A house is generally an
home,
shelter,
building or
structure that is a
dwelling or place for
habitation by
human
beings. The term includes many kinds of dwellings ranging from
rudimentary huts of
nomadic tribes to
high-rise apartment buildings.
In some contexts, "house" may mean the same as
dwelling,
residence,
home,
abode,
lodging, accommodation, or housing, among other
meanings.
The social unit that lives in a house is known as a
household. Most commonly, a household is a
family unit of some kind, though households
can be other
social groups, such
as single persons, or groups of unrelated individuals. Settled
agrarian and
industrial societies
are composed of household units living permanently in housing of
various types, according to a variety of forms of
land tenure.
English-speaking people generally call any
building they routinely occupy "home". Many
people leave their houses during the day for
work and
recreation,
and return to them to
sleep or for other
activities.
History
The oldest
house in the world is approximately from 10,000 BC and was made of mammoth bones,
found at Mezhirich
near Kiev
in Ukraine
. It
was probably covered with mammoth hides. The house was discovered
in 1965 by a farmer digging a new basement six feet below the
ground.
Architect Norbert Schoenauer, in his book
6,000 Years of
Housing, identifies three major categories of types of
housing: the "Pre-Urban" house, the "Oriental Urban" house, and the
"Occidental Urban" house.
Types of
Pre-Urban houses include temporary dwellings such as the Inuit
igloo, semi-permanent dwellings such as the
pueblo, and permanent dwellings such as the
New
England
homestead.
"Oriental Urban" houses include houses of the
ancient Greeks and Romans, and traditional
urban houses in China, India, and
Islamic
cities.
"Occidental Urban" houses include medieval urban houses, the
Renaissance
town house, and the houses,
tenements and apartments of the 19th and 20th centuries. Houses of
that time were generally made of simple and raw materials.
Types
Structure
The
developed world in general
features three basic types of house that have their own
ground-level entry and private open space, and usually on a
separately titled
parcel of land:
In addition, there are various forms of attached housing where a
number of dwelling units are
co-located
within the same structure, which share a ground-level entry and may
or may not have any private open space, such as
apartments (a.k.a. flats) of various scales.
Another type of housing is movable, such as
houseboats,
caravans, and
trailer homes.
In the
United
Kingdom
, 27% of the population live in terraced houses and 32% in semi-detached houses, as of 2002. In
the United States as of 2000, 61.4% of people live in
detached houses and 5.6% in
semi-detached houses, 26% in row houses or
apartments, and 7% in
mobile homes.
Function
Some houses transcend the basic
functionality of providing "a roof over one's head" or of serving
as a family "
hearth and home". When a house
becomes a display-case for
wealth and/or
fashion and/or
conspicuous consumption, we may
speak of a "
great house". The residence
of a feudal lord or of a ruler may require defensive structures and
thus turn into a fort or a
castle. The house
of a
monarch may come to house
courtiers and
officers as well as the royal family:
this sort of house may become a
palace.
Moreover, in time the lord or monarch may wish to retreat to a more
personal or simple space such as a
villa, a
hunting lodge or a
dacha. Compare the popularity of the
holiday house or
cottage, also known as a crib.
In contrast to a relatively
upper class
or modern trend to ownership of multiple houses, much of
human history shows the importance of
multi-purpose houses. Thus the house long served as the traditional
place of work (the original
cottage
industry site or "in-house" small-scale
manufacturing workshop) or of
commerce
(featuring, for example, a ground floor "shop-front"
shop or
counter or
office, with living
space above). During the
Industrial Revolution there was a
separation of manufacturing and banking from the house, though to
this day some
shopkeepers continue (or
have returned) to live "over the shop".
Inside the house
Layout
Ideally,
architects of houses design rooms
to meet the needs of the people who will live in the house. Such
designing, known as "
interior
design", has become a popular subject in universities.
Feng shui, originally a Chinese method of
situating houses according to such factors as sunlight and
micro-climates, has recently expanded its scope to address the
design of interior spaces with a view to promoting harmonious
effects on the people living inside the house. Feng shui can also
mean the "aura" in or around a dwelling. Compare the
real-estate sales concept of "indoor-outdoor
flow".
The
square footage of a house in the
United States reports the area of "living space", excluding the
garage and other non-living spaces. The "square metres" figure of a
house in Europe reports the area of the walls enclosing the home,
and thus includes any attached garage and non-living spaces.
Parts
Many houses have several rooms with specialized functions. These
may include a living/eating area, a sleeping area, and (if suitable
facilities and services exist) washing and
lavatory areas. In traditional agriculture-oriented
societies,
domestic
animals such as chickens or larger livestock (like cattle)
often share part of the house with human beings. Most conventional
modern houses will at least contain a
bedroom,
bathroom,
kitchen (or kitchen area), and a
living room.
A typical "foursquare house" (as pictured) occurred
commonly in the early history of the United States of
America
where they were mainly built, with a staircase in the center of the house, surrounded
by four rooms, and connected to other
sections of the house (including in more recent eras a garage).
The names of parts of a house often echo the names of parts of
other buildings, but could typically include:
- * Bath/shower
- * Toilet
- *Fireplace (for warmth during winter;
generally not found in warmer climates)
Construction
In the
United
States
, modern house-construction techniques include
light-frame construction
(in areas with access to supplies of wood) and adobe or sometimes rammed-earth construction (in arid
regions with scarce wood-resources). Some areas use
brick almost exclusively, and quarried
stone has long provided walling. To some
extent, aluminum and steel have displaced some traditional
building materials. Increasingly popular
alternative construction materials include
insulating concrete forms (foam
forms filled with
concrete), structural
insulated panels (foam panels faced with
oriented strand board or fiber
cement), and light-gauge steel framing and heavy-gauge steel
framing.
More generally, people often build houses out of the nearest
available material, and often tradition and/or culture govern
construction-materials, so whole towns, areas, counties or even
states/countries may be built out of one main type of material. For
example, a large fraction of American houses use wood, while most
British and many European houses utilize stone or brick.
In the 1900s, some house designers started using
prefabrication.
Sears, Roebuck & Co. first
marketed their
Sears Catalog
Homes to the general public in 1908. Prefab techniques became
popular after
World War II. First small
inside rooms framing, then later, whole walls were prefabricated
and carried to the
construction site.
The original impetus was to use the
labor
force inside a shelter during inclement weather. More recently
builders have begun to collaborate with structural engineers who
use computers and
finite element
analysis to design prefabricated
steel-framed homes with known resistance to high
wind-loads and
seismic forces. These
newer products provide labor savings, more consistent quality, and
possibly accelerated construction processes.
Lesser-used construction methods have gained (or regained)
popularity in recent years. Though not in wide use, these methods
frequently appeal to homeowners who may become actively involved in
the construction process. They include:
Energy-efficiency
In the developed world,
energy-conservation has grown in
importance in house-design. Housing produces a major proportion of
carbon emissions (
30% of the total in the
UK, for example).
Development of a number of
low-energy building types and
techniques continues. They include the
zero-energy house, the
passive solar house, the
autonomous buildings, the
superinsulated and houses built to the
Passivhaus standard.
Earthquake protection
One tool of
earthquake
engineering is
base isolation
which is increasingly used for
earthquake
protection.
Base isolation is a
collection of structural elements of a
building that should substantially
decouple it from the shaking ground thus protecting
the building's integrity and enhancing its
seismic performance. This technology,
which is a kind of seismic
vibration
control, can be applied both to a newly designed building and
to seismic upgrading of existing structures.
Normally, excavations are made around the building and the building
is separated from the foundations. Steel or
reinforced concrete beams replace the
connections to the foundations, while under these, the isolating
pads, or
base isolators, replace the material removed.
While the
base isolation
tends to restrict transmission of the ground motion to the
building, it also keeps the building positioned properly over the
foundation. Careful attention to detail is required where the
building interfaces with the ground, especially at entrances,
stairways and ramps, to ensure sufficient
relative motion of those structural
elements.
Legal issues
Buildings with historical importance have restrictions.
United Kingdom
New houses in the UK are not covered by the
Sale of Goods Act. When purchasing a new
house the buyer has less legal protection than when buying a new
car. New houses in the UK may be covered by a
NHBC guarantee but some people feel that it would be
more useful to put new houses on the same legal footing as other
products.
United States and Canada
In the US and Canada, many new houses are built in
housing tracts, which provide homeowners a
sense of "belonging" and the feeling they have "made the best use"
of their money. However, these houses are sometimes built as
cheaply and quickly as possible by large builders seeking to
maximize profits. Many
environmental health issues may be
ignored or minimized in the construction of these structures.
In one
case in Benicia
, California
, a housing tract was
built over an old landfill. Home buyers were never told, and
only found out when some began having reactions to high levels of
lead and
chromium.
Identifying houses
With the growth of dense settlement, humans designed ways of
identifying houses and/or
parcels of land.
Individual
houses sometimes acquire proper names;
and those names may acquire in their turn considerable emotional
connotations: see for example the house of Howards End
or the castle of Brideshead Revisited. A
more systematic and general approach to identifying houses may use
various methods of
house
numbering.
Animal houses
Humans often build "houses" for domestic or
wild animals, often resembling smaller versions of
human domiciles.
Familiar animal
houses built by humans include
bird-houses,
hen-house/chicken-coops and
doghouses (
kennels); while
housed agricultural animals more often live in
barns and
stables.
However, human interest in building houses for animals does not
stop at the domestic
pet. People build
bat-houses, nesting-sites for wild ducks and other birds, bee
houses, giraffe houses, kangaroo houses, worm houses,
hermit crab houses, as well as shelters for many
other animals.
Shelter
Forms of (relatively) simple shelter may include:
Houses and symbolism
Houses may express the circumstances or opinions of their builders
or their inhabitants. Thus a vast and elaborate house may serve as
a sign of conspicuous wealth, whereas a low-profile house built of
recycled materials may indicate support of energy
conservation.
Houses of particular historical significance (former residences of
the famous, for example, or even just very old houses) may gain a
protected status in
town planning as
examples of built
heritage and/or
of streetscape values.
Plaques
may mark such structures.
House-ownership provides a common
measure of
prosperity in
economics. Contrast the importance of
house-destruction, tent dwelling and house rebuilding in the wake
of many
natural disasters.
Peter Olshavsky's
House for the Dance of Death provides a
'pataphysical variation on the
house.
Heraldry
The house occurs as a rare
charge
in
heraldry.
See also
- Institutions
- Economics
- Functions
- Types
- Miscellaneous
- Lists
References
- Schoenauer, Norbert (2000). 6,000 Years of Housing
(rev. ed.) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company).
- Saitta House - Report Part 1
- YouTube - Testing of a New Line of Seismic Base
Isolators
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