Home, Witold Rybczynski
Home, Witold Rybczynski
2 Rating(s)
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

Home
A Short History of an Idea

Author: Witold Rybczynski

Narrator: Wanda McCaddon

Unabridged: 7 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/14/2014

Categories: Nonfiction, House & Home


Synopsis

In this illuminating book, Witold Rybczynski walks us through five centuries of homes both great and small, from the smoke-filled manor halls of the Middle Ages to the Ralph Laurendesigned environments of today. On a house tour like no otherone that delightfully explicates the very idea of homeyoull see how social and cultural changes influenced styles of decoration and furnishing, learn the connection between wall-hung religious tapestries and wall-to-wall carpeting, discover how some of our most welcome luxuries were born of architectural necessity, and much more.

About Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski has written about architecture for the New York Times, Time, Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Slate, and is the author of the award-winning A Clearing in the Distance. He is the recipient of the National Building Museum’s 2007 Vincent Scully Prize. He lives with his wife in Philadelphia, where he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tucker on December 16, 2011

Examines the European-American evolution of the cultural concepts of privacy, comfort, and the intersection of form and function. I'd group this book as informative to ecopsychology, although the author, writing in the mid-1980s, didn't use the term. The author admits that comfort "is an invention--a......more

Goodreads review by Erika on May 13, 2013

This book examines how the ideas of "home" and "comfort" and "domesticity" came into being and changed over the years and the relation of these ideas to technology in the home. For the most part, the book covers the period from the middle ages to the present. It is the author's claim that during thi......more

Goodreads review by Abril on December 26, 2021

Interesante libro sobre un tema poco tratado y, sin embargo, tan cotidiano. Fue escrito hace bastantes años, por lo que se queda un poco obsoleto en algunos aspectos y he echado de menos algunas ilustraciones más para comprender mejor conceptos arquitectónicos y de diseño que se me escapan. Pero dir......more

Goodreads review by Thomas on March 19, 2021

An entertaining rundown of the development of the home from the Middle Ages to the mid-1980s, when this book was written. Not that much, other than technology, has actually changed since the mid-1980s. Mostly, this deals with the Western world. (Europe and North America) This is not just about how th......more

Goodreads review by Tristan on June 01, 2012

My dad recommended this book to me. It was written a while ago, but it's a fascinating look at how the concept of "home" emerged throughout architectural history. It has a Eurocentric bias, but it's a really astounding amount of information and it's written extremely well. Rybcyznski makes you reall......more