3 ’S A HOUSE, DARLING

Chapter 3
’S A HOUSE, DARLING

2We hear much of designing from the ‘‘inside out’’ among those who constitute what remains of the architectural profession—that sometimes jolly, sometimes sanctimonious, occasionally chichi, and often pathetic organization of shelter tailors.

3 The pioneers who originally evolved the architectural ‘‘inside out’’ concept, now dogma to the profession, were led to it naturally through their own thought processes and deeds. They spared themselves no labor to go to the inside, and, once inside, were quick to realize the supreme efficacy of projecting from a central viewpoint.

4 After successful demonstrations by them of the inside out principle, their original trail blazing became the general formularized property of all whom the architectural guild included. Although ultimately the pioneers were acclaimed, according to the worth of their gift to various beneficiaries in terms of vanity or dollars, acknowledgment of the original quality of their creation was withheld until after the physical death of the designers. The lesser fry had need to prevent the foresighted few from cutting in on their ‘‘traditional’’ racket. So recognition was refused these deeply penetrating, hence visionary designers, while living, lest the schemes proposed by them be too popularly demanded before the untrained and unfitted ‘‘architects’’ had had time to re-educate themselves for the exploitation of the newer principles of design.

5 Obviously, to design a shelter from the inside out infers an outside with a key passage inward. However, if the architect does not think spontaneously in the terms of this primary philosophy, then to espouse it is merely to mumble a few words with the lack of objective understanding that characterizes most chanting of academic bon mots. Worse! To act without this basic knowledge is to be a non-progressive, dogmatic dolt, a shuffler and dealer of the same old pack of 52 cards for chance winnings.

6 The thought process discovered by the pioneers, whose design eventually proved to be successful, was understood by them only upon subsequent reflection. When recognized, it proved to have been ‘‘from the inside out’’ thought. It was not professed in advance. Truly creative work cannot be professed. Only the academic may be touted. As applied to houses the pioneers’ creative thought processes might have begun somewhat as follows:

7 ‘‘HOUSE—a phenomenon to which I am, upon first consideration, an outsider. What is a house? A block of brick, stone, wood, or steel, or a composite thereof? An object with various patterns of square openings called WIND-O-S applied to its surface? The alphabet-book illustration under ‘‘H’’ with an undeniable superficial child romance appeal? A major sensorial object of awakening life?’’

8 ‘‘What IS that, mother?’’ asked little Tim, as Julia took him on a tour of inspection of the tiny garden of the new Murphy habitation.

9 ‘‘A rose, darling.’’

10 Biology, chemistry and physics can explain some of the characteristics of the mechanics and processes that constitute the composite, constantly changing living-machine, ‘‘rose,’’ but neither Julia nor the scientist could presume to tell little Tim what a rose is.

11 ‘‘And what is that, mother?’’

12 ‘‘A clothes line, darling.’’ (Likely as not an aerial.)

13 ‘‘And this?’’

14 ‘‘A hammock.’’

15 ‘‘What do you do in a hammock?’’

16 ‘‘Rest or read.’’

17 ‘‘What is ‘read,’ mother?’’

18 ‘‘Oh…what you do with a book.’’

19 ‘‘What’s a book?’’

20 ‘‘Words, words!’’—Symbols, in sound, to carry a diminutive degree of understanding into the limbo of goo-goo, broad designators of general categories of discussion.

21 If baby Tim were never again to be curious regarding the object designated by the sound ‘‘book’’ beyond tearing its nice-to-tear pages and dropping them from the hammock to the grass in primary, untutored, flutter-flutter-plop experiments in tensile strength, gravity, sound and air-resistance effects, he would never know that the audible word-symbol BOOK designates but an indirect means or an instrument to a certain vital objective, namely, the communication of ideas by its author to other minds in a referential form more permanent than if they were to be just orally expressed; a method of broadcast beyond the power of human speech. It would be almost preposterous (though provocative of deep consideration) for Mrs. Murphy to suggest to her child that Newton’s ‘‘Optics’’ and ‘‘Bringing Up Father’’ are one and the same article, just BOOK.

22 From the hammock, Tim could see a mass that seemed to reach into the clouds.

23 ‘‘What is THAT, mother?’’

24 ‘‘ a house, darling. Where we live. All ours …at least it will be when Daddy finishes paying for it…’’ A sigh concluded the answer, a sigh born of the faint suspicion that the ‘‘good buy’’ for which Julia and Murphy must skimp for years was not wholly modern.

25 Julia had not heard of ‘‘designed from the inside out,’’ but she was beginning intuitively to sense that theirs was not that kind of house. The house tailors guild, through an enthusiastic house haberdasher, Mr. Jones, had high pressured the Murphys with the usual sample of the ‘‘own your own home’’ propaganda into contracting to pay for a house in Jamaica Gardens. Murph’ had been ‘‘easy’’ to sell because he still believed that any house is better than no house, and was ready to admit that this one certainly was a distinct improvement over the suite of rooms in a second rate hotel in the vicinity of 34th Street and Sixth Avenue, the noisiest section of the city, that Murphy had been calling ‘‘home.’’

26 It would seem that the principle of ‘‘inside out’’ is not first to be applied to the tangible house. But the assumption that eventually it must be so applied is seized upon only too often by the sterile, philosophy-dodging dogmatist type of architect who, cleverly and smartly, jumps to conclusions and puts the end at the beginning. This pays him in ‘‘good times,’’ when his neglect of principle is applauded and accepted by well-funded, stuffed shirts and skirts. Loathing to think, they are glad to patronize the professional academicians who, without recourse to boring thought problems, appropriate originality and submit pretty pictures of what is traditionally recognizable as good ‘‘front.’’ It goes over both the patron’s and his house tailors head that the result is as shallow and inconsequential as any temporary motion picture set.

27 It is the usual course of such a professional house tailor to segregate and list the physical units that comprise the whole of the house. Next, having superficially rearranged these physical end-objects, he dogmatically and arbitrarily starts his drafting scheme at the geometric space center (bathroom or chimney) of the habit-postulated-surface of the volume of space ultimately to be controlled (by which the geometrical center was determined) with the sublime conviction that he is designing from the inside out. This procedure is ipso facto proof that the architect formulated his plan not only from an envisioned outside inward, further circumvented by a specific ‘‘lot line,’’ but from a non-rationalized, habit-dictated ‘‘shell.’’ His defense that the outside is ‘‘undetailed’’ at the start of the blue printing and takes form after the inside detailing has been accomplished is just sleight-of-hand trickery, fooling no one but the homeseeking, homesick Murphys.

28 The vast majority of Mrs. Murphys the world over are so horsepower tired from performing the function of a machine in their utterly inefficient homes as to have little horse-power left with which to concentrate mentally and, therefrom, to articulate rationally in reaction to the natural growth phenomena of the lives in their custody.

29 The conversationally frugal life of families is relatively unimportant if the only persons affected are adults who have reached a stage where a grunt of assent or dissent is eloquent for harmony. There is no objection to communication with few words, or extravagantly with many per se, except that man’s intellect and words have evolved hand in hand at so high a price that speech, when resorted to without intellectual reflection, is wasteful, abortive, and paralyzing to the senses in the same way that an incessant radio ‘‘deafens’’ unwilling hearers.

30 The reaction of tired parents to the natural growth phenomena of the new lives in their custody is one of defense. It becomes expedient progressively to paralyze such inquisitive growth phenomena in order to effect a simplification of the parents’, particularly of the mother’s, survival problems. Convenient methods of doing this are:

1.

Arbitrary negations imposed by physical strength: ‘‘lickings,’’ or ‘‘lockings in’’ or ‘‘out.’’

2.

The exploitation of the physical strength of new life: ‘‘You don’t mind running down to the furnace?’’ or ‘‘To the corner for a pint, dear?’’

3.

The instillation of fear through the repetition of traditionally honored falsehoods, or by the invention of a lie, a moral, a code, or statute to suit the circumstance. (Fear is not innate. The fear reaction of the new born infant is brought about only by extraordinary noise or falling. If falling does not occur early, fear does not develop as dominant. It is fostered, however, by the exquisite stupidity and cruelty of singing, ‘‘Rockabye, baby—baby will fall, cradle and all,’’ and for the child who has experienced falling this is by way of being an ultimate lullaby into lunacy.)

31 The consequences of carelessly, expeditiously and selfishly answering the young with would-be simplifications is the gradual unfitting of that new life for a naturally developed, comprehensive outlook upon, and non-complexed reaction to, the increasing demands of maturer processes. Thoughtless ‘‘simplifications’’ are paradoxically not only complexity builders but complexity amplifiers. Though born with vast energy and volition for including, analyzing, refining and composing, most people, by the time they reach maturity, have been so progressively exploited or depleted that often there remains nothing of their rich original volition. In its stead, there is listless surrender to quasi-security, inertia, laziness, and, occasionally, vindictiveness. All these results are directly attributable to the mechanical inefficiencies of environment control, which is 95% a shelter problem.

32 Some point out that the constant din of ‘‘housing’’ is like an overdose of porridge—that it is apolitical device employed ad nauseam. If it seems that we are stressing ‘‘house’’ overmuch as constituting the ‘‘root of all evil’’ on the one hand, and on the other the area of panacaeic solution of social problems, we answer that very word ‘‘economics’’ springs etymologically from ‘‘ecology’’ meaning:—the body of knowledge developed out of the HOUSE. We stress not housingbut the essentiality of comprehensive research and design.

33 Both Murphy’s outbursts and Julia’s fatigue are manifestations of man’s growing pains in this most paradoxical period of his history, the paradox being the fact that although science is playing a dominant, behind-the-scenes role in all of the activities of man, mediaeval politics, morals, mysticism and usury are still visibly rampant on the stage. The situation in the human drama may be likened to a scene in the theatre. Backstage, smooth-running mechanisms and scientific light controls are collaborating with the actors who visibly are enacting a mediaeval drama. The great majority of the audience is intuitively aware of the silent backstage machinery, but, in the grip of imagination, prefers to accept the effects as magic.

34 Through all ages the crowd has relied upon magic. This has been particularly true in the determination of society’s commonweal course. The populace has believed in the wizardry of political leaders, who, in turn, have been bossed by big-shot crowd exploiters behind the scenes. This mass reliance upon the politician is oddly contradictory to the average individual’s almost fanatic desire for independence.

35 This desire for independence was temporarily satisfied in man’s pathetically funny demonstration in the 20’s of ‘‘me running it’’ for the first time.

36 Men surged out ‘‘of a Sunday’’ in their OWN automobiles to crawl at three miles an hour along limited arteries linking city to suburbia, happy because they were at last ‘‘the king himself resplendently on tour’’—happy despite the slow pace, gas fumes, dust and horn-honkings. ‘‘Get out of my way…. Who do you think you are?’’ It was the great family joy-ride era, the beginning of the popular era of ‘‘ME-running-IT’’ as the result of the social incursion of machinery. The hazards inherent in the Murphys’ habitual dependency on political leaders, or ‘‘somebody else’’ to make ‘‘first’’ demonstrations is now amplified in the industrial period, wherein ultimate cooperative activity must wait upon a host of correlated inventions, developments, organizations, and vast credit before popularly effective mechanisms can neutralize deleterious causes.

37 Until the majority of human beings individually perceive that the responsibility for the acquisition of a state of well being for others, and consequently for themselves, is first dependent on individual rationalization and, second, upon uncompromising cooperative action, in strict adherence to the former, they will not enter into that estate to which they are the specific beneficiaries by the will of every objectively-scientific human being in all history, some known, others (more often) unknown.

38 Involved in the foregoing is an attitude that makes the Earth- ians problems as easy of scientific solution as are the problem plays of clowns for the children in a circus audience: for instance, the laugh-provoking plight of the clown menaced by a fire attempting to escape through a locked gate that has no fence on either side of it. If the process of solution of Earthian problems SEEMS arduous and enormous, it is so only from a size viewpoint, and man as MIND is as large as the universe.

39 The de-roboting of humanity by the transfer of labor-slavery from life processes to inanimate instruments represents human emancipation. Earliest recorded history reveals armies of human automatons toiling from birth until death, at the instigation of a human-plied whiplash, as elevators of stones for pyramids, patronized by death. That was the real humano-mechanistic era. Man must throw off his slave complex before he can fly.

40 It is not surprising that those who have grown up in luxury or even in simple well-being under the tradition of ‘‘good old superiorities,’’ when experiencing the forces of cosmic equilibrium and the expansion of the universe (which willy-nilly must RAISE standards as upon a flood tide to a par with the mechanisms of their own earlier ‘‘exclusive’’ advantage) interpret the prognostications of leveling as implying an ebb-tide of their own estate, for their reactions are relative to ego.

41 To the most insensate soul, it must be evident that economic and industrial changes greater than any in history are at hand. The duration of the period of transition will be variable in direct proportion to the intelligence and support given to advancing industry. Prolongation of the transition will work great harm upon the welfare and mental equilibrium of the slothful-minded.

42 Shelter is by far the greatest single item among man’s requirements in point of physical volume, weight, cost and longevity of tenure. Yet it is among the last to receive his scientific attention. The time-lag of the building industry—an industry in name but not yet in fact—is almost beyond belief. For instance, there was a span of 42 years between the invention of Portland cement and the time of application of re-enforced concrete to buildings. This is to be compared with a lag of less than seven years between the attainment of a new speed record in aeronautics and the routine repetition of this speed by commercial air lines. The home building field is still dominated by the activities of the interests in natural materials, who seek either stupidly or helplessly to force a preponderance of their material upon the market. The cement people seek to impose the all-cement house, the lumber people the all-wood house, and likewise with steel or gypsum, or asphalt or asbestos. There is no organized, centralized industry, having a testing, designing, sorting, assembling, distributing and advertising authority, with a definite responsibility to the public, by its advertised ideals of service, guarantee and resale value. All this happens because, through selfish conceit—unable to see ourselves as others see us, we have been laboring under the delusion in regard to housing, despite its having been disproven in all the lesser necessities, that material stylistic deformities and superfluous weight signify the character and individualism of its occupants. What would we think of a man walking the city streets in silks and lace neck ruffle today, or of a lady in a hoop skirt? Would we concede individualistic beauty to a girl with her nose in the middle of her back?

43 This ‘‘conscious withdrawal of efficiency,’’ demonstrated in a willful adherence to mediaeval theories of design (the gaudy Beaux- Arts esthetics) and a profit-minded system of production, has made architecture the most backward of the technologies. Even the newest and most publicized skyscrapers are decades obsolete in terms of what science and industry have rendered attainable. ‘‘MODERN’’ architecture is but a return to basic-classic.

44 It has always been obvious that the dynamic life going on within a structure is more important than the static structure, but, like so much else that is apparent, this has been generally disregarded, with the result that shelter has been looked upon as an end in itself, and not as a means of life.

45 Once the problem of shelter service has been solved, the mechanical inefficiencies of environment-control will disappear. ‘‘The house will begin to live not by what it brings to the builder, but by what it gives to its occupants, and by what the latter, reciprocally, bestow upon it. It will become a triumph for the human mind through the human mind’’:¹ a place in which to live free from worry, free to explore, free to devise, include, refine, free to compose and synchronize.