American architecture introduced the open floor plan home around the turn of the 20th century, and now it is pretty much expected in new homes, where one large room combines the functions a kitchen, living room, and dining room. First, the kitchen and dining room were combined. By mid-century, open floor plans became synonymous with modern home architecture, bringing families together, facilitating supervision, and besides, it was great for entertaining.
Prosperity rose during the 1960s. The housing industry became more powerful, and many families had enough money to trade up from their wartime houses—especially white, middle-class families who had been able to build wealth through home equity. They developed greater ambition and wanted more space. As the small, modernist middle-class home of the 1930s through 1950s gave way to larger designs of the late 1960s and onward, the great room emerged, often with a vaulted ceiling exposed to high windows or a second-floor gallery. And so, the total space and activity the open-plan homeowner had to manage from behind the kitchen increased ever further. The kitchen became like a ship’s bridge, but absent the personnel to run the vessel.
Openness and continuity might have been modernist aspirations for the spirit as much as the body, but just as the open-plan office created the oppression of constant oversight in the name of collaboration, so the open-plan home merged the duties of hostess, butler, cook, and childcare provider. And despite its promise of relaxation and conversation, open-plan living has actually combined leisure with labor. When the two fuse, work wins in the end, converting recreation back into obligation. The dinner party entails its preparation and cleanup; meal-prep also involves child oversight or homework help; television-viewing takes place during dishwasher-unloading. Overall, domestic life becomes an exercise in multitasking. And so, even when it expands freedom, the open kitchen constantly reminds its users of that freedom’s limits.
Do the benefits of an open floor plan outweigh the disadvantages? An entire family can be together in a great room without actually interacting with each other, but proximity does encourage interaction. Open floor plans are a great boon to those susceptible to claustrophobia. And it does make bringing food to the table easier. But it also enables dirt to spread through the house easier. Kitchen smells, heat, and grease are no longer confined to the kitchen. A sinkful of dirty dishes makes the entire living space look messy. You can't control which spaces are heated or cooled separately. And what busy cook wants to be reminded that every other family member is relaxing in front of the TV? Read about the rise of the open floor plan and the backlash against it at The Atlantic. -via Metafilter, where you'll find more links on the subject.
(Image credit: Flickr user Steve Bennett)
nice racist identity politics dig at people whose skin is the lightest color and is achromatic because it fully reflects and scatters all the visible wavelengths of light
through no fault of their own as they were born with it and according to you that enabled them to get a place and that's the only reason they got it as in "if your skin is as mentioned
above you get to have a house and that's all the qualifications one needs"
thank you for continuing to spread hate between the skin tones, don't ever stop.
it seems to be working really well as divisions are becoming deeper and deeper,
let's never forgive, let's always hate.
what are you trying to achieve? is this a solution?
open concept=white=racist home ownership practices by banks in the 50s. the end?
maybe you should mention slavery while you're at it why stop at jim crow.
how about colonization, gender fluidity, man-spreading, slut walks etc...
when will you be satisfied? when will your thirst be quenched?
i think most people would like to move on as NONE OF US can change the past.
did you think you were uncovering some great hidden secret that some people
had it rough, had it tough, had to fight, had to die and still didn't have the ability
to get any kind of "concepts" open or otherwise.
you are the very thing you think you are fighting.
"black" people owned homes in the 60's you ignorant twit so no there is nothing
accurate about the "mention" or the "dig" at "white" people.
what does the colour if someone skin have to do with "open concept"?
do you see it now? do you see how it accuses an actual whole race of people for
what some may or may not have done for reason that are not really known and
are definitely not explained in the "open concept" article?
this clearly says "whites were ABLE" as in others were NOT able.
nothing whatsoever to do with how many "whites" there were or were not.
the sentence clearly suggests that whites were ABLE to build equity and
others were not based on the colour of their skin and not because of catastrophic
drug use, violence, poverty, rape, and other criminal activity
in a particular community of people.
i still don't know what any of this has to do with concepts which may or may not be open.
or the sentence could have gone this way
many families DID NOT have enough money to trade up from their wartime houses—especially BLACK families who had NOT been able to build wealth through home equity."
why not pray tell, why were black families not able to get "open concepts"
because although the article tries to race bait with the racially insensitive remark
it also fails to explain its existence in the context of "open concepts".