I have a friend who went to a show day and stumbled across photographs of her ex-husband displayed on a bookshelf. She didn’t make an offer. What is it about the inside of houses, about their details, that carries such a ghostly weight that even moving in cannot completely exorcise it? As an architect, it hurts me a bit to admit the obvious truth: it’s not the structure, it’s the inside that counts.
For three months The Block, a daily saga of four couples fixing up their apartments for fun and profit, has kept quite a few TV viewers riveted, including apparently, former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, who spotted some same-sex bathing and objected. I take it he is out of the market.
Even though my household is not The Block-watching type, and it felt to me, when I actually got to see The Block for real, that the place is altogether from another time and place, I can’t help thinking that The Block has captured some of the qualities that have insinuated themselves into all of our homes.
In the television programme the participants are given the unfinished shell of an apartment in a single block in a new cluster development, along with a fixed budget and timeframe to complete it. The inhabitants are in competition with each other, because they get to win a large prize for the completed apartment that sells for the highest price on auction.
On a superficial level all homes are like The Block because all homes require a level of human participation to become liveable. At the same time The Block exposes the
contradictions that creep into the way we plan and inhabit our homes as both houses and their contents become ever more commercialised.
I would like to believe that architects are learning to accept and, indeed, to plan for the acts of personalisation that happen to homes of all types. Whether one remodels expensive homes or works on subsidised housing, there is a point where the building stops and the ephemeral begins.
One has to imagine the shell of the building as something that nestles a series of ever more temporary layers: the finishes, then the furniture and, finally, the elements that are entirely temporary. Into the last category fall physical objects such as ornaments and plants, as well as the effects of sound, light, smells and other humans.
Without this layer homes feel unlived in. At the same time these light elements are the hardest to plan and usually develop over time, through habit and experience.
Modern architecture, as the avant-garde movement that dominated the first half of the 20th century, was a kind of undeclared war on the personal in the interior of housing.
German architects developed the concept of existenzminimum to define the minimum standards required for habitation: how many square meters (about 14 per person), what services (electricity, a flushing toilet, basin, squat bath and kitchen) and the minimum levels of light and cross ventilation.
Such research has had an impact on the design of state-funded housing and, as property development
becomes the tool of choice for the provision of housing at all scales of the market, has helped to define the minimum that people will accept.
The Block’s dimensions come pretty close to what I would consider livable minima, if one is to furnish, as they have done, in the conventional Western way, by placing big pieces in the centre of the room. The bathrooms are definitely not the cat-swinging type and, cleverly, one couple simply abandoned the battle and put the whole lot in the bedroom.
The aesthetics of modernist space are still very influential. Le Corbusier’s evocative interior perspectives are spookily empty, except for one inexplicable punchbag in a double-volume space. Perhaps he was reflecting his own personal experience. His wife, allegedly,
insisted on covering the bidet he had placed in the bedroom of their Paris apartment with a crocheted doily. His daily ritual was to explode ‘cette chose [this thing]!” and toss the doily across the room.
His architectural heirs (and they are many) fight their own daily battles with clients who just don’t understand and keep adding to the pure, minimalist structures they have been given.
And this interference is not confined to the rich: the highly rationalised township houses have almost all been transformed with colour variations, add-on rooms, carved front doors and, of course, burglar bars.
On the inside things have come even further from the modernist ideal of a cool, empty space. Never before have homeowners and decorators had a wider choice of knick-knacks, sofas and finishes. It seems that parts of China are devoted to the manufacture of endless variations of ‘homeware”, which are neither useful nor useless. What we are offered, if one looks past the cheerful aesthetics, is a multitude of slightly dysfunctional products, with ceramics that chip, colours that fade in the dishwasher, glasses that biodegrade prematurely and screws that go in skew.
The same goes for a lot of the larger pieces of furniture to be found in the warehouses springing up all round the outskirts of the suburbs. The couch designs are so numerous that they have all been given their own names, like Carlo, or, if they’re in leather, Monte Carlo, but despite the breadth of choice it remains hard to find one that isn’t too soft, too clunky or impossible to keep clean.
One has to admire the four couples of The Block for negotiating their way around this minefield of objects. Many of their choices have been surprisingly functional. They share a taste for the L-shaped couch, a design that allows one to fit both a giant TV screen and a giant reclining surface into a space 3m deep. One of the baths is an expensive neo-modernist icon designed by Phillipe Starck. They have some great-looking, robust stoves. But to really make the homes look personal, they have had to go beyond the basics.
The difficulty of the exercise is in striking the balance between a repellant excess of personal taste and a sense of emptiness. Most of the finishing touches ended up reflecting not so much a personal style as a prefabricated one. The homes fall into categories that to an extent reflect the identities of each couple. So they all look different but still stay within a sort of predictable palette of taste that an army of professional decorators, magazine editors and shop stylists have already staked out.
What then, in my professional opinion, sets apart one home from another? There are two thoughts on that. Firstly, it seems that the winning apartment of Camilla and Mark, furnished with the sort of bland but pleasant taste that Woolworths does so well, proves that beige wood really is the new white.
In modern architecture, white walls were everywhere and, in time, they ended up being all sorts of other colours, proving that you can’t stop people being expressive with their own homes. Today, corporate designers head off the inevitable anxiety that the lack of colour or texture or variation provokes by supplying this up front in a gentle and ultimately forgettable form.
When the dust settles, though, I think that the apartment that will leave an impression will be the one fixed up by the two graphic artists, Tamara and Angus.
Beyond its quirky styling, the apartment invited choices: not only through the electronic systems that control the taps and lights and music, but with sliding doors, ambivalent and layered spaces and an understanding of light.
Given the awful dilemma of The Block, which pits the banality of the market against the pleasure of self-expression, this couple found ways to make a space that will transform in time and find a space in the affections of its future owners.
Hannah le Roux is an architect and lecturer at the Wits School of Architecture and Planning.