Chasing Beauty

The American Purpose

Carolyn sat down with architect, teacher, and culture writer Witold Rybczynski to explore the nature of home, innovation gone awry, and whether beauty has principles.

Carolyn Stewart: Next year’s Met Gala will be themed, in part, around your 1986 book Home: A Short History of an Idea. This will be the first Met Gala since the pandemic, and the curators clearly wanted a theme that would resonate in the current moment. Did the pandemic shift our understanding of comfort and expectations for our home environments?

Witold Rybczynski: The short answer is probably no. The media love to think so, but historically pandemics have rarely had huge cultural effects. Who today remembers the great 1968 flu pandemic? There are exceptions. In the Middle Ages, if you started sneezing, that meant you had probably caught the plague, and you were most likely going to die. So when a person sneezed, you would say something like “Bless you,” or “Good health” in other languages—“Gesundheit.” When you sneeze today you’re not in danger of dying, but we still say “Bless you.”

An aspect of culture that does change is fashion—wearing decorated masks, bumping elbows—but fashion tends to have a very short life, a season or two. Think of how fashions changed men’s facial hair, for example. I remember Tom Wolfe talking about the “sideburns fairy.” One night, the sideburns fairy came around and touched men, he said, and they all sported sideburns—and then the sideburns disappeared just as quickly. Fashions don’t last long.

CS: Our notions of domestic comfort also seem to constantly change, as you point out in Home.

WR: Our idea of comfort does change, but very slowly. People no longer dress for dinner, for example, but we still like to gather the family around a dining table for special holidays.

Privacy, comfort, and domesticity are all cultural inventions. There’s nothing particularly natural about comfort. In the Middle Ages, homes were not furnished for comfort. They were more like public places, busy, full of people, family, servants, workers—an impersonal atmosphere, and no privacy.

I think one of the impacts of Home was that it reminded people that a concept like comfort had a history, and that it didn’t appear overnight; it had to be invented, and it had to take root. That took a long time. Our current notion of domesticity—that your home is a special place—has deep roots and is even encoded in our laws: the doctrine that a man’s home is his castle, for example. Things that take a long time to become established don’t change overnight. It’s not impossible that one day we’ll decide that our homes should be more like anonymous hotel rooms, that they’re not personal and there’s no reason to give them special treatment, but that would take a long time. It would be a sea change in the way we think of home.

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This article originally appeared in The American Purpose, July 23, 2021.