The Owner Built Home & Homestead
(Page 9 of 15)
Some furniture items can be advantageously mounted on
wheels. But wherever possible use built-ins—they go
far in eliminating the furniture clutter. Consolidation of
furnishings is an attractive concept to people who are
unencumbered by conventional trappings. Dispensing with the
usual traditional paraphernalia has economic as well as
social implications.
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There is a major economic advantage in building minimal
rather than fulsome interiors. The elimination of interior
non-essentials radically miniaturizes dimensions. Some
noteworthy concepts are called Room-within-a-room,
Mini-room, and Living-centers.
Living-centers consist of clustering equipment and
furniture into the central portion of a room. Furniture is
consolidated instead of scattered around the perimeter. A
Living-center contains "systems" furniture that does even
more than synthesize and consolidate furniture and
equipment. It provides a fresh, revolutionary view of the
whole "furniture" concept. In a Living-center the furniture
may very well consist of movable trays or platforms. They
can be wheeled or slid or taken apart into various pieces
or laid out in different ways. One polyfunctional
Living-center may thus become a living, dining, sleeping,
or study area.
This new-era furnishing concept is contrasted to current
furniture arrangement practices in about the same way that
a mobile-home furnishing arrangement relates to the
interior of a boat. A boat is designed to utilize total
space; emenities are built-in. The space in a boat is small
but highly integrated. The mobile-home, on the otherhand,
is also small in space, but it is furnished with the usual
assortment of standard-sized appliances and furnishings.
The basic prefabricated shell does not carry through to the
inside.
Possibly the most satisfying sense of all is the sense of
privacy. This refers to visual and acoustical privacy as
well as spatial (touch) privacy. In this regard there is
real danger in too much modern-day "open planning." Aldo
van Eyck has said:
We must break away from the contemporary concept of spatial
continuity, and the tendency to erase every articulation
between spaces, i.e., outside and inside, between one space
and another. Instead, the transition must be articulated by
defining the in-between places which induce simultaneous
awareness of what is significant on either side.
My endo-space, meso-space, ecto-space approach may help to
clarify this concept, but continuing on may prove more
confusing than helpful to the average Owner-Builder.
Suffice it to say that the inside
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