In manor houses of western France, the solar was sometimes a separate tower or pavilion, away from the ground-floor hall (great hall) to provide more privacy to the lord and his family.
Technology and privacy
The introduction of
technology and electronic systems within the house has questioned the impressions of privacy as well as the segregation of work from
home. Technological advances of
surveillance and
communications allow insight of personal habits and private lives. As a result, the "private becomes ever more public, [and] the desire for a protective home life increases, fueled by the very media that undermine it" writes
Hill.Work also, has been altered due to the increase of communications. The "deluge of information", has expressed the efforts of work, conveniently gaining access inside the house. Although commuting is reduced, "the desire to separate working and living remains apparent." In
Jonathan Hill's book
Immature Architecture, he identifies this new invasion of privacy as
Electromagnetic Weather. Natural or man-made
weather remains concurrent inside or outside the house, yet the electromagnetic weather is able to generate within both positions. On the other hand, some architects have designed homes in which eating, working and living are brought together.
Construction
Some houses are constructed from bricks and wood and are later covered by insulating panels. The roof construction is also seen.
Construction of a house using
bamboo. Bamboo-made houses are popular in China, Japan and other Asian countries, because of their resistance from
earthquakes and
hurricanes.
More generally, people often build houses out of the nearest available material, and often tradition and/or culture govern construction-materials, so whole towns, areas, counties or even states/countries may be built out of one main type of material. For example, a large fraction of American houses use wood, while most British and many European houses utilize stone or brick.
In the 1900s (decade), some house designers started using
prefabrication.
Sears, Roebuck & Co. first marketed their
Sears Catalog Homes to the general public in 1908. Prefab techniques became popular after
World War II. First small inside rooms framing, then later, whole walls were prefabricated and carried to the
construction site. The original impetus was to use the
labor force inside a shelter during inclement weather. More recently builders have begun to collaborate with structural engineers who use computers and
finite element analysis to design prefabricated
steel-framed homes with known resistance to high wind-loads and
seismic forces. These newer products provide labor savings, more consistent quality, and possibly accelerated construction processes.
Lesser-used construction methods have gained (or regained) popularity in recent years. Though not in wide use, these methods frequently appeal to homeowners who may become actively involved in the construction process. They include:
Thermographic comparison of traditional (left) and "
passivhaus" (right) buildings
Energy efficiency
Earthquake protection
Normally, excavations are made around the building and the building is separated from the foundations. Steel or
reinforced concrete beams replace the connections to the foundations, while under these, the isolating pads, or
base isolators, replace the material removed. While the
base isolation tends to restrict transmission of the ground motion to the building, it also keeps the building positioned properly over the foundation. Careful attention to detail is required where the building interfaces with the ground, especially at entrances, stairways and ramps, to ensure sufficient
relative motion of those structural elements.
Bamboo is an earthquake-resistant material, and is very versatile because it comes from fast-grow plants. Adding that bamboos are common in Asia, bamboo-made houses are popular in some Asian countries.
Found materials
In many parts of the world, houses are constructed using scavenged materials. In
Manila's
Payatas neighborhood, slum houses are often made of material sourced from a nearby garbage dump.
In
Dakar it is not uncommon to see houses made of recycled materials standing atop a mixture of garbage and sand which serves as a foundation. The garbage-sand mixture is also used to protect the house from flooding.
Identifying houses
With the growth of dense settlement, humans designed ways of identifying houses and/or
parcels of land. Individual houses sometimes acquire
proper names; and those names may acquire in their turn considerable emotional connotations: see for example the house of
Howards End or the castle of
Brideshead Revisited. A more systematic and general approach to identifying houses may use various methods of
house numbering.
Animal houses
Humans often build "houses" for domestic or
wild animals, often resembling smaller versions of human domiciles.
Familiar animal houses built by humans include
bird-houses,
hen-houses/chicken-coops and
doghouses (
kennels); while housed agricultural animals more often live in
barns and
stables. However, human interest in building houses for animals does not stop at the domestic
pet. People build bat-houses, nesting-sites for wild ducks and other birds, bee houses, giraffe houses, kangaroo houses, worm houses,
hermit crab houses, as well as shelters for many other animals.
Houses and symbolism
Houses may express the circumstances or opinions of their builders or their inhabitants. Thus a vast and elaborate house may serve as a sign of conspicuous wealth, whereas a low-profile house built of recycled materials may indicate support of energy conservation.
Houses of particular historical significance (former residences of the famous, for example, or even just very old houses) may gain a protected status in
town planning as examples of built
heritage and/or of streetscape.
Commemorative plaques may mark such structures.
Peter Olshavsky's "House for the Dance of Death" provides a
'pataphysical variation on the house.
IDIOMS WITH HOME:
Apartments
An apartment block located on a side street in China
An
apartment (in
American English) or
flat (in
British English) is a self-contained
housing unit (a type of residential
real estate) that occupies only part of a
building. Such a building may be called an
apartment building,
apartment house (in American English),
block of flats,
tower block,
high-rise or, occasionally
mansion block (in British English), especially if it consists of many apartments for
rent. In Scotland it is often called a
tenement, which has a pejorative connotation elsewhere. Apartments may be owned by an
owner/occupier by leasehold tenure or rented by
tenants (two types of
housing tenure).
The term
apartment is favored in
North America (although
flat is used in the case of a unit which is part of a house containing two or three
units, typically one to a floor) and also is the preferred term in
Ireland. Whereas the term
flat is commonly, but not exclusively, used in the United Kingdom,
Singapore,
Hong Kong and most
Commonwealth nations.
In
Malaysian English,
flat often denotes a housing block of lesser quality meant for lower-income groups, while
apartment is more generic and may also include luxury
condominiums. This usage has also been appearing in British English where
apartment is used to denote expensive 'flats' in exclusive and expensive residential areas in, for example, parts of London such as
Belgravia and
Hampstead.
In
Australian English, the term
flat was traditionally used, but the term
apartment is also frequently used, as is "unit," short for "home unit".
Tenement law refers to the
feudal basis of permanent property such as land or rents. It may be found combined as in "
Messuage or Tenement" to encompass all the land, buildings and other assets of a property.
In the United States, some apartment-dwellers own their own apartments, either as
co-ops, in which the residents own shares of a corporation that owns the building or development; or in
condominiums, whose residents own their apartments and share ownership of the public spaces. Most apartments are in buildings designed for the purpose, but large older
houses are sometimes divided into apartments. The word
apartment denotes a residential unit or section in a building. In some locations, particularly the United States, the word connotes a rental unit owned by the building owner, and is not typically used for a condominium.
In the UK, some flat owners own shares in the company that owns the
freehold of the building as well as holding the flat under a lease. This is commonly known as a "share of freehold" flat. The freehold company has the right to collect annual ground rents from each of the flat owners in the building. The freeholder can also develop or sell the building, subject to the usual planning and restrictions that might apply.
In some countries the word
unit is a more general term referring to both apartments and rental business
suites. The word is generally used only in the context of a specific building; e.g., "This building has three units" or "I'm going to rent a unit in this building", but not "I'm going to rent a unit somewhere." In Australia, a
unit refers to flats, apartments or even
semi-detached houses. Some buildings can be characterized as
mixed use buildings, meaning part of the building is for commercial, business, or office use, usually on the first floor or first couple of floors, and there are one or more apartments in the rest of the building, usually on the upper floors.
Apartment types and characteristics
Apartments in
Lagos, Nigeria
Studio apartment
Apartments can be classified into several types. In North America the typical terms are a
studio,
efficiency or
bachelor apartment (
bedsit in the UK). These all tend to be the smallest apartments with the cheapest rents in a given area. This kind of apartment usually consists mainly of a large room which is the living, dining and bedroom combined. There are usually kitchen facilities as part of this central room, but the
bathroom is a separate, smaller room.
Moving up from the bachelors/efficiencies are
one-bedroom apartments, in which one
bedroom is separate from the rest of the apartment. Then there are
two-bedroom,
three-bedroom, etc. apartments (Apartments with more than three bedrooms are rare). Small apartments often have only one entrance.
Large apartments often have two entrances, perhaps a door in the front and another in the back. Depending on the building design, the entrance doors may be directly to the outside or to a common area inside, such as a hallway. Depending on location, apartments may be available for rent
furnishedwith
furniture or
unfurnished into which a tenant moves in with their own furniture.
Garden apartment
The term garden apartment is variously defined, following regional practices.
In some locales, a garden apartment complex consists of
low-rise apartment buildings built with landscaped grounds surrounding them.
[1] The apartment buildings are often arranged around courtyards that are open at one end. Such a garden apartment shares some characteristics of a
townhouse: each apartment has its own building entrance, or shares that entrance via a staircase and lobby that adjoins other units immediately above and/or below it. Unlike a townhouse, each apartment occupies only one level. Such garden apartment buildings are almost never more than three stories high, since they typically don't have
elevators/lifts. However, the first "garden apartment" buildings in New York, USA, built in the early 1900s, were constructed five stories high. Some garden apartment buildings place a one-car garage under each apartment. The interior grounds are often landscaped.
In other locales, a "garden apartment" is a unit built at or below grade or at ground level. The implication is that there is a view or direct access to a garden from the apartment, but this is not necessarily the case.
In most west coast cities in United States, due to the need for resisting earthquakes at a low building cost, these low rise apartments are mostly built of wooden frames with thin plaster-board based interior dry walls, despite that they can be up to 3 to 4 levels.
Secondary suite
When part of a house is converted for the ostensible use of a landlord's family member, the unit may be known as an
in-law apartment or
granny flat, though these (sometimes illegally) created units are often occupied by ordinary renters rather than family members. In Canada these suites are commonly located in the basements of houses and are therefore normally called
basement suites or "mother-in-law suites."
Maisonette
Maisonette (from the French Maisonette - little house) is a large multi-storey apartment located in an apartment building.
Building may be a connection between two apartments above each internal staircase (renovation of older residential buildings), connecting the top floor with an attic (attic conversions), or pre-planned extension to the flat roof of the building (for new buildings).
The usual layout is combined kitchen and dining room, living space and accessories on the lower floor, several bedrooms and a second bathroom on the top.
Two-story flat
In
Milwaukee vernacular architecture, a
Polish flat is an existing small house or cottage that has been lifted up to accommodate the creation of a new basement floor housing a separate apartment, then set down again; thus becoming a modest two-story flat.
Communal apartment
In
Russia, a
communal apartment («коммуналка») is a room with a shared kitchen and bath. A typical arrangement is a cluster of five or so room-apartments with a common kitchen and bathroom and separate front doors, occupying a floor in a pre-Revolutionary mansion. Traditionally a room is owned by the government and assigned to a family on a semi-permanent basis.
Facilities
Laundry facilities may be found in a common area accessible to all the tenants in the building, or each apartment may have its own facilities. Depending on when the building was built and the design of the building, utilities such as water, heating, and electricity may be common for all the apartments in the building or separate for each apartment and billed separately to each tenant (however, many areas in the US have ruled it illegal to split a water bill among all the tenants, especially if a pool is on the premises). Outlets for connection to
telephones are typically included in apartments. Telephone service is optional and is practically always billed separately from the rent payments.
Cable television and similar amenities are extra also.
Parkingspace(s),
air conditioner, and extra
storage space may or may not be included with an apartment. Rental
leases often limit the maximum number of people who can reside in each apartment. On or around the ground floor of the apartment building, a series of
mailboxes are typically kept in a location accessible to the public and, thus, to the
mail carrier too. Every unit typically gets its own mailbox with individual
keys to it. Some very large apartment buildings with a full-time staff may take mail from the mailman and provide mail-sorting service. Near the mailboxes or some other location accessible by outsiders, there may be a
buzzer (equivalent to a doorbell) for each individual unit. In smaller apartment buildings such as two- or three-flats, or even four-flats,
rubbish is often disposed of in trash containers similar to those used at houses. In larger buildings, rubbish is often collected in a common trash bin or
dumpster. For cleanliness or minimizing noise, many lessors will place restrictions on tenants regarding keeping
pets in an apartment.
In some parts of the world, the word apartment refers to a new purpose-built self-contained residential unit in a building, whereas the word
flat means a converted self-contained unit in an older building. An industrial, warehouse, or commercial space converted to an apartment is commonly called a
loft, although some modern lofts are built by design. An apartment consisting of the top floor of a high apartment building can be called a
penthouse.
Property classes
In every community where there are several types of multi-family housing, properties are typically put into one of four property classes. Each "class" of properties has a letter grade. These grades are used to help investors and real estate brokers speak a common language so they can understand a property's characteristics and condition quickly. They are as follows:
Class A properties are luxury units. They are usually less than 10 years old and are often new, upscale apartment buildings. Average rents are high, and they are generally located in desirable geographic areas.
White-collar workers live in them and are usually renters by choice.
Class B properties can be 10 to 25 years old. They are generally well maintained and have a middle class tenant base of both white and blue-collar workers. Some are renters by choice, and others by necessity.
Class C properties were built within the last 30 to 40 years. They generally have blue-collar and low- to moderate-income tenants, and the rents are below market. This is where you'll find many tenants that are renters "for life." On the other hand, some of their tenants are just starting out. And as they get better jobs, they work their way up the rental scale.
Class D properties are where you'll find many
Section 8 in the U.S. or government-subsidized housing tenants. They are generally positioned in lower socioeconomic areas.
History
Rome
In
ancient Rome, the
insulae (singular
insula) were large apartment buildings where the lower and middle classes of
Romans (the
plebs) dwelled. The floor at ground level was used for
tabernas, shops and businesses with living space on the higher floors.
Ancient Roman insulae in Rome and other
imperial cities reached up to 10 and more stories, some with more than 200 stairs. Several
emperors, beginning with
Augustus (r. 30 BC-14 AD), attempted to establish limits of 20–25 m for multi-storey buildings, but met with only limited success. The lower floors were typically occupied by either shops or wealthy families, while the upper stories were rented out to the lower classes. Surviving
Oxyrhynchus Papyri indicate that seven-story buildings even existed in
provincial towns, such as in 3rd century
Hermopolis in
Roman Egypt.
Egypt
During the medieval
Arabic-Islamic period, the Egyptian capital of
Fustat (
Old Cairo) housed many
high-rise residential buildings, some seven stories tall that could reportedly accommodate hundreds of people. In the 10th century,
Al-Muqaddasi described them as resembling
minarets, and stated that the majority of Fustat's population lived in these multi-storey apartment buildings, each one housing over 200 people. In the 11th century,
Nasir Khusraw described some of these apartment buildings rising up to fourteen stories, with
roof gardens on the top storey complete with ox-drawn
water wheels for irrigating them.
By the 16th century, the current
Cairo also had high-rise apartment buildings, where the two lower floors were for commercial and storage purposes and the multiple stories above them were
rented out to
tenants.
England
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the concept of the flat was slow to catch-on amongst the English middle-classes. Those who lived in these flats were assumed to be adaptable and "different". In London, everyone who could afford it occupied an entire house – even if a small one.
During the last quarter of the 19th century, ideas began to change. Both urban growth and the increase in population meant that more imaginative housing concepts were going to be needed if the middle and upper classes were to maintain a
pied-à-terre in the capital. The traditional London town house was becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. Especially for bachelors and unmarried women, the idea of renting a modern mansion flat came increasingly into vogue.
The first mansion flats in England were:
- Albert Mansions, which were developed by Philip Flower and designed by James Knowles. These flats were constructed between 1867 and 1870, and were one of the earliest blocks of flats to fill the vacant spaces of the newly-laid out Victoria Street at the end of the 1860s. Today, only a sliver of the building remains, next to the Victoria Palace Theatre. Albert Mansions was really 19 separate "houses", each with a staircase serving one flat per floor. Its tenants included Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose connections with the developer's family were long-standing. Philip Flower's son Cyril Flower, 1st Baron Battersea, developed most of the mansion blocks on Prince of Wales Drive, London.
- Albert Hall Mansions, designed by Richard Norman Shaw in 1876. Because this was of a new type, risks were reduced as much as possible, each block was planned as a separate project with the building of each separate part contingent on the successful occupation of every flat in the previous block. The gamble paid off and the scheme was a success.
In London, by the time of the 2011 census, 52% of all homes were flats.
Scotland
Tenement in Marchmont, Edinburgh, built in 1882
In
Scotland, the term "
tenement" lacks the pejorative connotations it carries elsewhere, and refers simply to any block of flats sharing a common central staircase and lacking an elevator, particularly those constructed before 1919. Tenements were, and continue to be, inhabited by a wide range of social classes and income groups.
During the 19th century tenements became the predominant type of new housing in
Scotland's industrial cities, although they were very common in the
Old Town in Edinburgh from the 15th century where they reached ten or eleven storeys high and in one case fourteen storeys. Built of
sandstone or
granite, Scottish tenements are usually three to five storeys in height, with two to four flats on each floor. (In contrast, industrial cities in England tended to favour "
back-to-back"
terraces of
brick.) Scottish tenements are constructed in terraces of tenements, and each entrance within a block is referred to as a
close or
stair — both referring to the shared passageway to the individual flats. Flights of stairs and landings are generally designated common areas, and residents traditionally took turns to sweep clean the floors, and in
Aberdeen in particular, took turns to make use of shared laundry facilities in the "back green" (garden or yard). It is now more common for cleaning of the common ways to be contracted out through a managing agent or "factor".
Tenements today are bought by a wide range of social types, including young professionals, older retiring people, and by absentee landlords, often for rental to students after they leave
halls of residence managed by their institution. The
National Trust for Scotland Tenement House Museum in
Glasgowoffers an insight into the lifestyle of tenement dwellers.
Many multi-storey tower blocks were built in the UK after the
Second World War. A number of these are being demolished and replaced with low-rise buildings or
housing estates known in Scotland as housing schemes, often modern interpretations of the tenement.
In Glasgow, where Scotland's highest concentration of tenement dwellings can be found, the urban renewal projects of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s brought an end to the city's slums, which had primarily consisted of older tenements built in the early 19th century in which large extended families would live together in cramped conditions. They were replaced by high-rise blocks that, within a couple of decades, became notorious for crime and poverty. The
Glasgow Corporation made many efforts to improve the situation, most successfully with the City Improvement Trust, which cleared the slums of the old town, replacing them with what they thought of as a traditional high street, which remains an imposing townscape. (The City Halls and the
Cleland Testimonial were part of this scheme). National government help was given following
World War I when Housing Acts sought to provide "homes fit for heroes". Garden suburb areas, based on English models, such as
Knightswood were set up. These proved too expensive, so a modern tenement, three stories high, slate roofed and built of reconstituted stone, was re-introduced and a slum clearance programme initiated to clear areas such as the
Calton and the
Garngad.
Post Second World War, more ambitious plans, known as the
Bruce Plan, were made for the complete evacuation of slums to modern mid-rise housing developments on the outskirts of the city. However, central government refused to fund the plans, preferring instead to depopulate the city to a series of
New Towns[18][19] Again, economic considerations meant that many of the planned "New Town" amenities were never built in these areas. These housing estates, known as "schemes", came therefore to be widely regarded as unsuccessful; many, such as
Castlemilk, were just dormitories well away from the centre of the city with no amenities, such as shops and
public houses ("deserts with windows", as
Billy Connolly once put it). High rise living too started off with bright ambition - the Moss Heights are still desirable - (1950–1954) but fell prey to later economic pressure. Many of the later tower blocks were poorly designed and cheaply built and their anonymity caused some social problems.
In 1970 a team from
Strathclyde University demonstrated that the old tenements had been basically sound, and could be given new life with replumbing with kitchens and bathroom. The Corporation acted on this principle for the first time in 1973 at the
Old Swan Corner,
Pollokshaws. Thereafter,
Housing Action Areas were set up to renovate so-called slums. Later, privately owned tenements benefited from government help in "stone cleaning", revealing a honey-coloured sandstone behind the presumed "grey" tenemental facades. The policy of tenement demolition is now considered to have been short-sighted, wasteful and largely unsuccessful. Many of Glasgow's worst tenements were refurbished into desirable accommodation in the 1970s and 1980s and the policy of demolition is considered to have destroyed fine examples of a "universally admired architectural" style. The
Glasgow Housing Association took ownership of the housing stock from the city council on 7 March 2003, and has begun a £96 million clearance and demolition programme to clear and demolish many of the high-rise flats.
Yemen
Mudbrick-made tower houses in Shibam, Wadi Hadhramaut, Yemen
High-rise apartment buildings were built in the
Yemeni city of
Shibam in the 16th century. The houses of Shibam are all made out of
mud bricks, but about 500 of them are
tower houses, which rise 5 to 11 stories high, with each floor having one or two apartments. Shibam has been called "
Manhattan of the desert". Some of them were over 100 feet (30 m) high, thus being the tallest
mudbrick apartment buildings in the world to this day.
United States and Canada
Apartment buildings lining the residential stretch of East 57th Street between First Avenue and Sutton Place in New York.
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