Time is a fabric woven within space

El sonido de inicio de Windows XP ralentizado a 24 horas.

Here’s a palette for a Carnival

Here’s a palette for an Evening Sky

Here’s another palette for an Evening Sky

Hello Friends! Sorry about the drama this week. Back to our regularly scheduled content! 

Last week’s installment left us wondering: If architectural style isn’t going to help us identify common houses, what will? 

In the world of vernacular architecture, floor plans are perhaps one of the single greatest ways to differentiate and identify certain types of houses for a number of reasons: 

1) While the outside of some houses may look similar or exactly the same, their internal floor plans can be completely different, and vice versa!

2) There’s a clear historical progression of the number of rooms in a house and their various uses, which can be helpful in (roughly) determining the age of a house. 

3) It’s possible to identify many floor plans from reading the exterior of a house - it just takes some practice!

The good news about floor plans is that a lot of our architectural vocabulary when talking about everyday houses already revolves around floor plans - we’re just not often aware of it. For example, a four-square house is called such because, well, it usually has four rooms per floor. 

Sterling Homes, 1916. Via Archive.org. Public Domain

Alas, not all houses that look alike have the same floor plan! This is where homebuilding trends and regional differences come into play. For example, here is a four-square house that looks similar to the one above, but has a totally different floor plan! 

Radford Homes 1909, via Archive.org. Public Domain. 

In addition, houses that look relatively different from each other can have very similar floor plans. Taking the example of our first house, here is a house that looks different from it but has a very similar internal layout! 

Sterling Homes, 1916. Via Archive.org. Public Domain.

As we can see, unlike architectural styles, floor plans offer a certain cohesion to different everyday houses from similar time periods.

We’re going to look at different floor plan typologies in-depth in other posts in this series, but in order to do so, an overview is needed. 

Technology, Sociology, and the Layout of Houses

Before the Second Industrial Revolution, the layouts of most everyday houses were relatively simple, with a limited number of rooms and room functions. These pre-industrial houses are what most definitions of “vernacular” architecture refer to, emphasizing the heavily localized nature of their construction, entirely reliant on regional builders and their aesthetics, as well as material factors such as distribution of materials, types of financing, and land development/use.  (Hubka 2013, 41; Gottfried and Jennings 2009, 9)

It’s important to note that regional differences and the design traditions of local builders are still extremely important today when examining common houses. However, it’s also important to understand that the industrialization of homebuilding and the housing market beginning in the late 19th century increasingly homogenized these design traditions and the role of local builders became developing nuanced regional traditions within a nationalized design fabric rather than the dominant determinants of housing forms. (Hubka 2013, 41)

There is a common misconception that houses got smaller as the 20th century moved forward. This is only true when talking about the houses of the elite, which indeed shrunk after certain sociological changes, such as the abolition of slavery and the reduction of live-in servants in the post-Victorian era. 

The industrialization of national housing types ultimately brought down the costs of building homes with certain types of features. Several housing features that were previously accessible only to the upper classes such as modern bathroom and kitchen fixtures, dining rooms, closets, front porches, and larger, more private bedrooms became, through mass production, accessible to the middle and working class. For these classes, the average home sized actually increased in comparison to their previous dwellings. (Hubka 2013, 27)

Changing Patterns in Room Layouts and Uses

Pre-Railroad, Pre-Industrialization

Prior to industrialization (McAlester: pre-1850-1890), most working class houses were centered around the kitchen, with one or two other rooms for living, sleeping, and working.

1800s cottage in Custer Co., Nebraska. Image via Library of Congress. Public Domain. 

One-room-deep (aka hall-and-parlor or “I” house plans) plans demonstrate the sparseness of these early work and kitchen-centric houses. At this time, many people often worked within their homes, or their homes were located on the premises of where they worked, such as sharecroppers’ cottages. 

These early houses did not have the technological luxuries of today such as kitchen appliances or bathrooms. Each room had more than one purpose (Hubka 2013, 68). 

Expansion of Industrialization

During the expansion of the railroads and the transition into industrialization (Hubka: 1860-1930; McAlester: 1850-1920), working and middle class houses developed three areas of domesticity: kitchen, living, and bedroom(s). The total number of rooms was increased from 1-3 to 3-5. The houses built for workers by the industries they worked for tended to be of this model. Below is a 1903 Radford prototype:

A more common subtype was the two-room-deep four-box (one-story four-square), as seen in this 1910 Aladdin catalog example:

At this time, the threshold between working and middle class houses was whether or not they had an internal bathroom or other utility spaces such as pantries or closets. At this time, thanks to the railroads and other technological developments, work began to be separated from the home; that is, many families began that familiar ritual known as the commute. 

The Modern Era (post 1900)

Further improvements in homebuilding technology at the turn of the 20th century transformed the early industrial-era houses into our contemporary ideas of middle class domesticity that still exist today. House size increased from 3-5 to 5-8 rooms, with increasingly specified room types and modern utilities. By this time, thanks to the invention of the streetcar and later the automobile, almost all work was separated from the home as first and second generation suburbs flourished. 

The bungalow was the first types of houses developed during this time, and its layout continues to be influential today: 

Via Archive.org. 

At this time, specialized hobby rooms such as studies and sewing rooms began to appear in upper-middle class homes. This increasingly specific room use will soon devolve into contemporary tropes such as formal vs informal living rooms, game rooms, breakfast nooks, and laundry rooms. 

(We know that this devolves into McMansion tropes as well - theatre rooms, anyone?) 

That’s it for this week’s Looking Around! In our next installment, we’ll examine early industrialized home plans in more detail. Be sure to stay tuned for the Mississippi McMansion of the Week on Thursday! 

If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon!  Also JUST A HEADS UP - I’ve started posting a GOOD HOUSE built since 1980 from the area where I picked this week’s McMansion as bonus content on Patreon!

Not into small donations and sick bonus content? Check out the McMansion Hell Store- 100% goes to charity.

Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are publicly available and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107. Manipulated photos are considered derivative work and are Copyright © 2017 McMansion Hell. Please email [email protected] before using these images on another site. (am v chill about this)

Works Cited: 

Carter, Thomas, and Elizabeth C. Cromley. Invitation to vernacular architecture: a guide to the study of ordinary buildings and landscapes. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008.

Gottfried, Herbert, and Jan Jennings. American vernacular buildings and interiors 1870-1960. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009.

Hubka, Thomas C. Houses without names: architectural nomenclature and the classification of Americas common houses. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013.

Así reacciona un osciloscopio Tektronix al conectarle música especialmente diseñada para él.

‘You must include a cover letter’ does not mean ‘write a single line about why you want this position’. If you can’t be bothered to write at least one actual paragraphs about why you want this job, I can’t be bothered to read your CV.

Don’t bother including a list of your interests if all you can think of is ‘socialising with friends’ and ‘listening to music’. Everyone likes those things. Unless you can explain why the stuff you do enriches you as a person and a candidate (e.g. playing an instrument or a sport shows dedication and discipline) then I honestly don’t care how you spend your time. I won’t be looking at your CV thinking ‘huh, they haven’t included their interests, they must have none’, I’m just looking for what you have included.

Even if you apply online, I can see the filename you used for your CV. Filenames that don’t include YOUR name are annoying. Filenames like ‘CV - media’ tell me that you’ve got several CVs you send off depending on the kind of job advertised and that you probably didn’t tailor it for this position. ‘[Full name] CV’ is best.

USE. A. PDF. All the meta information, including how long you worked on it, when you created it, times, etc, is right there in a Word doc. PDFs are far more professional looking and clean and mean that I can’t make any (unconscious or not) decisions about you based on information about the file.

I don’t care what the duties in your previous unrelated jobs were unless you can tell me why they’re useful to this job. If you worked in a shop, and you’re applying for an office job which involves talking to lots of people, don’t give me a list of stuff you did, write a sentence about how much you enjoyed working in a team to help everyone you interacted with and did your best to make them leave the shop with a smile. I want to know what makes you happy in a job, because I want you to be happy within the job I’m advertising.

Does the application pack say who you’ll be reporting to? Can you find their name on the company website? Address your application to them. It’s super easy and shows that you give enough of a shit to google something. 95% of people don’t do this.

Tell me who you are. Tell me what makes you want to get up in the morning and go to work and feel fulfilled. Tell me what you’re looking for, not just what you think I’m looking for.

I will skim your CV. If you have a bunch of bullet points, make every one of them count. Make the first one the best one. If it’s not interesting to you, it’s probably not interesting to me. I’m overworked and tired. Make my job easy.

“I work well in a team or individually” okay cool, you and everyone else. If the job means you’ll be part of a big team, talk about how much you love teamwork and how collaborating with people is the best way to solve problems. If the job requires lots of independence, talk about how you are great at taking direction and running with it, and how you have the confidence to follow your own ideas and seek out the insight of others when necessary. I am profoundly uninterested in cookie-cutter statements. I want to know how you actually work, not how a teacher once told you you should work.

For an entry-level role, tell me how you’re looking forward to growing and developing and learning as much as you can. I will hire genuine enthusiasm and drive over cherry-picked skills any day. You can teach someone to use Excel, but you can’t teach someone to give a shit. It makes a real difference.

This is my advice for small, independent orgs like charities, etc. We usually don’t go through agencies, and the person reading through the applications is usually the person who will manage you, so it helps if you can give them a real sense of who you are and how you’ll grab hold of that entry level position and give it all you’ve got. This stuff might not apply to big companies with actual HR departments - it’s up to you to figure out the culture and what they’re looking for and mirror it. Do they use buzzwords? Use the same buzzwords! Do they write in a friendly, informal way? Do the same! And remember, 95% of job hunting (beyond who you know and flat-out nepotism, ugh) is luck. If you keep getting rejected, it’s not because you suck. You might just need a different approach, or it might just take the right pair of eyes landing on your CV.

And if you get rejected, it’s worthwhile asking why. You’ve already been rejected, the worst has already happened, there’s really nothing bad that can come out of you asking them for some constructive feedback (politely, informally, “if it isn’t too much trouble”). Pretty much all of us have been hopeless jobseekers at one point or another. We know it’s shitty and hard and soul-crushing. Friendliness goes a long way. Even if it’s just one line like “your cover letter wasn’t inspiring" at least you know where to start.

Bien jugado Skynet, bien jugado…