Avi Friedman

This book discusses many of the ways in which the home has changed in the last 50ish years. Unlike many books which focus mainly on architecture and personal anecdotes, this book bases its analysis on sociological studies and real statistics about how homes have changed.

Many of the changes in the home are driven by changes in the structure of households. Households are becoming increasingly less traditional. Although the nuclear family still exists, it generally has a smaller number of children than in the past. Non-traditional households are increasing. This includes single parents, couple with no children and co-habitating couples (with or without children). These factors lead to a traditional home being less suitable than in the past for many households. For example, single adults and couples without children do not require the same amount or type of space as households with children.

Baby boomers have also contributed to the changing housing needs in North America. The baby boomers helped drive the increase in housing size even as they had less children (houses are, on average, twice as larger now as they were just after WWII; to be fair, just after WWII houses were smaller than they were before then). These changing expectations of what a house should be has had a dramatic effect on both housing design and land usage.

As baby boomers age, they continue to have an effect. Now they are driving the need for retirement housing including nursing homes, retirement communities, and adaptation of existing houses to aging residents. The second and third forms of housing are particularly significant; they allow older members of society to live independently or with minimal help. This independence marks a change from the past when aging parent were more likely to depend on their children for care in their old age.

The changing role of technology in the home cannot be ignored. One of the largest changes over the past 50ish years has been the decentralization of technology in the home. The first phones were centralized and lacked privacy. The first radios (and the first TVs after them) provided a family gathering point. Since then, technology has moved out of the living room and into the bedroom. In many homes, it is not unusual for there to be about one phone, TV, DVD player, music playback device, even computer per person. Although technology has had some effect on the structure of the home itself, the larger impact has been on the use of the home. The big fancy TV in the living room may be rarely used because everyone prefers the privacy of consuming alone. What is hard to say is whether this decentralization of technology is a cause or effect of the degrading quality of family interactions over the past 50ish years.

The authors reserve their greatest criticism for the evolution of the suburbs and the accompanying evolution of the home from a place to live to a consumer product. The suburbs, according to the author fail as a good place to live because they lack any sense of human scale. It is impossible to live in the suburbs without a car because they are not designed to be walkable (if they can be said to be designed at all). They discourage interaction between neighbors because the houses are set so far back from the street.

As people become less attached to their community, they become less attached to their home, making the community less stable and people in the community even more unlikely to interact. Rather than moving into a home and then adapting it to fit their needs, they move as soon as they feel they need something different about their home. When in a home, there is a desire to make it "look right". Fashions come and go, adding expenses and decreasing pleasure in the home. These fashions are not limited to small things like throw pillows and the pictures on the walls. Non-functional remodels of homes and frequent replacement of furniture have become much more common than in the past.

This book provides a good balance to other books I have read that have taken a more theoretical look at the home or have failed to look deeply at modern home use (no one ever mentions where the TV should go). It is, for the most part, descriptive rather than prescriptive, so I think that there is still opportunity to integrate these ideas with the more prescriptive ideas of other books I have read. However, it certainly provides much of the data that would be necessary for that synthesis.… (més)