A house is a building that functions as a home, ranging from simple dwellings such as rudimentary huts of nomadic tribes and the improvised shacks in shantytowns to complex, fixed structures of wood, brick, marble or other materials containing plumbing, ventilation and electrical systems. Most conventional modern houses in Western cultures will contain a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen or cooking area, and a living room. In traditional agriculture-oriented societies, domestic animals such as chickens or larger livestock (like cattle) may share part of the house with humans. The social unit that lives in a house is known as a household. Most commonly, a household is a family unit of some kind, although households may also be other social groups or individuals. The design and structure of the house is also subject to change as a consequence of globalization, urbanization and other social, economic, demographic, and technological reasons. Various other cultural factors also influence the building style and patterns of domestic space.
Etymology
The English word house derives directly from the Old English Hus meaning "dwelling, shelter, home, house," which in turn derives from Proto-Germanic Khusan (reconstructed by etymological analysis) which is of unknown origin. The house itself gave rise to the letter 'B' through an early Proto-Semitic hieroglyphic symbol depicting a house. The symbol was called "bayt", "bet" or "beth" in various related languages, and became beta, the Greek letter, before it was used by the Romans
Elements:
Layout
Ideally, architects of houses design rooms to meet the needs of the
people who will live in the house. Such designing, known as "interior design", has become a popular subject in universities. Feng shui, originally a Chinese method of moving houses according to such factors as rain and micro-climates, has recently expanded its scope to address the design of interior spaces, with a view to promoting harmonious effects on the people living inside the house, although no actual effect has ever been demonstrated. Feng shui can also mean the "aura" in or around a dwelling, making it comparable to the real-estate sales concept of "indoor-outdoor flow".
The square footage of a house in the United States reports the area of "living space", excluding the garage and other non-living spaces. The "square metres" figure of a house in Europe reports the area of the walls enclosing the home, and thus includes any attached garage and non-living spaces.[citation needed] The number of floors or levels making up the house can affect the square footage of a home.
Parts
Many houses have several large rooms with specialized functions and several very small rooms for other various reasons. These may include a living/eating area, a sleeping area, and (if suitable facilities and services exist) separate or combined washing and lavatory areas. Some larger properties may also feature rooms such as a spa room, indoor pool, indoor basketball court, and other 'non-essential' facilities. In traditional agriculture-oriented societies, domestic animals such as chickens or larger livestock (like cattle) often share part of the house with human beings. Most conventional modern houses will at least contain a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen or cooking area, and a living room. A typical "foursquare house" (as pictured) occurred commonly in the early history of the US where they were mainly built, with a staircase in the center of the house, surrounded by four rooms, and connected to other sections of the home (including in more recent eras a garage).
History of the interior
Further information: House plan
Little is known about the earliest origin of the house and its interior, but it can be traced back to the simplest form of shelters. Roman architect Vitruvius' theories have claimed the first form of architecture as a frame of timber branches finished in mud, also known as the primitive hut.
Philip Tabor later states the contribution of 17th century Dutch houses as the foundation of houses today.
"As far as the idea of the home is concerned, the home of the home is the Netherlands. This idea's crystallization might be dated to the first three-quarters of the 17th century, when the Dutch Netherlands amassed the unprecedented and unrivalled accumulation of capital, and emptied their purses into
domestic space.
Communal rooms
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| "Gingerbread House" in Connecticut, United States, built in 1855 |
In the Middle Ages, the Manor Houses facilitated different activities and events. Furthermore, the houses accommodated numerous people, including family, relatives, employees, servants and their guests. Their lifestyles were largely communal, as areas such as the Great Hall enforced the custom of dining and meetings and the Solar intended for shared sleeping beds.
Interconnecting rooms
During the 15th and 16th centuries, the Italian Renaissance Palazzo consisted of plentiful rooms of connectivity. Unlike the qualities and uses of the Manor Houses, most rooms of the palazzo contained no purpose, yet were given several doors. These doors adjoined rooms in which Robin Evans describes as a "matrix of discrete but thoroughly interconnected chambers." The layout allowed occupants to freely walk room to room from one door to another, thus breaking the boundaries of privacy.
- "Once inside it is necessary to pass from one room to the next, then
to the next to traverse the building. Where passages and staircases are
used, as inevitably they are, they nearly always connect just one space
to another and never serve as general distributors of movement. Thus,
despite the precise architectural containment offered by the addition of
room upon room, the villa was, in terms of occupation, an open plan,
relatively permeable to the numerous members of the household."
Although very public, the open plan encouraged sociality and connectivity for all inhabitants.
Corridor
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| Floor plan of a "foursquare" house |
An early example of the segregation of rooms and consequent
enhancement of privacy may be found in 1597 at the Beaufort House built
in Chelsea. It was designed by English architect John Thorpe who wrote on his plans, "A Long Entry through all". The separation of the passageway from the room developed the function of the corridor.
This new extension was revolutionary at the time, allowing the
integration of one door per room, in which all universally connected to
the same corridor. English architect Sir Roger Pratt
states "the common way in the middle through the whole length of the
house, [avoids] the offices from one molesting the other by continual
passing through them." Social hierarchies
within the 17th century were highly regarded, as architecture was able
to epitomize the servants and the upper class. More privacy is offered
to the occupant as Pratt further claims, "the ordinary servants may never publicly appear in passing to and fro for their occasions there." This social divide between rich and poor favored the physical integration of the corridor into housing by the 19th century.
Sociologist Witold Rybczynski wrote, "the subdivision of the house into day and night uses, and into formal and informal areas, had begun." Rooms were changed from public to private as single entryways forced notions of entering a room with a specific purpose.
Employment-free house
Compared to the large scaled houses in England and the Renaissance, the 17th Century Dutch house was smaller, and was only inhabited by up to four to five members. This was due to their embracing "self-reliance",
in contrast to the dependence on servants, and a design for a lifestyle centered on the family. It was important for the Dutch to separate work from domesticity, as the home became an escape and a place of comfort. This way of living and the home has been noted as highly similar to the contemporary
family and their dwellings. House layouts also incorporated the idea of
the corridor as well as the importance of function and privacy.
By the end of the 17th Century, the house layout was soon transformed
to become employment-free, enforcing these ideas for the future. This
came in favour for the industrial revolution, gaining large-scale factory production and workers.
The house layout of the Dutch and its functions are still relevant
today. The names of parts of a house often echo the names of parts of
other buildings, but could typically include:
Alcove
Atrium
Attic
Basement/cellar
Bathroom (in various senses of the word)
Bath/shower
Toilet
Bedroom (or nursery, for infants or small children)
Box-room / storage room
Conservatory
Dining room
Family room or den
Fireplace (for warmth during winter; generally not found in warmer climates)
Foyer
Front room (in various senses of the phrase)
Garage
Hallway / passage / Vestibule
Hearth – often an important symbolic focus of family togetherness
Kitchen
Larder
Laundry room
Library
Living room
Loft
Nook
Office or study
Pantry
Parlour
Pew/porch
Recreation room / rumpus room / television room
Shrines to serve the religious functions associated with a family
Stairwell
Sunroom
Swimming pool
Window
Workshop
Technology and privacy
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| Traditional stone house in Serbia |
The introduction of technology and electronic systems
within the house has questioned the impressions of privacy as well as
the segregation of work from home. Technological advances of
surveillance and communications allow insight of personal habits and
private lives. As a result, the "private becomes ever more public, [and]
the desire for a protective home life increases, fuelled by the very
media that undermine it" writes Hill. Work also, has been altered due to
the increase of communications. The "deluge of information", has
expressed the efforts of work, conveniently gaining access inside the
house. Although commuting is reduced, "the desire to separate working
and living remains apparent." In Jonathan Hill's book Immature
Architecture, he identifies this new invasion of privacy as
Electromagnetic Weather. Natural or man-made weather remains concurrent
inside or outside the house, yet the electromagnetic weather is able to
generate within both positions.[clarification needed] On the other hand,
some architects have designed homes in which eating, working and living
are brought together.
Construction
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| Construction_maison_bambou |
In the United States, modern house-construction techniques include light-frame construction (in areas with access to supplies of wood) and adobe or sometimes rammed-earth construction (in arid regions with scarce wood-resources). Some areas use brick almost exclusively, and quarried stone has long provided walling. To some extent, aluminum and steel have displaced some traditional building materials. Increasingly popular alternative construction materials include insulating concrete forms (foam forms filled with concrete), structural insulated panels (foam panels faced with oriented strand board or fiber cement), and light-gauge steel framing and heavy-gauge steel framing.
More generally, people often build houses out of the nearest
available material, and often tradition and/or culture govern
construction-materials, so whole towns, areas, counties or even
states/countries may be built out of one main type of material. For
example, a large fraction of American houses use wood, while most
British and many European houses utilize stone or brick.
 |
| House Structure |
In the 1900s (decade), some house designers started using prefabrication. Sears, Roebuck & Co. first marketed their Sears Catalog Homes to the general public in 1908. Prefab techniques became popular after World War II. First small inside rooms framing, then later, whole walls were prefabricated and carried to the construction site. The original impetus was to use the labor force
inside a shelter during inclement weather. More recently builders have
begun to collaborate with structural engineers who use computers and finite element analysis to design prefabricated steel-framed homes with known resistance to high wind-loads and seismic forces. These newer products provide labor savings, more consistent quality, and possibly accelerated construction processes.
Lesser-used construction methods have gained (or regained) popularity
in recent years. Though not in wide use, these methods frequently
appeal to homeowners who may become actively involved in the
construction process. They include:
- Cannabrick construction
- Cordwood construction
- Geodesic domes
- Straw-bale construction
- Wattle and daub
- Timber framing
- Framing (construction)
 |
| Thermographic comparison of traditional |
Energy efficiency
In the developed world, energy-conservation has grown in importance in house-design. Housing produces a major proportion of carbon emissions (30% of the total in the UK, for example)
.
Development of a number of low-energy building types and techniques continues. They include the zero-energy house, the passive solar house, the autonomous buildings, the superinsulated and houses built to the
Passivhaus standard.
Earthquake protection
One tool of earthquake engineering is base isolation which is increasingly used for earthquake protection. Base isolation is a collection of structural elements of a building that should substantially decouple it from the shaking ground thus protecting the building's integrity and enhancing its seismic performance. This technology, which is a kind of seismic vibration control, can be applied both to a newly designed building and to seismic upgrading of existing structures.
Normally, excavations are made around the building and the building is separated from the foundations. Steel or reinforced concrete beams replace the connections to the foundations, while under these, the isolating pads, or
base isolators, replace the material removed. While the
base isolation
tends to restrict transmission of the ground motion to the building, it
also keeps the building positioned properly over the foundation.
Careful attention to detail is required where the building interfaces
with the ground, especially at entrances, stairways and ramps, to ensure
sufficient relative motion of those structural elements.
Bamboo
is an earthquake-resistant material, and is very versatile because it
comes from fast-grow plants. Adding that bamboos are common in Asia,
bamboo-made houses are popular in some Asian countries.
Found materials
 |
| A traditional Kurdish stone house |
In many parts of the world, houses are constructed using scavenged materials. In Manila's Payatas neighborhood, slum houses are often made of material sourced from a nearby garbage dump.
In Dakar,
it is not uncommon to see houses made of recycled materials standing
atop a mixture of garbage and sand which serves as a foundation. The
garbage-sand mixture is also used to protect the house from flooding.
Legal issues
Buildings with historical importance have legal restrictions.
United Kingdom
 |
| A house in Ontario, Canada |
New houses in the UK are not covered by the Sale of Goods Act.
When purchasing a new house the buyer
has different legal protection
than when buying other products. New houses in the UK are covered by a National House Building Council guarantee.
Identifying houses
With the growth of dense settlement, humans designed ways of identifying houses and/or parcels of land. Individual houses sometimes acquire proper names; and those names may acquire in their turn considerable emotional connotations: see for example the house of
Howards End or the castle of
Brideshead Revisited. A more systematic and general approach to identifying houses may use various methods of house numbering.
 |
| Birdhouse made to look like a real house |
Animal houses
Humans often build houses for domestic or wild animals, often resembling smaller versions of human
domiciles. Familiar animal houses built by humans include birdhouses, henhouses and doghouses, while housed agricultural animals more often live in barns and stables.
Houses and symbolism
Houses may express the circumstances or opinions of their builders or
their inhabitants. Thus a vast and elaborate house may serve as a sign
of conspicuous wealth, whereas a low-profile house built of recycled
materials may indicate support of energy conservation.
 |
| complex construction history. |
Houses of particular historical significance (former residences of
the famous, for example, or even just very old houses) may gain a
protected status in town planning as examples of built heritage and/or of street scape. Commemorative plaques may mark such structures.
Home ownership provides a common measure of prosperity in economics. Contrast the importance of house-destruction, tent dwelling and house rebuilding in the wake of many natural disasters.
Peter Olshavsky's "House for the Dance of Death" provides a 'pataphysical variation on the house.
Source By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House
Given all the frightening headlines about exotic mortgage products and under-water
home loans, it's easy to forget about the old-fashioned threats to
property. But in 2007 alone, there were nearly 2.2 million burglaries in
the United States, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation
estimates. While that's down slightly from 2006 levels, the figures
represent a 1 percent increase from five years earlier. Even worse, more
than two thirds of all burglaries in 2007 involved residential properties.
But if they approach home theft from the offender's point of view,
homeowners can reduce the chances that their home will be targeted, says
Steve Houseworth, a program director for Theft Talk, a nonprofit
counseling service. In a recent interview with U.S. News,
Houseworth outlined eight simple and inexpensive steps that owners can
take to make their properties less vulnerable to intruders.
