by: Murrye Bernard Assoc. AIA LEED AP
Event: This Will Kill That? Presents Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London
Location: Center for Architecture, 12.05.07
Speaker: Sharon Marcus — Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Institute for Research on Women & Gender, Columbia University, & Author, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999)
Organizer: Emerging NY Architects (ENYA) Committee, AIANY
Author Sharon Marcus discusses her book.
Katerina Kampiti
For many, the image of “home” connotes a single, cozy structure surrounded by a yard. However, in compact urban environments the apartment becomes the unit of domestic life. In Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London, Sharon Marcus argues that apartment buildings embody the intersections of city and home, public and private life, and masculine and feminine spheres. She set out to prove this theory by researching 19th-century Paris and London.
Marcus found that London and Paris regarded the apartment unit in very different ways. For Londoners, the phrase, “An Englishman’s home is his castle,” carried psychological as well as cultural meaning. The English sought to make every residential building appear as a house; multiple units were arranged to simulate a mansion on the exterior, often in a horizontal format with separate entries hidden from view. Foliage and trees surrounded these “homes,” further de-emphasizing urbanity and aiming to create a sense of privacy for the inhabitants.
Parisian residential architecture, on the other hand, embraced scale and verticality, integrating buildings with monuments. Multi-use buildings were much more common in Paris than London. Privacy was not as important as the social relations among building inhabitants. Parisians entertained in their bedrooms, which were considered a private realm in English apartments, and Parisians accepted the lack of privacy, trading solitude for a view of the lively street.
Illustrations from the period further depict the contrasting attitudes towards apartment life held by the English and the French. London homes are shown in plan and elevation, whereas Parisian apartments are revealed in section, placing their “private” lives on display. As New Yorkers, it’s easy to draw comparisons between 19th century London and Paris and our own modern, urban dwellings. It seems we’ve ended up with a blend of both.
Murrye Bernard, Assoc. AIA, is a designer with TEK Architects and Director of Forward, the quarterly publication of AIA’s National Associates Committee.