The phenomenon of the intimacy gradient is particularly evident at the time of a fiesta. Even though the house is full of people, some people never get beyond the sala; some do not even get beyond the threshold of the front door. Others go all the way into the kitchen, where the cooking is going on, and stay there throughout the evening. Each person has a very accurate sense of his degree of intimacy with the family and knows exactly how far into the house he may penetrate, according to this established level of intimacy.
Even extremely poor people try to have a sala if they can: we saw many in the barriadas. Yet modern houses and apartments in Peru combine sala and family room in order to save space. Almost everyone we talked to complained about this situation. As far as we can tell, a Peruvian house must not, under any circumstances, violate the principle of the intimacy gradient.
The intimacy gradient is unusually crucial in a Peruvian house. But in some form the pattern seems to exist in almost all cultures. We see it in widely different cultures—compare the plan of an African compound, a traditional Japanese house, and early American colonial homes—and it also applies to almost every building type—compare a house, a small shop, a large office building, and even a church. It is almost an archetypal ordering principle for all man’s buildings. All buildings, and all parts of buildings which house well-defined human groups, need a definite gradient from “front” to “back,” from the most formal spaces at the front to the most intimate spaces at the back.
In an office the sequence might be: entry lobby, coffee and reception areas, offices and workspaces, private lounge.
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| Office intimacy gradient. |
In a small shop the sequence might be; shop entrance, customer milling space, browsing area, sales counter, behind the counter, private place for workers.
In a house: gate, outdoor porch, entrance, sitting wall, common space and kitchen, private garden, bed alcoves.
Intimacy gradient in a home.
And in a more formal house, the sequence might begin with something like the Peruvian sala—a parlor or sitting room for guests.
Formal version of the front of the gradient. 612
127 INTIMACY GRADIENT
Therefore:
Lay out the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence which begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.
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| entrance public semi-public private |
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At the same time that common areas are to the front, make sure that they are also at the heart and soul of the activity, and that all paths between more private rooms pass tangent to the common ones—common areas at the heart (129). In private houses make the entrance room (130) the most formal and public place and arrange the most private areas so that each person has a room of his own, where he can retire to be alone— a room of one’s own (141). Place bathing rooms and toilets half-way between the common areas and the private ones, so that people can reach them comfortably from both—bathing room (144)5 and place sitting areas at all the different degrees of intimacy, and shape them according to their position in the gradient—sequence of sitting spaces (142). In offices put reception welcomes you (149) at the front of the gradient and half-private office (152) at the back. . . .
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| 128 INDOOR SUNLIGHT* |
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. . . according to south facing outdoors (105), the building is placed in such a way as to allow the sun to shine directly into it, across its gardens. From intimacy gradient (127), you have some idea of the overall distribution of public and private rooms within the building. This pattern marks those rooms and areas along the intimacy gradient which need the sunlight most, and helps to place them so that the indoor sunlight can be made to coincide with the rooms in the intimacy gradient which are most used.
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If the right rooms are facing south, a house is bright and sunny and cheerful; if the wrong rooms are facing south, the house is dark and gloomy.
Everyone knows this. But people may forget about it, and get confused by other considerations. The fact is that very few things have so much effect on the feeling inside a room as the sun shining into it. If you want to be sure that your house, or building, and the rooms in it are wonderful, comfortable places, give this pattern its due. Treat it seriously; cling to it tenaciously; insist upon it. Think of the rooms you know which do have sunshine in them, and compare them with the many rooms you know that don’t.
From the pattern south facing outdoors (105), the building gets an orientation toward the south. Now the issue is the particular arrangement of rooms along this south edge. Here are some examples: (1) a porch that gets the evening sun late in the day; (2) a breakfast nook that looks directly into a garden which is sunny in the morning; (3) a bathing room arranged to get full morning sun; (4) a workshop that gets full southern exposure during the middle of the day; (5) an edge of a living room where the sun falls on an outside wall and warms a flowering plant.
The key diagram for this pattern summarizes the relations between parts of the house and the morning, the afternoon and
. . . the distribution of towns required to make a balanced region—distribution of towns (2)—can be further helped by controlling the balance of urban land and open countryside within the towns and cities themselves.
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Continuous sprawling urbanization destroys life, and makes cities unbearable. But the sheer size of cities is also valuable and potent.
People feel comfortable when they have access to the countryside, experience of open fields, and agriculture; access to wild plants and birds and animals. For this access, cities must have boundaries with the countryside near every point. At the same time, a city becomes good for life only when it contains a great density of interactions among people and work, and different ways of life. For the sake of this interaction, the city must be continuous—not broken up. In this pattern we shall try to bring these two facts to balance.
Let us begin with the fact that people living in cities need contact with true rural land to maintain their roots with the land that supports them. A 1972 Gallup poll gives very strong evidence for this fact. The poll asked the question: “If you could live anywhere, would you prefer a city, suburban area, small town, or farm?” and received the following answers from 1465 Americans:
City 13 %
And this dissatisfaction with cities is getting worse. In 1966, 22 percent said they preferred the city—in 1972, only six years later, this figure dropped to 13 percent. (“Most don’t want to live in a city,” George Gallup, San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, December 18, 1972,9. 12.)
It is easy to understand why city people long for contact with
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the late afternoon sun. To get the sun right in your design, first decide upon your requirements for sun: make a diagram for yourself, like the key diagram, but with your own special needs. Then arrange spaces along the south, southeast, and southwest of the building to capture the sun. Take special care to detail the south edge properly, so that the sun is working indoors throughout the day. This will most often need a building which is long along the east-west axis.