A Christian worldview
impacts every area of life. Including making your house a home.
The magazine cover
revealed
one of the loveliest living rooms imaginable: Hand-painted silk covers
the walls. Antique Louis Seize tables scattered about; a Picasso hangs
on another wall. A Bavarian crystal chandelier sheds light on the ebony
flooring. Guests
may seat themselves on suede sofas, or
read a rare book parked on a bookcase.
There’s just one problem: You’d never
dare let a child
loose in it. It’s a reminder that even when it
comes to architecture and home design, worldview
plays a role.
In her book, “The Making of Home,” Judith Flanders
describes the work of a French-Swiss architect
known as Le Corbusier, who
made modern, open-plan architecture hugely influential in the 1920s and beyond.
But did ordinary people actually
like the ideas of Le Corbusier and his colleagues?
The problem with high modernism, according to Flanders,
has been
its tendency to “focus its attention more on appearance than utility,
both in architecture and in product design.” Seldom did modern
architects
concern themselves with the needs of daily
life—staying warm, getting groceries into the house, cooking, eating,
cleaning up after meals. Yes, they
invented the concept of “form follows function,” but in practice, they
ignored it.
“If a house
looked sleek and
streamlined, it
was modern,” Flanders writes. “If a wall
had no electrical sockets showing, it was modern, even if it
left the residents nowhere to plug in a lamp. If a chair
enhanced the design, it
was good, even if it
was too low, or too narrow.”
When it
came to textiles and tableware, their designs “
were not easier to use (like non-stick pans), nor easier to care for (such as linoleum flooring, which
didn’t need intensive polishing). They just
looked good,” Flanders
notes. No wonder housewives
didn’t like them.
Nor did architects
care about what Flanders
calls “the essence of homes:” that is, “how homeowners
experience their domestic spaces.” In fact, some philosophers, such as Theodor Adorno,
considered the very idea of home as the enemy of modernism. German philosopher Walter Benjamin
considered domesticity itself as “physically and mentally cloying,” Flanders writes.
In his 1863 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” the critic Charles Baudelaire “
described the perfect flaneur, or man about town,
as one who
lives
‘in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite . . .
To be at the very centre of the world’ is his ideal. Such a man is
“solitary . . .
detached from both family and home.”
* ebb and flow;
들락날락
a recurrent or rhythmical pattern of coming and going or decline and regrowth.
The ebb is the outgoing phase, when the tide drains away from the shore; and the flow is the incoming phase when water rises again.But this
is not the ideal for Christians, who
embrace biblical teachings, not only about the importance of family life, but also of the value of permanent things. Home
is—or should be—a place for companionship, for rearing children, and having friends and family over for meals, while the dog
begs for scraps under the table. (At least, that’s what sometimes
happens in my home.) It
should be a cozy and comfortable place /for putting our feet up, for reading, perhaps the Bible, and for praying together each evening.
The story of modern architecture
is a reminder of how worldview
influences every aspect of life. We
should keep this in mind
/if we’
re planning to decorate a new home /in such a way that our own children
will not be comfortable in it.
Instead, they should feel, as Dorothy did, that there’s no place like home.