How could open plan living actually be a trap?
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size One of historys most powerful images is a dramatic black-and-white shot of two women in big dresses and tiny pumps chatting in a transparent glass box. Its night-time. The glass box is held between two sheer white planes high above the Hollywood hills. Its ribbed ceiling, uplit, soars out over limitless space. Out there, gridded with tiny lights and spread to the horizon, is the vast Los Angelean sprawl. That, of course, was before the hubristic smog arrived. These days, the same image shows an horizon of brown smudge. The house is Pierre Koenigs 1959 Stahl House, aka Case Study House #22. In 1945, six months before the end of World War II, the young editor of the California-based Arts & Architecture magazine, John Entenza, decided to release the pent-up energies of wartime in a series of emblematic house commissions for radical young architects. These houses  by Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Craig Ellwood, Koenig and others  changed the world. The Stahl house is a classic. A listed cultural monument, it has featured in countless films, TV shows, music videos and fashion shoots. But in the history of the world, the image  taken by Julius Shulman in 1960  is bigger. This image, and others like it with their seductive whispers of freedom and power, sold us the open plan. It heralded modern advertising. Julius Shulmans iconic 1960 photo of Pierre Koenigs Stahl House in Hollywood Hills. Credit:  J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles The two women inside the audacious scarp-edge build seem magically suspended in a world of eternal optimism. Beneath them, concrete floor beams hang in space. In the foreground, a small pot-plant signifies nature tamed while above, the planar roof flies out in mastery of the Earth itself. Fast-forward 60 years. The open plan is now a sine qua non of real estate. Every developer apartment, renovated terrace, crappy McMansion and speculative office locates us within yet another space without walls. Too often, with no escape from boss supervision, kid noise, partner grump, cooking smells or the myriad frustrations we found ourselves feeling during the COVID-19 pandemic, we find ourselves feeling not liberated but trapped. The 20th century was fuelled by versions of freedom; individualism, democracy, creativity, transparency, openness. In retrospect, its failure fully to deliver resonates eerily with Kris Kristoffersons line, immortalised by Janis Joplin in 1971, Freedoms just another word for nothin left to lose. Open-plan living in the Stahl house in Los Angeles, photographed in 1960. Credit:Julius Shulman @ J. Paul Getty Trust. The open plan was no mid-century invention. Indeed, when the Stahl house was built in 1959, it was already a half-century old. In the US, some of the early shingle style architects had begun to experiment with spaces that flowed into one another from the turn of the century. Greene and Greenes legendary Gamble House in Pasadena (1909) had played with the idea of breaking open the cellular house-plan. With its glazed screens and bays gently held beneath a great maternal roof, it toyed with defining space by use  a dining table or a settee  rather than by walls. People were intrigued and enchanted, but such houses were strictly for the wealthy, whose everyday mess could be tucked securely away. It was the mud and chaos of war that really triggered the craving for a clean, open future for everyone. It was the mud and chaos of war that really triggered the craving for a clean, open future for everyone. The first explicit formulation of the open plan as universal principle came from Swiss architect and polemicist Le Corbusier who, in the 1920s, coined the term le plan libre  the free plan. Corbusiers Five Points of a New Architecture manifesto, published in 1927, made the free ground plan one of the five essentials of modern design. The key to it was pilotis (or columns) instead of loadbearing walls. Swiss-French architect and designer Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. Advertisement  That was the domestic world. In office design, a similar reverence for universal openness was reached by a different route. Frederick Taylor was an American engineer obsessed with the idea of efficiency. His theory was known as scientific management or, simply, Taylorism. It merged two new types of 19th-century workspace  the commercial office (typing pool or mail-order firm) and the factory production line  into a vast, open-plan work space that meant hundreds of workers could be overseen by one or two supervisors. Not surprisingly, this idea caught on. Technology was the facilitator. Architecture had always been constrained by the need to put things on top of other things. Walls and columns were necessary to bear the weight; windows had to go between. Steel changed all that. Steel-reinforced concrete made immense spans and cantilevers possible. Floors soared out into space, roofs seemed to float, weightless. Openings could be anywhere, or everywhere. Corridors were obsolete. Enter, the glass box. Mies van der Rohes Farnsworth House in Illinois. Credit:Alamy The glass box became the dream. Many became architectural icons  from Ludwig Mies van der Rohes ultra-elegant Farnsworth House in Illinois (1951) to Sean Godsells very beautiful 1997 Kew house in Melbourne, with no external walls (except glass) and no curtains. As to work, the glass-walled skyscraper  such as the 1955 ICI House in East Melbourne by Bates Smart McCutcheon or the first AMP building in Sydney, 1957-1962, by Peddle Thorp  is really just glass boxes piled into tower form. Privacy was virtually non-existent in the typing pool of 1966. Credit:Fairfax The ultra-efficient floorplate of the open-plan office enabled the squeezing of space standards and the intensification of supervision. We see, for instance, the phenomenon of the typing pool, where a hundred  or two hundred  (usually) women could be overseen by a single pair of (usually male) eyes. Privacy was virtually non-existent. The clear message was, while you are here, you are 100 per cent company property. In other words, an idea born of the yearning for freedom was rapidly deployed in pursuit of its opposite; oppression. Many workers in open-plan offices today, fighting for a private conversation or phone call, might concur. Modern architecture  indeed, perhaps the whole of modern life  is shaped by the tension between two opposite and insatiable human cravings: for freedom, and for safety. As herd animals, we crave the freedom of the prairie but, at the first scent of danger, scurry back to the safety of the corral. Behind both yearnings  and therefore beneath the open plan  sits fear. And, ultimately, this is the freedom we crave: freedom from the fear of pain and mortality. Advertisement  Modern architecture is shaped by the tension between two opposite and insatiable human cravings: for freedom, and for safety. Architect Sean Godsells Kew House. Credit:Earl Carter Almost all advertising exploits this fear. Modern architecture, in many ways an early product of advertising, is no exception; whetting our freedom-appetite without, ever, fulfilling it. At its best, the open plan offers a sense  perhaps an illusion  of both freedom and safety. The house in the Shulman photograph seems to offer limitless view and openness in all directions with no loss of privacy or control. There is allure here. But its the allure of the unachievable. And Dr Edith Farnsworth sold what may be the worlds loveliest house after complaining of never being able to hide the bins, keep mosquitoes out or conceal dirty dishes. The history of Modern architecture is twined in ironies. One is that the open plan, which began as a push for universal equality and freedom, has become yet another device to entrap the poor and enrich the wealthy. What began as a critique of orthodoxy became its tool. In the 1920s and 1950s, the immediate postwar periods, Modernism strove to break free of historical constraints, including those of inherited wealth and class. So it lionised typologies such as schools, health centres, public and affordable housing that would benefit everyone and adopted aesthetic values  simplicity, plainness, openness  that seemed similarly aligned. Even residential towers carried this idealism. In theory, gathering ground-hugging slums into a single tower left the ground that had been vacated open for park-like gardens. There, it was said, children could play while mothers supervised from the 10th-storey kitchen window. Not surprisingly, with such a sales blurb, the open plan quickly gained popularity. Advertisement  Loading This socialist drive was everywhere. In Auckland, in 1949 and 1950, a bunch of architecture students calling themselves the Group Architects built two shed-like houses as habitable manifestos. Design was a socialist platform. Known simply as First House and Second House, these dwellings, with almost no internal walls, were intended to make usable, delightful, climate-appropriate shelter available for all. Architecture, polemicised the Group, can only arise out of the daily life of Everyman, and without Everyman there can be no architecture. In a world bursting with optimism, the dream was irresistible. Philip Johnsons own all-glass house set in an oak park in Connecticut (1949) was hugely influential, and Mies van der Rohes Farnsworth House even more so, as were the Case Study houses. In Australia, the glass-house dreaming spawned similar houses, by Harry Seidler, Robin Boyd, Bill Lucas and others. Sydney architect Harry Seidler in his open plan apartment in 1992. Credit:Andrew Taylor But there were problems. A house without walls is one thing on the Hollywood scarp or a 10-hectare estate, and quite another on a tiny suburban block An open plan is one thing if you are across its Socialist polemic; another if you just want to be able to shut the kids toys away. The glass box was an Edenic dream. Adam and Eve could be naked in paradise because they were clothed in solitude and innocence. Replicate those Edens, set them cheek by jowl, send Adams and Eves, suited and brief-cased, off to work each day to feed their growing tribes, and the picture is altogether different. In that situation, the need for privacy demanded that houses be separated by space and planting, helping to entrench the low-density, car-dependent sprawl that typified the 20th century across the world, and all of its environmental detriments. Now, the open plan is ubiquitous. Virtually every habitable building from the past 20 years boasts a farmhouse kitchen, open-plan living or open workspace. And true, there are upsides to this. You cant enter a Victorian terrace house or Federation bungalow without wanting to blow the back off it, replacing the dank huddle of laundries and outhouses with a big, bright, airy space that opens the shared life of the household to a garden or court. Advertisement