Looking Around: Introduction to Floor Plans
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:
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!
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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)
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.
McAlester, Virginia, and A. Lee McAlester. A field guide to American houses: the definitive guide to identifying and understanding Americas domestic architecture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
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