Changing Architecture Over Time

My article is about how homes have changed over the last century, and how older homes can tell us a lot about how people lived in the past. At first homes were made with great European influence. In the Victorian era the style of homes changed and represented the optimism the Americans had. Advances in our civilization greatly effected house designs, some examples are telephones, indoor plumbing, cars and electricity. Eventually Victorian style houses became bigger and started to cost more money, because of this and the rapidly growing population builders looked for houses that were cheaper to build and quicker to make. Also people wanted to be able to buy a house and have extra money for the new conveniences. The next type of house was the bungalow, witch was smaller then the Victorian but much cheaper and aloud for easy additions when the home owners got more money. Another new type of home that came out around the bungalow was the Colonial style. Colonial style homes were bigger then and more expensive then the bungalow but they were quicker and easier to build then the Victorian homes. After the Great depression and World war II there was a huge increase in the number of homes bought, the main house style chosen was the ranch. People chose the ranch because of its simple design and was easy to build but it had a more modern feel then the Bungalow. Eventually building materials and land prices went up, and houses were built in more rural areas and built planed communities to attract buyers. Building in rural areas was not relay an option until recently with the Internet and instant communications, witch would allow people to stay connected.

This article I read was very interesting to my because it connected home designs with history. It was fun to read and see how major events and advances in our history resulted in the change of house designs. Think to the Victorian era when there were not many cars, there was not a need for a garage with the house, then you start getting more cars and you need a garage and then the house becomes more expensive. Then the next thing you see are builders trying to bring the cost of houses down, and they make a totally new house design. This shows how one little thing like the car had a major effect on how houses were designed and built. Now just imagine all the new advances in technology over the past century and think of how each one effected how the moder house is designed today.

This article relates to our Architecture class in many ways. In the begging of the year we learned about different house styles and what were the benefits and draw backs. This article connects the styles of houses we learned about with why they were actually built the way they were. Also when we had to do our house sketches we needed to place rooms in locations in the house that made sense. When thinking of where to place rooms we may not have noticed it when we did it but, history effected our judgment on where the rooms in the house should be placed. Also advances in technology dictated the size of rooms in our houses. An example is when designing your house you probably made sure you had room for a TV in your family room, a hundred years ago architects did not need to make the rooms bigger for appliances like we do today because they did not exist.