The new Manual of the Dwelling

Le Corbusier was on to something in 1927. We pick up the ball.

Lloyd Alter

While wrapping up the draft of my new book tentatively titled “The Story of Upfront Carbon,” I prepared to export it from my beloved Scrivener writing program to the horrid Microsoft Word that my publisher uses. I looked back at my previous book ideas sitting in Scrivener, which I started and pitched but never got published for some reason or another, probably because I never could pay much attention to them when writing full-time for Treehugger. My first was to be a history of the bathroom, then one on healthy homes, and then when the pandemic hit, I tried to roll them all into one, which I called The New Manual of the Dwelling, a play on Le Corbusier’s Manual of the Dwelling published in 1927. I have decided to serialize it here every Friday; Charles Dickens did this with his books for reasons explained by Professor Joel J. Brattin:

“Publishing his novels in serial form expanded Dickens’s readership, as more people could afford to buy fiction on the installment plan; publishers, too, liked the idea, as it allowed them to increase sales and to offer advertisements in the serial parts.  And Dickens enjoyed the intimacy with his audience that serialization provided.”

I like the idea of expanded readership, encouraging subscriptions (starting in May! $5 per month!) and comments, and this is a subject that I think will encourage comments and discussion, if not the occasional scream. So here goes with Chapter 1:

Towards a new architecture was the English title for Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, a collection of essays written for a magazine starting in 1921. In a chapter extolling the virtues of airplanes, he notes that everything about an airplane “lies in the logic which governed the enunciation of the problem and which led to its successful realization.” It is a machine for flying. Le Corbusier believed that a house should be a machine for living, with every part as useful and as well-resolved as the airplane. In this chapter on airplanes, he also included barely a page and a half of “an urgent appeal to architects; they should have The Manual of the Dwelling printed and distributed to mothers of families and should demand the resignation of all the professors in the architecture schools.”

This short Manual of the Dwelling holds up rather well 90 years later, with advice like “keep your odds and ends in drawers or cabinets” or “if you want to see bad taste, go into the houses of the rich. Put only a few pictures on your walls and none but good ones.” Then there is “teach your children that a house is only habitable when it is full of light and air, and when the floors and walls are clear.” Or the last:  “Bear in mind economy in your actions, your household management and in your thoughts.”

In Le Corbusier’s beloved airplanes, everything was about efficiency and economy; pilots then and now had to know the weight of everything and the exact amount of fuel to get that plane and its contents to its destination. Airlines today spend billions on new planes that squeeze out the most passenger-miles per pound of fuel.  If you didn’t have enough fuel, you had a serious problem.

Today, we have a different kind of fuel problem- we have to stop burning it, we have to stop releasing the carbon dioxide that is cooking the planet. That means thinking about radical efficiencies, rethinking both the design of our houses and where we put them.

Le Corbusier was also thinking about design in the aftermath of the flu pandemic and the ongoing tuberculosis crisis that spawned the modern movement. Although some see the light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel, we may well face yet another crisis of antibiotic resistance or a different pandemic.

We have always depended on our homes, which, as Le Corbusier noted, are “a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive." But today, the heat, cold, and rain are changing around us. The methods that we have used to stay warm or cool inside are now contributing to the problems outside. The thieves and the inquisitive are not kept out by mere walls and locks, and the coronavirus has demonstrated that there are new threats to our health and wellbeing that we have never considered in our home design.

Le Corbusier was right; a house is a machine for living.  Today, we have to build a better, more efficient machine.  That’s why I will try to update The Manual of the Dwelling for a different time. Can we fix this problem before it’s too late? One last airplane analogy from Le Corbusier in 1927:

The airplane shows us that a problem well stated finds its solution. To wish to fly like a bird is to state the problem badly… To invent a flying machine having in mind nothing alien to pure mechanics, that is to say, to search for a means of suspension in the air and a means of propulsion, was to put the problem properly: in less than ten years, the whole world could fly.

It took a world war to change the airplane in 10 years, and we are in a dire crisis now to cut our carbon emissions in half in less than 10 years and to zero in 30. That is the problem, not particularly well stated.

Consider what follows to be a manual for understanding the homes we have today, and what they must become – resilient in the face of change, supportive of our health and well-being. Efficient but, more importantly, sufficient – just what we need to be happy, healthy, and comfortable.

Next week: Chapter 2- What is comfort?