Living Stones

The Idea of the Living House

The anthropomorphic notion of the house clearly was not an invention of the early modern era; but it saw its heyday in that period. ¹¹ To a significant extent, this had to do with the interplay of three specific factors at the time.

The first factor harked back to antiquity, and there was nothing specifically European about it: like many traditional non-Western societies studied by anthropologists, the peoples of ancient and premodern Europe did not have a standardized metric system, and therefore the human body often served as an important scale for apprehending and experiencing space. This is also reflected in the etymology of measurement units from that period, some of which are known or even used to this very day, such as “foot, “span,” or “cubit” (from Latin cubitum, “elbow”). In his microhistorical study of everyday life in the medieval French village of Montaillou, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has brought to life a world in which corpus and domus—body and house—were the two fundamental categories for conceptualizing space and reality. As Le Roy Ladurie notes, “the body was the measure of the world, in the first place, and when the world was too large to be measured by the body, its place would be taken by the domus.” ¹² Further, these two experiential categories were often closely intertwined. Not only did the body serve as model for the house, but it was also commonly believed that the house was “a suitable model for the interior of the body.” ¹³

The second contributive factor is that Christianity further bolstered and legitimized the entwinement of “house” and “body.” More prominently than Judaism and Islam, Christianity employed house metaphors, especially those related to anthropomorphic notions, in order to describe the relation between God and his believers. According to the New Testament, the apostles and prophets were “the foundation” of the “household of God,” with “Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord.” ¹⁴ Other passages speak of Jesus as “a living stone,” while promising believers, “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house.” ¹⁵ If God was as a “building fitly framed together,” it followed that man, made in the image of God, could be construed in similar terms. Paul applied these analogies to the inner structure of man, explicitly referring to the human body as an “earthly house” and as the “temple of God.” ¹⁶ This imagery, charged with theological meaning and popularized through the teachings of the Church, exerted great impact on medieval thought. More specifically, it described the relations between people and hence the elementary structures of society. For instance, it was not unusual to compare the well-organized Christian commonwealth—the so-called body politic—to the human body, an analogy that could also be applied to the inner composition of cities. Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) vividly captured this idea in a sermon he delivered in Siena: “I say unto you again, that it [the Hospital] is one of the eyes of the city, and the other eye is the Duomo, how well they do appear there side by side. The right eye is the Duomo, and the left is the Hospital; the nose is the piazza, which doth lie between them.” ¹⁷ The individual houses of the city and especially the church, as the House of God, mimicked this model on a smaller scale. In a cathedral, for instance, the narthex and naves were construed as the legs and trunk; the transept, the stretched arms; and the apse, the head. From another perspective, the elements of the cathedral followed the overall structure of Christian society: the altar was Christ; the illuminating windows were the Doctors of the Church; the mighty columns, the bishops; the beams, the princes; the tiles, the soldiers; and the floor, the ordinary people. ¹⁸ Such interpretations notwithstanding, the anthropomorphic notion of architecture was not as extensive and widespread in the Middle Ages as it would become in the Renaissance and Baroque eras. In practice, the hallmark of Gothic architecture was its rootedness in geometrical rules and patterns, as well as its striving for an ascension to (heavenly) heights. ¹⁹ In other words, Gothic architecture was not primarily geared toward analogies with the human body, nor can it be easily described in such terms.

The boom of anthropomorphic architecture only began—and this leads us to the third and final factor—with the renewed interest in Greek and Roman architecture that emerged in the Renaissance. As the master builders and architectural theoreticians of the Renaissance delved enthusiastically into the ancient literature on architecture, they noted the recurring analogy between body and building in many of these texts. In antiquity, the key question in both architecture and aesthetics was that of the right proportions, a question that preoccupied not only architects such as Vitruvius, but also thinkers like Cicero. Ancient writers believed that the perfect human body and its proportions were the measure of all things, so it was only natural to apply this idea to the art of building. ²⁰ Vitruvius summarized this approach as follows: “In the human body there is a kind of symmetrical harmony between forearm, foot, palm, finger, and other small parts; and so it is with perfect buildings.” ²¹ Renaissance architects incorporated these ideas into their own writings, embracing the notion that the body of a well-proportioned man (homo bene figuratus) should serve as a model and measure. ²² In the mid-fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti, drawing on his extensive study of ancient architecture, concluded in his influential treatise De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building) that “the building is a form of body” and that the different parts of the house should be “joined together like members of the whole body,” so that the “the building appear a single, integral, and well-composed body, rather than a collection of extraneous and unrelated parts.” ²³ In sum, the Renaissance rediscovery of ancient literature not only boosted the anthropomorphic notion of the house, but also imbued it with new elements and more systematic principles. As a result, the idea of the living house rose to a level of prominence that it had not yet achieved in the medieval period.

The Corporal Features of the House

The metaphorical discourse about the “living house” flourished throughout Europe during the Renaissance and the Baroque. But that does not imply that this discourse was entirely homogenous or consistent. Its lowest common denominator was the idea that certain parts of the house could be compared to the human body, and that the individual parts of the house should be bound together by the principle of organic unity. But there was no clear consensus as to which particular part of the body corresponded to which element of the house; it did, in fact, happen that in different regions of Europe one and the same part of the building was associated with different parts of the body. ²⁴

Throughout Europe, it was common to think of the door as the mouth of the house and the windows as its eyes. ²⁵ The popularity of these two analogies owed in part to their deep roots in language. In early modern French, for instance, the common word for front door was still huis, a term originating in the Latin word ostium (door), which, in turn, came from os (mouth). The term porte, which prevails in modern French, was mostly reserved for the lavish entrances of castles and government buildings. ²⁶ Christian iconography further bolstered the analogy between door and mouth, as it was common to depict the gates to the netherworld as Hellmouth (sometimes also referred to as the “jaws of hell”). ²⁷ Here again we see how such metaphorical notions sometimes left a concrete imprint on the architectural reality. Indeed, some architects went so far as to design real doors and portals as oversized mouths, either out of wittiness or in order to inspire awe (or both). A particularly imposing example is the monumental and intimidating mouth-shaped entrance to the Palazzo Zuccari in Rome, built by the painter and art theorist Federico Zuccari in the 1590s (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Mouth-shaped entrance to the Palazzo Zuccari, Rome. Built by the painter and art theorist Federico Zuccari in the 1590s.

The window, as the Germanic origins of the word reveal, traditionally was perceived as the wall’s eye, or “wind-eye.” ²⁸ Admittedly, the Romance languages used words derived from the more neutral Latin term finestra to designate windows, but this does not mean that the notion of the window as eye was absent in the Romance world. Quite the opposite, the Italian architect Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548–1616) was by no means alone in recommending that in a well-designed house “the windows [finestre] should, so to speak, be imitating eyes. … And this is why they have to be arranged in a way that some be on the right side, and some on the left side, and in the middle of the façade one should build some kind of arch.” ²⁹ Despite linguistic differences, then, the idea of the window as eye was common throughout Europe. This was in line with an established iconographic tradition of depicting windows as eyes (Figure 2). But it was also a reflection of the fact that there existed numerous proverbs equating windows with eyes in almost all major European languages. ³⁰ Further, in German—although it belonged to the group of languages using a word (Fenster) borrowed from Latin to designate windows—the analogy with the eye manifested itself in noun compounds. Thus it was common to link the term Fensterladen (shutter) to Lid (lid of the eye). This etymology seemed even more convincing given that the term Fensterladen was also spelled Fensterliet at the time, while the lid of the eye was sometimes called Augenladen (literally “eye-shutter”). ³¹ The English synonym for shutter, “blind,” likewise invokes ocular imagery. And even in Italy—where on the level of vocabulary there were relatively few such affinities between the terms “eye” and “window”—it was common to speak of the shutters as the eyes of the house. ³² It is hardly surprising that, conversely, the human eye was construed as the window of the body. This idea harked back to antiquity and became very popular in medieval and early modern Europe, not least through the medical literature. ³³ Early modern physicians often compared the human body to the house (Figure 3), and the fourteenth-century French surgeon Henri de Mondeville was not alone in advising his readers and patients to protect the eyes like windows. ³⁴ Physiognomists, by contrast, offered to fathom the character and fate of clients by examining their eyes, the “windows of the soul.” ³⁵ Construing the mouth as the body’s door and the cranium as its roof, they even claimed to provide “glimpses through the window, door, and roof into the interior of man.” ³⁶

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Figure 2.

From: Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp: Moretus, 1601). This engraving by the Flemish artist Cornelis Galle, titled “Adspectus incauti dispendium” (The Cost of Incautious Looking), is accompanied by exhortations in Latin, Dutch, and French. It appears in a treatise on sensual perception by the Jesuit Jan David.

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Figure 3.

From: Ma’aseh Toviyah (Work of Tobias), a medical treatise by the seventeenth-century Jewish physician Tobias Cohn (Venice: 1708). The diagram likens the various organs of the human body to the different parts of a house. This allegorical representation shows that the early modern discourse about anthropomorphic architecture was not a one-way street: just as houses were compared to organisms, organisms were also conceptualized as houses.

In his 1624 treatise The Elements of Architecture, Englishman Henry Wotton wrote that it was common to compare “the principall Entrance” to “our Mouthes” and the house’s windows to “our Eyes.” But he also acknowledged that “this Allegorical review may be driven as farre as any Wit will, that is at leasure.” ³⁷ Indeed, the early modern literature on architecture contained a wide range of additional analogies with the human body, some of which might seem rather outlandish to us today. Alberti, for instance, referred to the walls and beams of the house as its “bones” and considered the paneling between them to be the flesh of the building. According to Alberti, the architect’s task was to “bind together the bones and interweave flesh with nerves.” If the walls of the house turned out too thick, they could easily resemble the “swollen limbs” of a sick body. ³⁸ We find similar analogies in the works of other noted architects from that period, among them Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554), who argued that in a stone building, “the bricks are the flesh of the building and the stones are bones which support.” Like Alberti, Serlio warned that “if these two things are not well bound together, in the course of time they will fail.” ³⁹

In line with this image of the house having its own anatomy, the central space of a building, typically the courtyard, was referred to as its “bosom” or “belly.” Alberti, who argued that this space should ideally be an atrium in the style of antiquity, called it “the main part of the house, acting like a public forum, toward which all other lesser members converge.” ⁴⁰ By contrast, the hearth of the house often was analogized to the heart. In Germanic languages, this analogy was particularly plausible given the similarity between these two terms (a similarity that exists in German to this day, where the hearth is Herd while Herz is heart). ⁴¹ Some contemporaries argued that the internal stairs of a building were like a circulatory system, while the chimney, responsible for conducting away the smoke produced by the hearth, was like a trachea. ⁴² Others preferred to compare “the Offices […] to the Veines in our Bodies,” especially if these offices were “usefully distributed.” ⁴³ There was more agreement about the roof, which was described as the pate, hair, or headgear of the house, as the German term Schopfdach (“shock-of-hair-roof”) captures vividly. Against this background, it was only fitting that early modern Germans referred to the proper alignment of the roof beams as “combing” (verkammen) or the “brushing of the head” (Verbürstung des Kopffs). ⁴⁴ This imagery could also be applied to the projecting canopies and eaves, which occasionally were referred to as Schöpfflin (small shock of hair). ⁴⁵ Such different interpretations notwithstanding, there was one part of the house that was construed throughout Europe in the very same way: the façade, the face of the house.

The Face of the House

To interpret the façade as the house’s face was entirely in line with the etymological origins of the term. The term “façade” originated in the Italian facciata, which, in turn, came from faccia (face). The term facciata gained currency in Italy in the fifteenth century, and from there it soon spread all over Europe and was adopted in all major languages (in English and French as façade; in German as Fassade). ⁴⁶ The rise of this metaphor had concrete implications on a material level: just as the face constituted the most characteristic part of the human body, the façade similarly was the core of the house’s individuality. And much as the face, in Filarete’s words, contained “in itself the principal beauty” of a person, requiring continuous care and sometimes even cosmetic brightening up, similarly the façade deserved attention and beautification. ⁴⁷

Houses, of course, had always had façades, and the custom of ornamenting them existed as early as in antiquity. The ancient Greeks had a predilection for painting façades in different colors (unfortunately, few of these façades have survived, which leads to the popular misconception that all ancient Greek houses and temples were marble white). ⁴⁸ The Romans, by contrast, preferred a more monochrome façade, yet they paid great attention to the decoration of certain parts of it, especially the front door and the windows. ⁴⁹ In the early modern period, this custom of the Romans, which had to do with the display of social status as well as with certain religious rituals, was well known and even cited as a justification. As Diderot and d’Alembert’s famous Encyclopédie put it, the Romans decorated their doors and windows, and “this custom subsists among genteel people today.” ⁵⁰

However, this continuity between antiquity and early modernity was not a matter of course. Consider, on the one hand, the Islamic societies in Asia Minor and the Levant, which took a very different approach, despite the fact that they bordered Europe and also had been influenced by Greco-Roman culture in the past. In Islamic countries, the most imposing and lavishly decorated parts of the house tended to face the courtyard rather than the street. ⁵¹ On the other hand, in medieval Europe, too, many façades were still rather plain and unadorned, owing to both practical and economic limitations. ⁵² These limitations also affected the placement of windows and doors in the façades of medieval houses, with the desire for symmetry set aside in favor of a sober assessment as to where such apertures would be most useful for the residents. ⁵³

In the Italian Renaissance, the ornamentation and beautification of the façade became, in an unprecedented way, a task in its own right, independent from the interior and geared toward maximizing the house’s outward effect. ⁵⁴ The design of windows and doors likewise became more and more elaborate, while their positioning in the façade increasingly followed the rules of symmetry. Sometimes this even led to the insertion of windows where they did not fulfill any practical purpose. The doors, in turn, were made of costly materials and equipped with artful door-rings and doorknockers. Tellingly, Alberti admonished house-owner to use “modest materials” instead of bronze and ivory for their doors. ⁵⁵ Others also criticized the extravagant and excessive use of precious materials in façades. In seventeenth-century England, Francis Bacon noted sarcastically that “houses are built to live in, and not to look on.” ⁵⁶ And in Germany around the same time, the noted architect Joseph Furttenbach reminded his readers that the appearance of a façade could be deceitful, in the same way that expensive clothes had the potential to conceal a person’s flaws: “Therefore,” Furttenbach summarized, “I have looked much more at the interior of the building than at its ornamentation.” ⁵⁷ By and large, Northern European architects blamed the Italians for the fashion of “sacrificing the interior in favor of the beauty of the exterior.” ⁵⁸

Such critics tended to turn a blind eye to the fact that façade beautification was as popular in Northern Europe as it was in Italy. Their criticism was justified only insofar as many major trends in façade ornamentation indeed originated in Italy. It is not entirely clear to what extent this also holds true for the custom of painting the façade. There are modern scholars who have argued that “Venice may have seen the first experiments in painting the outer walls of a house.” ⁵⁹ According to this theory, the custom gradually spread from Venice all over Northern Italy, and then to Central Europe. At any rate, we know that the Venetian authorities decreed as early as the mid-fifteenth century that, wherever possible, every house façade should feature a depiction of the Virgin Mary. They hoped that this measure would help to secure God’s benevolence toward the city and its houses, but at the same time, as Edward Muir notes, “the relevant legislation made it clear that these images were to be prophylactic against blasphemy and street violence.” ⁶⁰ By the time of the Renaissance, the custom of painting the façade with religious as well as secular subjects was widespread in Italy, as was the custom of painting or affixing the family’s coat of arms on the façade. ⁶¹

For painters, such commissions were a welcome opportunity to earn extra income and to display their skills in a prominent location; even a distinguished artist like Botticelli agreed to paint the outer walls of buildings. ⁶² Architects, however, could perceive this as an encroachment into their domain. Thus, Serlio emphasized that the ornamentation of the façade was the architect’s responsibility and that the painter should merely be an executor of the architectural master plan. What is more, Serlio had a clear opinion as to what kinds of paintings were inappropriate if the corporeal soundness of the edifice was to be preserved: “If you have to decorate the façade of a building with painting, what is certain is that any opening which simulates sky or landscapes will not be suitable. These things break up the building—a solid and corporeal form—and transform it into a transparent one, without solidity, like a building that is unfinished or ruined.” ⁶³

Today, relatively few painted façades from that period have survived in Italy. As far as Venice is concerned, this is likely due to the destructive impact of the salt-laden air. ⁶⁴ However, such explanations can hardly be applied to inland cities such as Florence. Though inclement weather and other negative climatic factors may offer a partial answer, these are obviously not limited to Italy, which leads to the question of why painted façades have survived in certain areas north of the Alps more frequently than in Italy. Indeed, façade paintings were particularly popular and common in the German lands (a tradition that has been preserved in certain rural areas in Bavaria and Austria to this day). During his 1580 journey through southern Germany and Switzerland, Montaigne observed this phenomenon with great interest, noting in his travel diary that “they have the custom of painting nearly all the houses on the outside and loading them with mottoes, which make a very pleasant sight.” ⁶⁵

But Montaigne’s delight in this “very pleasant sight” should not make us overlook that the flourishing of façade painting in German lands had much to do with the continuous confessional tensions that marked everyday life in these places. Just as in Italy, in Catholic areas north of the Alps it was perfectly common to adorn the façades with depictions or statues of the Virgin Mary or other saints. ⁶⁶ In Italy, a relatively homogenous Catholic society, this was not a bone of contention (not to mention that the authorities had the power to punish anyone who dared to deface these images, sometimes even by death). ⁶⁷ North of the Alps, however, the situation was very different, especially in those German cities in which Catholics and Protestant lived side by side. The Protestant reformers, who appeared on the scene in the sixteenth century, vehemently opposed any visual representation associated with the cult of saints, be it in churches or on the façades of houses, and some of their followers went so far as to paint over or forcibly remove such images. But Protestants did not disapprove of façade painting altogether. Although they rejected certain motifs, they knew very well how to co-opt this medium for their own purposes: on the walls of Protestant houses, Biblical verses and theological maxims took the place of paintings depicting saints, and this held true for both sides of the house’s wall. Luther even envisioned “the whole Bible to be painted on houses, on the inside and outside, so that all can see it,” and he concluded: “That would be a Christian work.” ⁶⁸ Calvin exhorted his followers in a similar way: “Let us have Gods lawe written, let us have the saying of it painted on our walles as in tables, and let us have things to put us in minde of it early and late.” ⁶⁹

Precisely because of these fundamentally different attitudes, biconfessional cities were prone to become sites of fierce competition between the façades of Catholic and Protestant houses. On the one hand, this competition revolved around the question of how to adorn one’s “earthly house” in a way pleasing in the sight of God, so that He, in turn, would fulfill on the day of judgment people’s “[earnest desire] to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven.” ⁷⁰ On the other hand, homeowners from both camps were eager to showcase their religious convictions in public, and the house façade lent itself very well to this end. As a result, conflicts were inevitable, especially when the façades of public buildings were drawn into the conflict, as happened in the biconfessional city of Augsburg in 1589. When the municipal authorities ordered that the walls of a gate tower be painted with depictions of religious scenes, they proceeded—according to a Protestant observer—in an unacceptable “papist” way. He noted with biting sarcasm, “In this month [March] the lords of Augsburg chalked the Kreuzerturm and restored the crucifixion scene; this was probably a necessary Jesuit deed, so that even more devotion will be instilled in the Papists whenever they enter and leave through the gate.” ⁷¹

In addition to permanent façade ornamentation, there was also temporary decoration. Throughout the early modern period, it was customary in Europe to decorate houses upon the visit of a dignitary to the city or during other important political events. On such occasions, the authorities often explicitly decreed that the façades be adorned with precious tapestries and other fabrics. ⁷² Such decrees were not always necessary. Many burghers, on their own initiative and out of civic pride, spared neither trouble nor expense to decorate their houses. Things became more complicated, however, when it was a religious holiday or procession that prompted such orders. Catholic authorities went to great lengths to ensure that on such occasions every house façade, especially those along the procession route, be decorated with tapestries and sometimes also with candles. ⁷³ Protestants fiercely rejected any such orders or attempts to decorate their houses, which led to innumerable violent clashes with Catholics. In places where Catholics formed the majority, Protestants were often fighting a lost cause, as in France, where Catholics forced their Huguenot neighbors to decorate the façades of their houses, or even attacked and looted those houses that were considered not properly decorated. ⁷⁴

Dressing the House

The clashes sparked by the issue of façade decoration speak to the extraordinary attention early modern people paid to the appearance of the house. Here again, it is insightful to relate the phenomenon to the anthropomorphic notion of the house. Far more than just an architectural issue, the ornamentation of the façade was driven by the idea that the house, as an entity, had to be properly “dressed,” an idea deeply embedded on the level of language. In German lands, for instance, the terms for “wall” (Wand) and “garment” (Gewand) sprang from the same root, and the word Tünche (meaning “wall color”) stemmed from the Latin tunica (tunic). ⁷⁵ Architectural treatises often referred to the covering and surfacing of the walls as the Bekleidung or Verkleidung (clothing) of the house. ⁷⁶ In French, in turn, the word chemise (shirt) was used to refer to walls that were internally strengthened by supporting structures or filling materials. Tellingly, walls that were not “clothed” in one way or another came to be known in German as “smooth walls” (glatte Mauern), while the French expression was even more graphic: “naked walls” (le nud du mur). ⁷⁷

In the early modern period, there was an increasing tendency to prefer “clothed” walls to “naked” ones. Painting the façade was one means to this end, but it was expensive. A much cheaper option was to “cover” the outer walls with tiles, slates, or bricks. The residences of more affluent families were sometimes even “dressed” with stonework in different colors or with marble. ⁷⁸ As far as the inner walls went, early modern people could likewise avail themselves of a variety of methods. Wallpaper, invented in the fifteenth century, was the most affordable, and thus also a particularly popular option. The upper classes and the aristocracy, by contrast, preferred to cover the walls with exceedingly costly tapestries or painted, and sometimes even gilded, leather panels—in other words, with materials that could have been used to produce clothes for people. ⁷⁹

While early modern people were theoretically free to decide which clothes and degree of ornamentation suited their houses best, social and cultural conventions limited the realistic range of options. Generally speaking, this was an era when clothes were deeply invested with social meaning, indicating the wearer’s station and sometimes even his or her religious identity. ⁸⁰ The question of how people should dress was regulated in great detail. Almost every state in early modern Europe had elaborate sumptuary laws and government-issued dress codes that stipulated who could wear which particular clothes. Against this backdrop, homeowners knew to dress their houses in ways reflective of and appropriate to their station. Albrecht Dürer, for instance, was acutely aware of the symbolic power and social implications of clothes. In his self-portraits, he appears in garments that in reality he was not entitled to wear under the sumptuary laws of his hometown of Nuremberg. In his Four Books of Measurement, first published 1525, Dürer also touches on the topic of architecture, detailing various ways of adorning buildings. One chapter revolves around the question of how to construct a tall tower in the center of a city, a building that would enable citizens to enjoy the view of their city while also serving as an imposing civic monument and as an orientation aid to visitors. “Anyone wishing to build such a tower,” writes Dürer, “should adorn it as desired / for such a work requires quite a few clothes.” ⁸¹ It was, of course, easier to promote (and implement) such an ambitious architectural-sartorial vision with respect to public buildings and monuments. As far as private homes went, to dress one’s house “as desired” would likely have collided with the contemporary view that only certain clothes fit certain kinds of homes. A house that was dressed too ostentatiously or plainly could easily become the subject of criticism and even derision.

The criticism leveled toward over- or underdressed houses leads us to another facet of the metaphorical discourse about the “living house,” namely the association of houses with a particular gender. In the early modern period, it was not at all uncommon to speak of female and male buildings. ⁸² Overly adorned buildings often were considered female or at least effeminate. In this vein, the seventeenth-century German architect Leonhard Christoph Sturm polemicized against decorating church façades with ornaments made of carved wood, for “such decoration takes away quite something from the eminence of these edifices / making them all too womanish [weibisch] and wispy.” ⁸³ The Silesian architectural theorist Nicolaus Goldmann (1611–1665), who heavily influenced Sturm, went even further and altogether dismissed buildings that “have been made entirely womanish and whorish by means of too much decoration.” ⁸⁴ Similarly harsh was the verdict of the eighteenth-century architectural theorist Johann George Wagner, who decried the sort of architecture (Bau-Kunst) in which “that random and excessive finery rules … with which we often dress and paint [schminken] our buildings like whores, instead of putting them, as the ancients did, in the bashful dress of a virgin or in the honorable frock of a lady.” ⁸⁵

At the other extreme were buildings that were adorned too sparsely. ⁸⁶ Sparseness and simplicity certainly did not make buildings per se manly. For a house to appear manly, it required certain architectural features. In German lands, this often included a helmet-shaped roof (Helmdach), as opposed to a bonnet-shaped roof (Haubendach), which was typically considered feminine. But just as not every man at the time was allowed to wear a helmet, not every building deserved a Helmdach. In reality, it was mostly important public buildings such as city halls, palaces, and churches that tended to have helmet-shaped roofs. ⁸⁷ Early modern people were attentive observers of such architectural features and knew how to interpret them. Alberti’s remark that “roofs are the most important elements” of the house had more than just an architectural dimension. ⁸⁸

Anthropologists have observed the existence of similar concepts in a range of non-Western societies. We know, for instance, that among the Kabyles of North Africa there is a tradition to construe certain spaces of the house as male and others as female. ⁸⁹ Similarly, gendered notions of the house existed in Greco-Roman antiquity, and beginning in the Renaissance, Europeans increasingly rediscovered this tradition. This is not to say that they adopted all notions of gendered space that they encountered in ancient literature. The second-century Greek diviner Artemidorus found few followers subscribing to his idea that “the wall with the door signifies the master of the house [and] the wall with the window means the mistress.” ⁹⁰ By contrast, many early modern people agreed with the ancient view that the proportions of a house had an impact on whether it had a female or male appearance. It was similarly popular to associate the different varieties of columns with a particular gender. The ancient Greeks had created the framework for this discourse by noting the resemblance of columns to the upright human body and by experimenting with different ways of aligning the proportions of the column to those of the body. This analogy also informed the so-called Classical Order, the attempt to distinguish between different classes of columns. The designations used for these different varieties of columns (such as Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian) reflected the social composition of ancient Greek society, but over the course of time they also took on a distinctively gendered dimension. ⁹¹ By the Roman period, it seems to have been an established tradition to refer to Doric columns as distinctively male, owing to their grave appearance and their “nakedness” (nudam speciem). By contrast, the Romans considered Ionic columns feminine, partly because of their capitals displaying curved volutes (thought to represent curls of hair), and partly because of the hollow flutes in the shaft (which were likened to folds in a woman’s garment). ⁹² With the renewed interest in ancient architecture during the Renaissance, these notions resurged in the architectural discourse, sparking not only a profusion of treatises discussing the Classical Order and the gendered notions associated with it, but also countless attempts to implement these ideas in practice, resulting in what one scholar has called an unprecedented “inflation of columns” across Europe. ⁹³

The House as Organism and Its Life Cycle

The popular metaphor of the house having a body and a gender could not, of course, change the fundamental fact that houses, unlike humans, are incapable of moving of their own volition. But this did not mean that individual houses were stationary throughout their existence. First, God had the power to make them move, as in the case of the Holy House of Loreto, which was believed to have flown from Palestine to Italy, where it became a popular pilgrimage site. And other houses were movable in a different sense: many of the simpler wooden structures of medieval and early modern Europe could be disassembled with some effort and rebuilt somewhere else. This explains why in some parts of the German lands, houses belonged to the legal category of chattels or “movables” (mobilia) rather than real property. ⁹⁴ But even if a given house was made of stone and thus stationary, it did not have to be perceived as inanimate. Precisely because the house often was construed as an individual actor, it was only natural that it should have its own life cycle. Indeed, houses were not only associated with anthropomorphic, but also anthropodynamic features: they were born, lived, grew old, and eventually decayed. ⁹⁵

Filarete expressed these ideas vividly in his Trattato di architettura, written in the 1460s. Just as conception of a human required both a father and a mother, Filarete claimed that the homeowner was the father of the house and the architect its mother. And much in the way that the medical literature of this period linked the child’s features to planetary and stellar alignments at the moment of conception, Filarete and many other architects at the time believed that the soundness of a building depended not merely on the use of the right materials, but also on the favorable conjunction of the heavenly bodies during groundbreaking. ⁹⁶ After construction, it was typical for a priest to inaugurate the house in a ceremony similar to the baptism of a newborn, and this custom also existed in Protestant areas. ⁹⁷ But even such apotropaic rituals did not release the owner from his responsibility to pay close attention to the state of the house and to the external factors impacting it. Filarete, like Alberti and Leonardo, argued that while people relied on nourishment and medical care to live their lives, houses required continuous maintenance and caretaking, lest they “sicken and die like a man.” ⁹⁸

Continuous caretaking was all the more necessary since many premodern houses were never “completed” in the proper sense of the word. As is the case today, householders frequently remodeled interior spaces or added extensions, as per economic exigencies or changes in the social structure of the household. Thus architects rarely had the last word in the design of a house. In reality, houses were constantly in a state of flux; as we have seen, they were sometimes even moved. And although early modern architects liked to proclaim that the houses they built were made to last for eternity, most houses were bound to die. According to historians’ estimates, an ordinary wooden house had a life expectancy of around thirty or forty years, while the average stone house was more likely to survive for two hundred years. ⁹⁹ The perpetual cycle of birth and death, and the possibility of rebirth, was sometimes reflected in the very building materials. It was common to take so-called spolia—building stones and other fragments from surviving or dilapidated earlier structures—and reuse them for new building projects. In the Renaissance, the renewed interest in the past and especially antiquity led to a greater attention toward the different historical layers of buildings and at times even sparked veritable archaeological explorations, especially if the spolia were of Greek or Roman origin. ¹⁰⁰ People became more aware of buildings’ “life stories” and thus more conscious of the historicity of architecture.

In line with this metaphorical discourse, another dynamic feature of the house-organism was its inner life, which—like that of every living organism—experienced perceptible fluctuations, for instance on the level of temperature. Today, self-regulating systems for central heating and air conditioning have helped us achieve homeostasis in our homes. But premodern Europeans had the daily experience of finding certain parts of the house significantly warmer or colder than others. “When it is cold, one can often warm oneself on one side and freeze on the other,” a Swedish traveler visiting England noted as late as the eighteenth century. ¹⁰¹ This discrepancy left an imprint on language: while we tend to use the word “room” indiscriminately today to refer to the domestic spaces in which we live, sleep, or work, early modern people distinguished between the heated “parlor” and the relatively cold “chambers.” The German term for parlor, Stube, is related to the English word “stove,” reflecting the generally higher temperature in this part of the house. Thus the parlor, or Stube, served as the primary space for social activities within the house throughout premodernity, especially in the evening and during periods of cold weather. ¹⁰² The importance of heating for conducting social life within the house was yet another reason the hearth was the heart of the house.

When temperatures in the house diverged beyond the norm, however, dwellers could become very concerned (much like hypo- or hyperthermia as part of a human illness). In German lands, for instance, people believed that walls that were unusually cold to the touch forebode the death of a family member. Conversely, walls that felt suspiciously warm to the touch were thought to presage a fire. ¹⁰³ Of course, if the heat in the house came from a known source, such as the stove, sometimes homeowners really did have cause to worry. If the stove or the chimney of the house—often analogized to the trachea—did not work properly, it could lead to an excessive formation of smoke and soot. Such malfunctions of the airways could have grave effects on the house-body, not least by blackening the eyes of the house, the windows. Quite literally, the house would go blind. Daniel Schaller, a sixteenth-century Protestant minister in northern Germany, described this familiar situation in a poem in which he depicted the decay of an old house as an allegory of the end of the world (which he thought was imminent): “In an old house the windows darken / and in a raddled body the face thins down / and precisely this is now happening to the old and cold world / which is constantly declining.” ¹⁰⁴ It was generally believed that neglect on the part of the owner and the occupants could lead to the house falling ill or incurring bodily harm. Alberti noted that removing a stone from the masonry would inflict a “scar” on the wall, and he made a similar diagnosis for cracks in the brickwork caused by poorly executed extensions to the building. ¹⁰⁵ In line with such imagery, wet walls were called “sweating walls.” ¹⁰⁶

A particularly grave danger for the house-body was the risk of contamination during epidemics. Considered objectively, it was, of course, not the house, but rather its occupants who suffered during outbreaks of plague. However, lacking bacteriological explanations for the spread of disease, people blamed outbreaks on miasmata—that is, rank vapors and effluvia. Homeowners were very anxious about miasmata potentially spreading into their houses and settling there. During the plague, a house could turn from a shelter into a trap, or to put it differently, into a contagious organism. European sources from that period explicitly speak of “infected houses,” and that was not just a metaphor for the ill occupants. In fact, the houses themselves underwent rigorous treatment. As prescribed by law, once the occupants had either recovered or died, the house had to be vacated and then systematically cleaned: first, it was fumigated with its doors and windows shut, then scrubbed with either water or preferably vinegar, and finally thoroughly swept with a broom. Any grime or other possibly infected matter had to be burned outside in order to remake the house into an organism both living and livable. ¹⁰⁷

The Name of the House

Given this association of the house with a wide range of anthropomorphic and anthropodynamic features, it was only natural that houses also had names. This may seem unusual to us, as we are accustomed to having numbers rather than names for our houses; numbers, moreover, that do not contain any intrinsic information about the house other than indicating its geographical location in relation to other houses. In premodernity, the lay of the land was very different: not only did houses throughout Europe—as well as in the Islamic world—bear names instead of numbers; these very names also served as essential orientation aids in the urban space. ¹⁰⁸ As late as 1857, a burgher of Zürich reminisced that “until a few years ago, the names of houses were better known in Zürich than the names of streets.” ¹⁰⁹ Further, although streets had names, there were rarely any signs to indicate them. In Zürich, street signs were introduced only in the nineteenth century, and even then this was done primarily to help visitors find their way around. Zürich was typical in this sense. In Paris, too, street signs were not put up until the eighteenth century, although certain streets were known by name as early as the Middle Ages. Instead, the names of houses, and the so-called house signs deriving from those names, structured and ordered the premodern urban space.

At times the names were quite imaginative and even witty. An inn in late medieval Paris bore the name Au lion d’or (The Golden Lion), which in oral speech was almost homophonous with Au lit on dort (In the bed where one sleeps). Indeed, the names of animals were popular designations for houses, but so were the names of saints or of the homeowners. ¹¹⁰ The latter was relatively common in Cologne, as we know from the diary of the sixteenth-century councilman Hermann Weinsberg: “The majority of houses are,” he noted, “named after their owner, that is, his baptismal or last name; some are also named after their appearance [gestalt], others after the signs and slates [bredern], more specifically after what is depicted on them or on the façade.” ¹¹¹

While houses often took on the names of their owners or occupants, a person could also adopt the preexisting name of the house he inhabited. This was particularly common in cities where the names of houses had been officially set down at some point. In Cologne, for instance, in 1437 the city council prohibited any future attempts to change the names of houses registered in the Schreinsbüchern (the ledgers recording most, though not all, real estate transactions). The idea was that the names of these houses would be preserved irrespective of who owned or inhabited them. ¹¹² However, Cologne’s strict policy was an exception, and in most major European cities house names changed repeatedly. It could even happen that multiple houses bore the same name, either consecutively or at the same time. In medieval Constance, there were three houses called Engel (Angel), while the Jewish district in early modern Frankfurt had two houses named after unicorns. An extreme case was that of eighteenth-century Vienna, where thirty houses bore the name Goldener Adler (Golden Eagle), six of which were in the center of the city. ¹¹³

This way of structuring urban space might seem bewildering and dysfunctional to us today, but not for early modern people. For them, the house’s name was by no means an incidental or haphazard feature, but rather a natural and integral part of its identity. The name had an impact on the artistic decoration of the house. As the German architectural theorist Johann George Wagner put it in 1728, the crucial question was how “to make, as it were, speaking or suggestive buildings by way of ornamentation, so that they shout out their own name like the cuckoo does. In short, they [viz. the buildings] have to fulfill the task and know the art that was once mastered by the pantomimes [of antiquity].” ¹¹⁴

This was a point in common between private houses and churches, for the House of God, too, always bore a name (mostly that of a saint), and this name, in turn, often had a significant impact on the artistic decoration, the iconographic program, and even on the architectural form of the church. ¹¹⁵ For private houses, however, the relation between house and name was even more osmotic: as mentioned, inhabitants lent their names to houses, but there were also instances in which an individual or even an entire family adopted the house’s name. The interrelatedness of house and family led to the custom in some areas in Central Europe of engraving the house sign into the skull of a deceased resident. ¹¹⁶

Unsurprisingly, then, the government-ordered replacement of house names with house numbers met with considerable resistance. Though authorities first attempted to number houses in the sixteenth century, the policy did not prevail until the eighteenth century. In London, house numbers were first recorded in 1708, but only on Prescot Street; the rest of the city’s houses were not assigned numbers until the 1760s. In Prague, numbering began in 1727, in Madrid in 1750, and in Paris authorities made a start in 1779, but only finished the project during Napoleon’s reign. ¹¹⁷ Throughout Europe there were different motives for house numbering, but three factors were particularly important. First, house numbering made it easier for authorities to conduct the conscription process and billet soldiers methodically. Moreover, it facilitated tax and duty collection. Finally, in many places the emerging fire insurance companies, often run or subsidized by the state, had a concrete economic interest in a more systematic ordering of urban space and thus also in house numbering. ¹¹⁸

The citizens themselves were rarely proactive. Quite the contrary, they often vehemently opposed the measure. Members of the aristocracy and upper class, for their part, considered the policy an assault on the honor of their houses. In the Habsburg lands, for instance, there were quite a few aristocrats who defied government attempts to number their residences. Civil servants countered that even the emperor’s palace in Vienna had been assigned a number under the new policy. Ordinary people also opposed the measure, fearing—and rightly so—that house numbering would tighten the grip of the conscription and tax system. They also shared the concern that the measure would deprive the house of its distinctive identity, turning it into an anonymous, countable unit. As the sociologist Georg Simmel, an astute observer of urban culture, noted more than a century later, “through the name, which was associated with the conception of the house, there is formed much more of an inherent being of individuality than does the identification by numbers that are repeated similarly in every street and constitute only quantitative differences between them.” ¹¹⁹ When the authorities affixed numbers to house façades, the inhabitants took this as an affront to the very face of the house, and as an act of branding. Consequently, government officials in charge of numbering houses were often severely insulted, spattered with water, and beaten up (sometimes even to death) by householders. Even if the officials managed to accomplish the task, it was not uncommon for residents later to “besmear [the house numbers] with excrement, or scratch them off with iron tools,” as a frustrated Habsburg official reported in 1770. ¹²⁰

Punishing the House

Let us now return to the Venetian episode with which we started. As we have seen, the premodern European house often was construed as an actor in its own right, or in the words of a modern anthropologist, a “living extension of the group of its inhabitants.” ¹²¹ On the one hand, the house embodied the honor and social status of its occupants. As the sixteenth-century architect Palladio put it, “that house only ought to be called convenient, which is suitable to the quality of him that is to dwell in it.” ¹²² It is not by chance that in this period the words “house” and “family” were used interchangeably in all major European languages and throughout all strata of society. ¹²³ Indeed, as Amanda Vickery notes, “homes or the lack of them materialized one’s place in social hierarchy.” ¹²⁴ On the other hand, this entanglement was precisely the reason houses were quite literally vulnerable and often the targets of certain rituals of violence and scorn, many of which seem rather foreign to us today.

Naturally, the most exposed parts of the house were also the most vulnerable. The smashing of windows and doors was an ongoing problem throughout early modernity, especially in urban spaces. Such assaults on the house formed an essential and highly ritualized part of the “culture of retribution” that was the hallmark of urban revolts and other forms of uprising. ¹²⁵ For example, outbreaks of violence were common in Rome whenever a pope died, or when his successor was elected (the interregnum between these two events was the period of sede vacante, which the populace understood as a period of the suspension of law). As early as the ninth century, a Catholic Council bemoaned the custom in Rome of assaulting the Lateran Palace on the death of a pope, a ritual that in later years extended to the houses of courtiers and supporters of the deceased pope. ¹²⁶ Looting was an important motive behind these acts, but at the same time houses were damaged and mutilated in ways that made no strategic or economic sense, suggesting that the house was seen as a symbolic proxy for its owner. Consider this contemporary account of how the citizens of Rome attacked and “blinded” the house of an aristocratic supporter of Pope Sixtus IV after the latter’s death in 1484: “They took the house by storm and plundered and tore down what was left in the palace, ravaged and destroyed all doors and marble window frames with iron clubs; … as one can still see, not a door or window was left unharmed.” ¹²⁷ The same ritual would typically happen again right after the election of the new pope, although at that point the house of the freshly elected cardinal became the target—easy prey, as it had lost both its owner and, as it were, its raison d’être. Pope Pius II, writing in the third person, recounts with indignation in his Commentaries that immediately after his election in 1458 “a disgraceful mob not only pillaged his house but actually demolished it by making off with blocks of marble.” ¹²⁸

Such acts of violence happened regularly also on a smaller scale. This held true all over Europe. In many university towns, for instance, it was a custom (as well as an act of daring) among students to deride and provoke burghers by smashing the windows of their homes. This custom became so rampant that entire treatises were written by jurists about how to cope with it. ¹²⁹ The houses of prostitutes could likewise become targets of assault: it was not uncommon for both angry clients and jealous competitors to set fire to the doors of a prostitute’s house, or to break its locks, smash its windows, and besmear its shutters. ¹³⁰ In a similar way, householders who were suspected of morally reprehensible acts as well as those who failed to live up to normative gender roles could become victims of a charivari, a mock ritual typically including the smashing of windows and doors. ¹³¹ Jews, too, were frequent victims, especially during Eastertide, when it was common for youths and children to throw stones at Jewish houses and their windows in a carefully scripted ritual, which in Italy, for instance, came to be known as santa sassaiola (Holy Stoning). ¹³²

The material damage caused by such rituals of scorn was significant, especially when the smashed windows were made of glass, a costly commodity at the time. But the damage alone does not sufficiently explain why such assaults were exceedingly provocative and why, by extension, the perpetrators could be harshly punished. In fact, the smashing of windows constituted—along with crimes such as murder, heresy, and treason—a grave offense that was subject to high justice. ¹³³ According to legal reasoning at the time, the windows and doors stood pars pro toto for the entire house; to smash them was therefore a breach of the pax domestica, the domestic peace, as well as an affront to the honor of the House (in the familial meaning of the word). ¹³⁴ Additionally, it was not far-fetched to interpret the smashing of windows as an act of blinding of the house’s eyes. In a similar way, the smashing or removing of doors was an act of great humiliation for the house, further amplified if—as in the case of the Venetian Balduin family mentioned above—the door was to remain perpetually open: a door-less house was no longer a proud actor representing the family, but rather resembled, as it were, a fool, a figure traditionally characterized by his gaping mouth. In line with this imagery, assailants could also “pale” the orifices of the house (verpfählen, in German). The semantic affinity to the corporeal punishment of “impaling” is not accidental. In the context of the house, “paling” meant the sealing of doors and windows by way of planting stakes in front of them, thereby leaving the occupant locked in the house. Particularly common in rural areas of England and the German lands, this violent ritual shut down contact between deviant individuals and society, and pressured them into giving up their residence. ¹³⁵

Besmearing a façade with excrement or covering it with graffiti had a similarly humiliating effect, as did tearing off coats of arms or scraping the wall: all these acts were not just random vandalism, but by virtue of targeting the façade they also amounted to an intentional defacement of the house. Early modern Europeans considered scars, especially those inflicted in disputes of honor, as a significant stigma, and this held true for human bodies as well as for houses. Tellingly, in Italian the word sfregio—meaning a wound to the face—was also used to refer to traces on the façade that resulted from an assault against the house. In a quarrel between two female neighbors in sixteenth-century Rome, in the course of which one of them besmeared and smashed the windows and doors of the other, the victim vowed vengeance by threatening to do the same thing to her neighbor’s face (faccia): “If she doesn’t watch out, I will give her a sfregio. If I have to do something I won’t do it to the windows. I will do it to her.” ¹³⁶

The roof could likewise become the target of assaults, especially when neighbors knew of marital problems or skewed gender hierarchies in the house. In such cases, the preferred ritual of scorn was to unroof the house. Neighbors would climb onto the roof and systematically remove the tiles or thatch. ¹³⁷ The full symbolic meaning of this ritual can only be understood if one keeps in mind that the roof often was construed as the hair or headgear of the house. For a person to be denied headgear, let alone to be stripped of it, was considered extremely humiliating at the time, and unroofing the house invoked this notion.

Admittedly, assaults on the windows and doors, but also on the façade and the roof, primarily affected the “skin” of the house. This is what distinguished such acts from humiliations and punishments that aimed at harming and injuring the interior of the house-body. A particularly severe form of such invasive violence was called “hamesucken” in English. This word, now largely forgotten, designated the act of breaking and entering, not with intent to steal, but rather to trample on the victim’s honor by devastating his or her house. ¹³⁸ The Latin term invasio domus, used by jurists to denote this violent act, vividly invokes the image of a forcible penetration of the house-body. Once the assailants managed to penetrate the house, they could choose from a wide range of options in order to harm its interior. On the less severe end of the spectrum, they might rip out the floor and destroy the table; or more drastic, they could smash the hearth. To destroy the hearth or to tear out the vessel located in its center was tantamount to making the house unlivable, because it was indispensable for cooking and heating. From a figurative point of view, it was like stabbing the house through its heart. ¹³⁹

The most extreme form of punishing a house was to raze it to the ground, a punishment attested all over Europe throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. ¹⁴⁰ In medieval France and Germany, this punishment would typically unfold with an assembly of citizens gathering in front of the target’s house. Equipped with a hammer, the mayor or judge would step forward and deliver the first blow to the house. Afterward, a group of workers specifically hired for this purpose would proceed to raze the house stone by stone. ¹⁴¹ As this example indicates, house razing—in contrast to most of the other violent acts mentioned above—was not necessarily an extralegal or vigilante form of punishment. It was, however, generally reserved for criminal offences of the gravest sort. Jurists, especially those trained in Roman law, knew that the ancient Romans ordered house razing as a punishment for usurpers who sought to establish tyranny. This lent support to the contemporary legal opinion maintaining that house razing should be handed out in cases of major political crimes, such as lèse-majesté, conspiracy, and assassination. ¹⁴² In addition, authorities sometimes ordered the razing of a house that had served as a murderer’s hideout or heretic’s abode, or even as a site for counterfeiting, illegal gambling, or homosexual activities. ¹⁴³

Clearly, the razing of a house caused massive economic harm to the owner-victim and could even deprive him of the basis of his existence. But in reality this was not the primary consideration in handing out the punishment, especially since the owner was often banned or executed before the house razing even began. The intrinsic connection between the house and its inhabitants’ honor likewise does not fully explain why such acts occurred. In fact, a house might be razed not just because it belonged to the culprit of a particularly serious crime or because it reflected his social status, but also because it was considered complicit in the criminal act for having harbored or inspired the criminal. Of course, this idea that a particular house could have a distinctive evil quality to it, by virtue of which it inspired crime or criminality, might well seem bizarre to us today. But some of the sections of medieval law codes dealing with house-razing suggest precisely this kind of complicity on the part of the house. ¹⁴⁴ In other words, certain laws allowed authorities to treat buildings like people for judicial purposes. Indeed, we know that in German lands at the time, houses of prosecuted individuals could be indicted in separate and independent legal proceedings from those against their owners. By the same token, a house in which a crime had been planned could be razed as an accessory to the crime even when the criminal had no ownership interest in the premises. ¹⁴⁵

The Decline of the Living House

It is rather difficult for us today to transport ourselves back into a mentality that charged houses with complicity in crimes and compared them, more broadly speaking, to living organisms. But for centuries, precisely this mentality had a significant impact on the way Europeans thought about houses. When exactly did the living house, as a notion, die?

Throughout early modernity, certainly there were some critics who railed against the idea of the house-body, or more precisely, against certain excesses associated with this notion, such as extravagantly decorated façades. But a sea change in attitude occurred only in the eighteenth century. As far as decoration went, critics—and there were suddenly many more of them—no longer limited their strictures to the issue of excess, but rather targeted the very idea of decoration, as a number of travelogues from that time show. Thus, one German writer visiting Nuremberg in the 1790s noted that the city would be much prettier if “the bizarreness of the paintings did not disfigure the façade of the houses.” ¹⁴⁶ Another contemporary, sojourning in Frankfurt around the same time, noted with similar disgust: “Most houses are painted in various colors. This bad taste [üble Geschmack] prevails almost everywhere in the [Holy Roman] Empire. Very often one sees walls splotched with leafwork, and even with stories and similar things.” ¹⁴⁷ Such remarks fundamentally questioned the idea that the house-body needed decoration and clothing. What is more, they presaged (and encouraged) the change in aesthetic attitudes that would occur in society at large during the nineteenth century, leading to the removal or whitewashing of façade paintings in many places. Yet there were eighteenth-century critics who went even further and denied outright any analogy between house and body. The British philosopher and politician Edmund Burke (1730–1797) noted sarcastically that “certainly nothing could be more unaccountably whimsical, than for an architect to model his performance by the human figure, since no two things can have less resemblance or analogy, than a man, and a house or temple: do we need to observe that their purposes are entirely different?” ¹⁴⁸ It fits into this picture that the transition from house names to house numbers only gained momentum in the eighteenth century. By the same token, the tradition of punishing houses came to be seen as an oddity and even as an act of barbarism. A German legal scholar writing in the late eighteenth century condemned house razing as a “nonsense and savagery of the law” ¹⁴⁹ In a similar vein, another German author of that time argued that this punishment belonged to the “list of horrible punishments” of the past and that it bore the “impress of nonsense.” ¹⁵⁰

What were these reasons for this change in attitude toward the house? One way of answering this question is to link this phenomenon to what the Austrian historian Otto Brunner described as the rise and fall of the idea of the “whole house.” In a famous, albeit controversial, study published in the 1950s, Brunner argued that in premodern Europe the notion of the “whole house” was a guiding principle in all areas of life, and that even economic thought—the term “economy” being derived from the Greek oikos, “house”—was “not a theory of markets, but rather a theory of the house.” The “whole house” of early modernity consisted of more than just the sum of its architectural parts: according to Brunner, it was the “entire complex of all interpersonal relation, activities, and operations in the house.” At the head of this entity stood the lord of the house who was not just the father of the family but also master of the servants. ¹⁵¹ It was not the “family” in the modern sense of the word that was the central unit of society; it was the house.

Brunner’s model has drawn criticism by historians, not least because of its patriarchal nature and its unmistakably antimodern outlook. ¹⁵² But this does not mean that we have to drop the concept of the “whole house” altogether. It does, however, require greater differentiation. For one thing, Brunner’s observation that the house was a more inclusive social entity than it is today—comprising not just the nuclear family, but also members of different generations, as well as servants—does not mean that the reality of domestic life was a rosy picture. ¹⁵³ Beyond that, it would be misleading to think that just because the premodern house was “whole,” it was also a monolithic entity defying change. As we have seen, houses were constantly in flux on an architectural level, and the same held true with respect to their social composition. Premodern people were remarkably mobile; also, not everyone worked at home or spent his or her entire life in the same house. Despite the fact that premodern societies are often depicted as socially static and bound together by a strong awareness of tradition, houses were sold with great frequency and ease, and especially in the cities there was a brisk business in real estate. ¹⁵⁴

Against this backdrop, the historical process by which the modern concept of the nuclear family superseded the “whole house” was not so much a decline as it was a shift in the house’s functions. There are four key aspects to this shift, some of which are closely connected to what Michel Foucault has called the rise of “governmentality” in the transition to modernity: First, the state began to claim the social responsibilities that had previously fallen into the domain of the house and its lord. Second, state-run schools increasingly took up the role of the house as a place where children spent much of their youth and where many of them received their education. Third, the house lost its importance as a distinctive legal space marked by patriarchal prerogatives. Fourth—and this was the most decisive factor—the industrial revolution led to a growing spatial separation of residence and workplace. As a consequence, houses lost their significance as sites of work and production. ¹⁵⁵

None of this, however, meant a decline in the residents’ quality of life. Quite the contrary, precisely because houses became residential spaces more than anything else, “in the most extreme instance, the dwelling [became] a shell,” as Walter Benjamin noted. He went on to remark: “The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet.” ¹⁵⁶ In other words, the interior became the telos of the house. The comfort of the inhabitants predominated in the design, based on the premise that the house’s primary function was to seal its inhabitants off from the exterior. The issue of how the house appeared to the outside world and how it communicated with its environment faded into the background. This would have been hard to imagine in the Renaissance and Baroque, where the highly individualized houses of the city vied for attention and edged themselves into the urban space, often competing aggressively with each other. In early modern Rome, for example, houses quite literally competed. The edges of Roman house walls often displayed bricks protruding and receding like teeth (nicely captured at the time by the Italian word addentellato). These “teeth” displayed the self-confidence of the house and its owner, and not just on a symbolic level: they were also meant to serve as a bond if the wall should be extended to the neighboring house—a common scenario in a city, where large buildings were only waiting to “devour” their smaller neighbors. ¹⁵⁷

This “egocentricity” and aggressive behavior of houses, along with the punishments that could, conversely, be inflicted on them, is yet another reminder not to paint an idyllic picture of early modern urban space. But this does not mean that we should prefer houses that are devoid of individuality and make no attempt to communicate with the urban space in which they are embedded. True, there are houses today that communicate with their surroundings—for instance, the glitzy mansions of our time. But the modern mansion, at least in its outward appearance, is not so much a function of the owner’s individual taste, but simply of wealth. When these buildings make a statement about the social status of their inhabitants, they do so mostly by virtue of their sheer size rather than any particular decorative element. And irrespective of what one thinks about such statements, these houses often speak to a rather limited and socioeconomically homogenous audience in the first place. Typically, they are surrounded by extensive lawns and even by fences, and often are located not in the city, but rather in the gated communities outside it. ¹⁵⁸ In other words, they are located in places where street life has become a rather theoretical scenario, with the occasional passing car having replaced the regular traffic of passersby. By contrast, the public and residential buildings that we find in today’s city centers, and thus in places where interaction between street and house is still possible, tend to be monotonous and uniform, reflecting the fact that the production of income has become their main social function. ¹⁵⁹ As Joseph Rykwert has rightly noted, these buildings are seldom spaces that man “could interpret in terms of his own body.” ¹⁶⁰

To interpret a building in terms of one’s own body is, of course, not a goal in itself. Good architecture does not need to be human; but it should be humane. As Heinrich Wölfflin noted in 1886, architectural forms that we can construe in terms of our own bodies allow us in a unique way to experience buildings as an “expression of a psychological state or of a mood,” which is what allows us to speak, for instance, of a “pleasant” or a “severe” building. ¹⁶¹ Admittedly, throughout modernity there have been architects who have attempted to hark back to the idea of the house as an organism. A famous twentieth-century proponent of this idea was Frank Lloyd Wright, who argued that “the human figure should fix every proportion of a dwelling or of anything in it” in order to achieve “natural houses” imbued by “organic simplicity.” ¹⁶² But this has largely remained experimental. Such buildings have hardly become the architectural mainstream, and like many of Wright’s intriguing houses, these are often located outside the big cities. ¹⁶³ Furthermore, it is hard to overlook the poignant discrepancy between the invocation of this idea and its actual realization in modern architecture. Le Corbusier, arguably one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century, echoed his contemporary Walter Benjamin’s deep criticism for the “dwelling addiction” of modern people. He decried the way “we gather together in our houses gloomily and secretly like wretched animals.” ¹⁶⁴ Denouncing these “unworthy houses,” Le Corbusier offered a sweeping vision of the architect as “a creator of organisms” and developed the idea of the Modulor, an anthropometric scale meant to help implement this vision. ¹⁶⁵ Admittedly, some of Le Corbusier’s early buildings achieve a felicitous balance between human-oriented individuality and architectural modernism. But with his rise to fame, Le Corbusier’s plans became more ambitious. Le Corbusier replaced the idea of the house as an organism with the notion of the “house as machine for living in” and the call for “mass-production houses.” ¹⁶⁶ The large-scale housing projects planned by Le Corbusier (and other proponents of what ultimately came to be known as Brutalism), which were designed to provide almost identical housing units to hundreds of people, are the troubling culmination of this development, a testament to the almost autocratic “authority of planners to decide people’s life-styles.” ¹⁶⁷ Having severed all ties to the human body both as a scale and experiential model, these buildings dwarf their inhabitants and turn them into small cogs in the giant “House-Machine.”

Of course, not all modern architecture has taken such an extreme stance. But at the same time, all modern architecture faces the challenge of coping with the void left behind when the idea of the house as an actor, endowed with individual, corporeal features as well as a name, waned. Theodor Adorno pungently noted that “the functional modern habitations designed from a tabula rasa, are living-cases manufactured by experts for philistines, or factory sites that have strayed into the consumption sphere, devoid of all relation to the occupant.” ¹⁶⁸ And he concluded: “The house is past.” ¹⁶⁹ If it is true that the house is a matter of the past, this might be good news for historians—but only for them.