The Architecture of Daily Life

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The Architecture of Daily Life

College Architecture.

One of the most original architectural contributions of the late Middle Ages was collegiate architecture. In the wake of the rise of universities throughout Europe in the late twelfth century, colleges were founded as safe and regulated residences for students who, at the beginning of their liberal arts studies, might be as young as thirteen or fourteen. Initially, colleges in Bologna, Cambridge, Paris, or Oxford were simply established in houses donated or purchased by a benefactor. The famous Sorbonne, founded in 1259 for theology students at the university, was initially located in a series of nondescript houses in the Latin Quarter of Paris. However, in the mid-thirteenth century monastic orders, such as the Cistercians and the Cluniacs, arriving in these centers of learning created enclosed compounds that limited contact with the seductions of the secular world. They adapted the cloister to the new educational requirements, reducing the church to a chapel and lodging students in a building that included a refectory with a dormitory above. The College of Navarre in Paris, established by Philip IV's queen, Jeanne de Navarre, in her will of 1304, marked a further step as it forged a new blend of building types for its seventy students from the liberal arts, law, and theology faculties. Part urban palace, part monastery, the college was composed of fine stone residential houses and included a chapel and a library arranged around an interior court. In England, the Oxford and Cambridge colleges of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries display various combinations of halls, chapel, residential cells, monumental bell towers, and entrance gates built around open quadrangles, a scheme that has been widely imitated in American universities, such as Yale and Michigan.

The Guild Hall.

As Europe made the transition from an economy based on large aristocratic landholdings to a commercial economy with a thriving merchant class, a new kind of architecture emerged to meet the needs of the groups called "guilds." Guilds began as voluntary associations of individuals to control training, membership, prices and quality in a trade or craft, and grew to have social and political significance as the trades gained economic power. These organizations began to own property from donations and bequests, and real estate provided a steady source of income, so they began to construct their own buildings in cities for meetings, celebrations, and political activity. By 1192, the city of Gloucester, in England, had its own guildhall, and as traders came from various countries their guilds erected halls for their members in the cities in which they did business. By the mid-twelfth century, for example, merchants from Cologne had established a guildhall in London. In the great cloth trading city of Ghent in modern Belgium, a variety of different trades such as bakers, brewers, butchers, carpenters, cheesemongers, shoemakers, and coverlet weavers had their own guildhalls. Perhaps the most elaborate of these structures was the Ghent Cloth Hall where members of other trades in the city obtained their materials and women were even allowed to have stalls to sell cloth and related items. Such guildhalls could even politically and economically dominate a city neighborhood. By the early fifteenth century, there were 1,200 craft associations in London alone, and in 1411 a new guildhall was constructed on a site of one dating back to 1128; the borough called "Guildhall," surrounding the present building, has been the center of London city government since the Middle Ages. The London Guildhall, which is very large, has stained glass windows, echoing a pattern very common in Belgium, where guildhalls consciously imitated Gothic churches. In these barn-like civic structures the steep roofs and large lancet windows created a sense of spaciousness and importance for the crowds doing business just as a Gothic church accommodated and inspired its congregation. The cloth hall at Ypres, built in the thirteenth century, is generally considered the most impressive of secular Gothic buildings. It had sumptuous decorations and elaborate woodwork, as well as huge front steps from which proclamations could be read. Such buildings expressed not only a belief in the power of commercial enterprise, but a newfound spirit of civic freedom and pride.

Standard Plans for Living.

Although non-aristocratic domestic architecture did not go through the number of changes and technical developments that characterized public, religious, and aristocratic architecture, the housing of peasants and working people did reflect an evolution towards multi-room and multi-level architecture. During the earliest period of the Middle Ages, and even as late as 1300, many peasant families lived in single-room buildings called "longhouses," which they shared with livestock. The bulk of surviving houses, however, had three rooms, usually with a large central room called the "hall" that was heated by an open-hearth fireplace and no real chimney (that is, smoke rose to the rafters and exited through an open hole in the thatched roof). At one end, there would be an entrance passage and service area, screened off to prevent drafts and sometimes subdivided into a pantry and buttery; at the other end of the hall was a private room, which in some plans was on a second or loft level called a solar. As more people moved into cities and land became more valuable, use of vertical space increased. Plans, materials, and styles varied according to local building traditions, physical context, climate, and wealth, yet houses throughout Europe had certain basic features in common. Surviving medieval houses from the eleventh into the fifteenth century tended to include a shop or commercial space on the ground floor (sometimes open to the street by day and shutterable by night), with the living quarters arranged above in the upper stories. A warehouse or manufacturing area might be located towards the rear. Unlike modern houses with rooms that accommodate specific activities and that allow for ample individual private space, medieval dwellings generally were still composed of a few multipurpose rooms, often grouped around an inner courtyard or light well. Surviving twelfth-century houses in the town of Cluny had one large front room connected by a corridor to a smaller back room per floor.

Reflections of Urban Wealth.

Nevertheless, later medieval houses, for example the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence of the mid-fourteenth century, could include sophisticated comforts and lavish decoration. Each of the three floors that rise above the street-level loggia (open arcade) is composed of a large room that stretches the entire width of the house together with smaller chambers decorated with carved and painted ceilings and wall frescoes. A well shaft ran through the main rooms at every level and lavatories were provided on each floor, reflecting the high standard of living enjoyed by this wealthy merchant family. The crenellations that topped the house, later replaced by an open loggia, were a mark of social distinction. The monumental city halls, the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence (c. 1300) or the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena (c. 1300), are in effect enlarged versions of these grand urban palaces. Decorative detailing of houses, seen in door frames or window moldings, mirrored contemporary and local architectural fashion: twelfth-century houses sport classicizing pilasters, columns, capitals, and semi-circular arches; thirteenth-century dwellings feature pointed arches and traceried lights.

Half-Timber Construction.

But the most widespread and enduring type of town-house construction was the half-timber frame, built with interlocking beams and a wattle and daub filling. With an appearance that is familiar today in homes that imitate Tudor architecture, this new type of house featured an exposed frame of hewn timbers notched and pinned together to form a cage-like structure in such a way that the dark vertical and diagonal beams remained flush with the finished surface of the exterior wall. To create the wall itself, the spaces between the timbers were filled with "wattle"—actually a mixture of interwoven twigs and branches—and then sealed with a thick coating of mud and straw, the predecessor of modern stucco or plaster. The upper stories of these three- or four-floor houses (five or six floors in crowded cities like Paris) were corbeled out over the street on projecting brackets, a technique that increased precious interior space. Houses of this type, with their distinctive high-pitched roofs and dormers, later sheathed by clapboards, were transplanted to America in the seventeenth century by the first settlers who continued construction techniques learned in Europe.