Evolution and history of housing
If we look at human existence, housing history they have varied dramatically over time and centuries; size, materials, height, design, types … etc. From the caves of our caveman ancestors or the houses made of straw and earth with a duration of more than one hundred years, until the first house printed in full 3D.
To begin with, we would like to first release a very interesting little short on «history of house» …
Different techniques and types of construction that enhance the attitude of man in search of shelter and House perfect. This video represents the housing evolution to try to understand the key points in the history of home architecture.
A short created and developed by Jackie Lay and originally published in The Atlantic. Now we want to discuss in summary, the housing evolution over time and by times.
Housing and construction chronology through time
The history of housing has been and will be very long, but we have tried to understand what has happened to this day and how housing and human habitat have evolved.
First, we want to provide a historical chronology of the transformation of the constructionn to this day with the following scheme:
| Historical chronology and construction evolution | |
| 10,000 BC | Natural materials are used. Wood, clay, abobe bricks for houses and barns. |
| 4800 BC | Megaliths are used in tombs and temples. (Stonehenge, Great Britain) |
| 4200 BC | The Dolmen is used to cover graves near homes. (Country Clare, Ireland). |
| 3200 BC | The settlements evolve in forms, materials and construction systems (Skara Brae. UK). Sumerian culture in Mesopotamia. The Ziggurats are built. Materials: stone, adobe. |
| 3100 BC | Egyptian culture. The pyramids of Giza are built. Materials: stone, adobe, wood. |
| 3000 BC | The tombs and temples reach monumental proportions. (Tomb of Menga. Antequera, Spain). |
| 1800 BC | New materials and tools are used (Bronze Age). The houses evolve in their function and distribution |
| 1200 BC | The Olmec culture is established in the Gulf of Mexico. They build the first cities of Mesoamerica. |
| 776 BC | Greek culture. The Acropolis is built. Materials: limestone, marble. |
| 750 BC | Roman culture. The City is founded. The Colosseum is built. Materials: limestone, marble. |
| 312 d. C. | Emperor Constantine orders the construction of Christian Churches, Paleo-Christian architecture arises. |
| 330 AD | Byzantium is the new capital of Rome, monumental temples are built, Byzantine architecture emerges |
| 790 AD | The first monasteries were built in Germany, later in Spain. Early Romanesque arises. |
| 1140 AD | Saint Denis Abbey is built in France. “The architecture of light” emerges. The Gothic |
| 1420 d. C. | The aesthetic theories of ancient Rome and Vitruvius's book "De Architecture" are taken up. |
| 1550 AD | The Baroque arises in Italy, an architectural style loaded with ornamentation, light, color and textures. |
| 1640 AD | Neoclassical architecture. It arises in France after the Baroque. Architecture returned to classical styles in a monumental way |
| 1750 d. C. | The industrial Revolution. The steam engine emerges, mass production. Steel and Concrete are used. |
| 1850 AD | XIX century. Industrial Architecture, Functionalism and Bauhaus, Modern Movement. |
| 1980 AD | Due to the great advances in Technology, High Tech Architecture arises and architects who begin to use computer programs in projects from 1984 - 1985. |
| 2002 AD | The BIM development appears in housing and building projects that begins to be used from Autocad. Large architecture firms immerse themselves in its possibilities. |
| 2013 AD | The parametric and adaptive architecture appears where the projects, together with the BIM, adapt to the spaces automatically |
As a complement and schematically, the following document chronologically summarizes the different architectural styles and their relationship with art. A very useful guide document as we can see in the following image:
We also recommend this document - which is more visual - and also investigates the historical narrative of architecture and its relationship with different artistic styles.
The specific peculiarities of a house depend on the time, the terrain, the free materials, the edifying techniques, the historical moment in its relationship with art and abundant symbolic factors such as the social class or the economic resources of its owners.
Until recently, in rural areas, people have shared their home with family animals. Today, residences can have different non-habitable areas, such as workshops, garage or guest rooms, in addition to the different services that are required in daily life.
Houses can be built either above or below ground level, although most modern residences are located on a higher level than the ground, sometimes on semi-buried basements, especially in cold weather.
The most used materials are the earth itself, wood, bricks, stone, and increasingly iron and concrete, especially in urban areas. Most of the time they are combined with each other, although the choice depends on the architectural project, the customer's tastes of the service and, above all, the cost of the material or the simplicity of its implementation.
Architecture of indigenous materials
One of the primary peculiarities of the vernacular architecture is the use of indigenous materials. Among them, the most widespread in the warm and hot areas has been the earth, which can be used raw to make adobes and mud, or cooked in the form of bricks. Adobe is made up of mud and straw, bound together by building blocks that dry in the sun.
The mud, more suitable for sandstone lands, is worked by tamping the material between 2 boards until a wall is built. Another of the vernacular and widely used construction materials is lime, a binder for the composition of mortars and one of the waterproof coatings most used by man.
The housing evolution provides a second characteristic of traditional residences is their perfect adaptation to the physical environment where they are located. In this way, in areas where the summer heat becomes unbearable, the rooms are arranged around a patio, flanked by arcades that allow clean air to circulate through each and every one of the rooms. In cold areas, on the other hand, the houses are concentrated in thick walls to preserve the heat of the sun.
In tribal societies, the residence usually consists of a single space, where each and every one of the activities takes place. Often it is built attached to another neighboring building, and it is usually far from the site of the tribe assembly or from the sacred space. The manner of these huts is repeated throughout the village, sometimes producing fabulous compositions, in Sudan, those of the Dogon people or those of the Zambian herdsmen.
Most of the huts are built from easy geometric shapes, such as a circular plan crowned by a conical roof to serve as an example. The construction materials are always and in all circumstances, the autochthonous ones. If mud is available, it is used to fill the gaps between the warp of branches, or adobes or bricks are made. Dried stems can also be used, as in the swampy areas of southern Iraq.
Old Egypt and the Middle East
The ancient Egyptians lived in low houses built with adobe on a quadrangular plan (Today clay bricks have evolved to the example here). The excavations carried out show that the houses of the slaves used to have between 2 and 4 rooms and were clustered on an orthogonal grid, with narrow alleys that ran between the long lines that made up the district, while the residences of the foremen were considerably more relaxed.
In the Near East, residences were molded to constructive possibilities, where there was mud, houses with a single room in the shape of a beehive were common; where there was no wood, but rather only stone. Even the roofs were built through bands of this material. As a general rule, these traditions have survived to this day and little change has occurred. evolution of dwellings from prehistory to the present dayd in its construction techniques, maintaining in many cases bioclimatic aspects necessary for efficient housing.
In Pompeii many domus have been preserved, urban or suburban single-family residences that have come down to us as the most representative of traditional culture.
These residences are usually located next to the street that serves as their access. After crossing the hall, you reach a semi-covered space called atrium, a mixture of living room and patio, in the center of which is the impluvium or a small pond to collect rainwater.
From the atrium you can access each and every one of the rooms of the house and, on one part of the back, a garden known as hortus or peristyle that is surrounded by galleries of columns. At present, many villas continue to maintain their initial features without any differences in the evolution of the houses and their distribution.
The insulae were the equivalent to apartment blocks, multi-family residences inhabited by the poorest classes. The height of these buildings fluctuated between 3 and 5 floors and they used to respond to complex functional programs. The villas can be understood as manors of the most powerful families, and sometimes they were transformed into genuine residential complexes that occupied multiple hectares between gardens, pavilions and houses. See Art and architecture of the city of Rome.
Housing in the Middle Ages
Each and every one of these residential typologies disappeared in Europe throughout the High Middle Ages, coinciding with the demographic crisis of the continent. Although quite a few people lived under the protection of fiefdoms and huge castles, many others were crowded into small rooms located on the walls of small and not so small cities, mainly due to the fact that the countryside was unsafe.
The prosperous farms of antiquity disappeared, until little by little conditions improved in the shadow of monasteries and sprawling urban centers. A prosperous mercantile class then appeared that began to build large stately homes in cities and rural fiefdoms. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, manor houses evolved to become palaces.
These new constructions consisted of complex residences for the ecclesiastical and mercantile nobility, or for the ruling families, which occupied an entire building and contained ritual rooms, chambers for the lords and rooms for a large number of servants and courtiers of all kinds.
Living in the architecture of the Renaissance XIX century
The history of housing is complicated and if we look at the palace, even more so, it was one of the residential typologies that evolved the most throughout the Renaissance, transforming into a large-scale urban factor, which has been repeated many times later. The first Renaissance palace was built in Florence and from there it spread to the rest of Europe as the example of the image of London.
In France it was mixed with the medieval castle to produce the château, a rural dwelling that became the center of aristocratic life since the 16th century. Meanwhile, attempts were made to convert traditional urban residence typologies into buildings with roughly uniform characteristics, which could be inspired by models of traditional antiquity.
Objective, to achieve a new baroque city, characterized by the breadth of its perspectives and by the homogeneity of its fronts.
Housing in the 19th century
The Industrial Revolution produced an enormous demographic explosion, caused by the appearance of a new social class, the proletariat, which lived in crowded conditions, in miserable conditions, next to the large industrial centers.
The inconvenience of excessive urban development, associated with the growing interest of the middle classes in owning a residence, gave rise to very different solutions, from the extensions of the old medieval centers to the suburban solutions in the form of a city-garden.
At the end of the 19th century, residence was among the most essential concerns of architects, and a new science appeared that was in charge of urban planning, alerted by the unbridled expansion of urban centers. Thanks to the new types of transport, cities they grew in 2 directions:
- Throughout, thanks to horizontal transport (Railroad, tram and automobile), through suburbs far from the urban center where the land was more affordable and it was possible to live in contact with nature;
- At the top, since the invention of the elevator in the United States, in blocks of flats little by little higher that favored speculation on the cost of the floor.
The 20th century of the architectural revolution
The architecture through the times has evolved in constant movement with a special heyday of the residence in petty-bourgeois property (Early 20th century) brought with it the survival of historicist styles in residential construction. Up to a certain point, it could be said that modern typologies have not yet been admitted, especially in single-family works. At the end of the last century, a series of architects were designing residences according to the principles and materials imposed by their season.
Among them, the work of Antoni Gaudí's architecture in Catalonia (Spain) stands out, where the modernism movement reconverted the city into a banner of innovation and culture.
All reached certain principles that later became the seed of modern architecture, such as the open plan to achieve a progressive fluid space, or the possibility that new materials offered to break the walls through extensive windows.
After World War I, the residence became the primary focus of attention for avant-garde architects, and over many years the best works built of the modern movement were residential buildings, such as the Steiner house (1910) by Adolf Loos , the Tugendhat house by Mies van der Rohe, the Schroeder house by Gerrit Rietveld or the Ville Savoie and the Unité d'Habitation by the great architect Le Corbusier.
Great architects of the 20th century
Although it is important to recognize history from cHow housing has changed over time. In the 20th century, the activity of the great architects who designed the foundations and future of the house evolution and modern architecture has been important.
We can highlight the following architectural icons in a summary regarding reference to houses in the 20th century by means of different illustrated images. A good example of the most perfect architecture!
Mass concrete, the industrialization of industrial and housing prefabricated buildings, houses made of maritime containers, modular housing, has been during this century the spearhead of an entire architectural revolution.
And this following video portrays the most outstanding architects who have somehow revolutionized the way we do things today. (Also from a QUI presentation we can understand a little more)
The Far East and its homes
The houses of the Indian subcontinent change a lot depending on the area, time and local traditions. In the villas or towns there are patio houses and others compact around a single space, while in highly populated cities there are many apartments. The palaces, which are found in the most different places, can be fortified, and those that extend over the land have buildings scattered like pavilions. The western impact is only felt in certain small areas and in large urban centers.
In China, the house with a patio and roof tiles has been preserved for centuries. It is a walled house, which represents the social order of the traditional extended family. In certain areas there are also strings of easier single-family residences, made up of a single room and a small patio or garden. At the opposite extreme, there are the large palace complexes, such as the Forbidden City in the city of Beijing.
In the Japanese country, the traditional house is concentrated in a progressive quadrangular space, divided by mobile panels of rice paper that attempt a convoluted appearance, and flooring through tatami mats made of rice straw. The construction is built in wood and covered with tiles if the land has enough space, a small garden is added to the complex. One of the most relevant peculiarities of Japanese residential architecture is the harmony of proportions and formal simplicity.
The western repercussion has been felt in the Japanese country more than in other eastern countries, but, at the same time, many of its architects are among the most distinguished of the modern movement.
Documents to understand how housing evolved over the centuries
Obviously, an article cannot explain in detail the evolution of architecture throughout history. At this point and for more information we have an excellent search engine.
From the OVACEN website we have created a document search engine that filters Google information and that only returns results in PDF, Word, books, etc. The document search engine can be accessed from the following link and so that you have an idea of how it works, we leave the following scheme:
I hope it helps you find more data on the evolution of construction and the prehistory of housing.
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