Home: A Short History of An Idea is a book published in 1986 by Canadian architect, professor and writer Witold Rybczynski.
- ISBN 978-0-14-010231-4 (paperback)
- ISBN 978-0-670-81147-2 (hard cover)
Home won the 1986 Governor General's Award for non-fiction.
The book is an extended essay on the evolution of domestic living; rather than providing a technical treatise on architecture, Rybczynski recounts the history of the material and cultural influences (such as intimacy and privacy, domesticity, ease) as well as and ideas about light, air, and efficiency, all of which have helped shape the thoroughly modern idea that we call comfort.
Throughout the work, Rybczynski probes emphasizing cultural ideals as a basis for creating comfortable homes.
Famous quotes containing the words short, history and/or idea:
“It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be,
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)