long dimension and high side toward the equator, or ideally, slightly eastwards of the equator. This one structural detail contributes to more of our housing goals than any other single thing I can think of.

It invites heat in winter, keeps it out in summer. It invites winter light, controls summer light. It provides a roofed, sunny outside area at no extra charge. Its acoustics are superb. No charge. Ventilation works perfectly without further effort or expense. It confines the water run-off problem to one side only, the least useful side, at that. It contributes to a feeling of spaciousness, but the actual cubic content to be heated is the same as with an A-frame, or a little less. Its interior shape is friendly, varied, inviting, pleasantly unsymmetrical. Its outside weather surface is cheap to build and easy to maintain. All parts of its roof structure involve a minimum of cutting and fitting.

The only structural drawback is that the main roof beams have to use more material, or else be more skillfully designed than an A-frame for a house of the same size.

The single-slope roof has been attacked on aesthetic grounds. Though I refuse to argue aesthetics, I believe the attackers just haven't got used to it yet, or else may be referring to a single slope aimed in some direction other than south. To me the single slope, properly used, speaks so clearly and naturally of its purpose that it can not help but be beautiful.

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