Circulation, Clients, and Guest Spaces Vs. Family Spaces

chapter 11 F10 House Robie House Your Home COMPARISON BUILDINGS Circulation, Clients, and Guest Spaces vs. Family Spaces How do architects THE BIG How do people move arrange the rooms in through the spaces in QUESTIONS 1 2 a home to best fi t the a home? needs of the client? Architects make decisions about the When architects design any building, arrangement of all the rooms in they must consider who is going to relation to the path through the house. use it. If the architects know specifi c Consider the arrangement of rooms in information about the people who your home: Do you have to walk will live in a home, they can design through one room to get to another? it to best suit the needs of those If you were to walk from the front people. The client is the person who door of your home to your bedroom, hires the architect and often lives how many different spaces would you in the building. If you closely study pass through? Do all the spaces fl ow a fl oor plan, you can fi nd clues freely into one another? Are the rooms about the specifi c family or type of organized around a hallway? If you families for whom the home was were to walk from the front door of originally designed. your home to the back door, how Families lived a much more formal many different rooms would you walk lifestyle 100+ years ago. Throughout through? This circulation path, most of the 18th century, 19th century, designed by the architect, can depend and the fi rst half of the 20th century, on the shape of the lot and the overall American homes typically had a arrangement of the home, as well as closed fl oor plan. Each individual on the needs of the client. room had one function and doors that separated it from the other rooms. Today, many newer homes like the F10 House designed by EHDD Architecture have an open fl oor plan with few or no doors between spaces. F10 House – circulation path through the fi rst fl oor plan 182 THE CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE FOUNDATION The Architecture Handbook: A Student Guide to Understanding Buildings © 2007 P3 THE FLOOR PLAN Circulation, Clients, and Guest Spaces vs. Family Spaces 11 school came to your home. Are there rooms where they would not be “allowed” or welcomed? Which rooms CHAPTER VOCABULARY would they never be invited into? This situation helps illustrate how circulation path the path that different rooms are arranged and also a person travels when walking used by different people. through spaces in a building When a guest comes to your home, client the person or company that pays the architect to design the your family will probably lead them building; often the client lives to a room where you can comfortably in the building or is the primary © Doug Snower Photography. visit. Often, this is the living room or user, but not always F10 House interior – view looking west toward perhaps the dining room. Bedrooms the living room and the front door closed fl oor plan a fl oor plan and bathrooms aren’t usually designed where four walls enclose each near the front door of the home space; the rooms are linked by Floor plans in apartment buildings are because these spaces are more private. doors and are designed to have often more complicated because several In a two-story home, the bedrooms distinct uses; the second fl oor households (each with their own family are almost always located on the of the F10 House has a closed fl oor plan members and their own guests) live second fl oor. open fl oor plan a fl oor plan under the same roof. Apartments have Today we may use our homes without walls to fully enclose the three types of walls – interior partition differently than they were originally walls that separate rooms from one spaces; the fi rst fl oor of the F10 designed, and we may use one room House has an open fl oor plan another, exterior walls that separate for several different purposes. One interior partition wall a wall within rooms from the outside, and common hundred years ago, for example, it walls or party walls that separate one a home that separates rooms would have been completely unheard from one another apartment from another. of to eat in the living room. Today exterior wall a wall that separates While family members can freely move however, many families relax and eat rooms from the outside through all the rooms in their home on the couch in front of the TV in the (family spaces), some rooms are living room. Your family’s computer common wall / party wall a wall shared by two adjacent but might be located in the dining room specifi cally designed to also be used separate buildings or apartments; by guests (guest spaces). Imagine for or your bedroom might also be the the F10 House is a free-standing a moment that the principal of your place where you study. building, so it has no common walls family space a space or room in a home, such as a bedroom, typically used only by family members guest space a space or room in a home, such as the living room, typically used by both family members and guests; it may also include a hallway leading to the door of an individual apartment Robie House, 1906 Prairie Style home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; located in the Chicago A student’s home – bubble diagram of guest spaces (grey) and family spaces (brown) neighborhood of Hyde Park CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE The Architecture Handbook: A Student Guide to Understanding Buildings © 2007 THE CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE FOUNDATION 183 11 Circulation, Clients, and Guest Spaces vs. Family Spaces THE FLOOR PLAN P3 Prairie Style a style of buildings, Kitchens also illustrate how families you chatted with them and stirred furniture, and glass (from and rooms have changed over time. dinner on the stove. Today however, approximately 1900–1920); Meal preparation was much more labor kitchens are rooms where families and Prairie Style designs used horizontal lines to mimic the intensive 100 years ago. Families and their friends cook together and relax. fl at Midwestern landscape architects felt compelled to hide these The F10 House is a good example of spaces away behind closed doors. In this, as there aren’t any interior walls Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) 1906, it would have been unthinkable to separate the kitchen from the rest an American architect who began his architectural career to have guests in your kitchen while of the home. in Chicago where he did much of his most famous work; he is well-known for his Prairie Style homes built here A 1910 kitchen in Park Ridge, Illinois © Doug Snower Photography. F10 House interior – view looking east toward the kitchen / dining room and the back door on your way home The size of an at the exterior of homes found in more ‘public’ individual window in you pass by and see (guest) spaces within TODAY a room often provides if you can guess the the home, while smaller a good clue about the function of a room just windows are often function of that room. by looking at the size used in more ‘private’ On your way home of its window. A larger (family) spaces. today, look carefully window will typically be 184 THE CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE FOUNDATION The Architecture Handbook: A Student Guide to Understanding Buildings © 2007 P3 THE FLOOR PLAN Circulation, Clients, and Guest Spaces vs. Family Spaces 11 Chapter 11 compares the fl oor plan of the F10 House with the fl oor plan DID of the Robie House designed in 1906. The fl oor plan of this Prairie Style YOU home shows that architect Frank Lloyd Wright was ahead of his time. He know? anticipated that families would use rooms in less formal ways and that Tea and guests in the parlor guest spaces and family spaces would be separated in different ways. Frank Lloyd Wright Colonial-era families in early America (1600s–1700s) did not have the luxury of building homes with rooms designed for only one purpose. “Hall and parlor” homes had rooms that were multi-functional, just as are the rooms in many new homes Robie House designed today. These two-room homes typically were 18 feet wide and 36 feet long, and they had a fi replace at each end of the structure. The hall was typically the larger and more informal space and was used as the kitchen, dining, and work room. The parlor served as the formal room where the guests were received and where the family slept. (Toilet facilities were located in the outhouse!) © Hedrich Blessing. Robie House – view looking toward the living room from the dining room (during the home’s restoration, the furniture was removed) The Architecture Handbook: A Student Guide to Understanding Buildings © 2007 THE CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE FOUNDATION 185 11 Circulation, Clients, and Guest Spaces vs. Family Spaces THE FLOOR PLAN P3 Although the kitchen in the Robie A fi replace and open stairwell are in class House is still separate from the other the only divisions between the living rooms, the living room and dining room and the dining room. This Mr. Robie with the open fl oor room can both be seen at the same arrangement was very different than plan in the red brick home time. The two rooms are visually tied most of the other homes designed together with a continuous strip of in America at the beginning of the The playing cards provide the windows along one wall.

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