News

Inside and out, the architecture of new single family houses reveals us. Touring the new subdivisions of South Surrey, then over to Port Moody and into Coquitlam, what strikes me is how utterly different house exteriors are from interiors these days.

What I mean are not the obvious functional differences between keeping the rain out and providing surfaces to hang pictures of the cousins, but rather the aesthetic choices that render the public faces and the private realities of dwellings in different ways. Modern suburbia means one architecture for external walls, but an altogether different one inside, where we live. Why should this be so?

Visit new Vancouver suburban houses and you will see window designs resonating with European history. For example, there are lots of Palladian windows — a rounded and raised central pane flanked by two side panes — inspired generally from Italian Renaissance maestro Andrea Palladio, but more specifically, from the 18th century English 'Palladians,' who revived window forms like these after reading Palladio's books and studying his drawings.

Another common, equally Anglophile detail is radiating window panes or similarly-radiating under-eave designs inspired by the Victorian pattern called "The Sun In Splendour." The borrowing of historical styles is everywhere, dormers and bay windows abound.

But inside, these houses are starkly modern. No embellishment is to be found, except for occasional touches around the front door or fireplace mantel. The interiors of our houses have become like modernist art galleries, neutral surfaces upon which we hang our lives, flat screens upon which we project the melodramas of our families.

In large part this is due to the fact that we blanket our interiors with acres of wallboard, Gyproc, gypsum board — whatever the trade name, the result is often a bland interior. In Alberta, because the building boom has made skilled labour had to come by and cutting, nailing, taping, sanding and painting wallboard so expensive, architects are finding it cheaper to substitute more expensive but less workman-intensive fine woods and veneer panels. May B.C. be so lucky.

This inside/outside house design dichotomy is recent. In the Georgian and Victorian eras, the decorative program and range of colours and forms on exterior walls was usually mirrored inside. Parlours and foyers featured miniatures and variations on the very same dentils, cornices, columns and architraves as outside walls. On Edinburgh's Prince's Street for example, the severe, lightly-incised exterior architecture had its interior consort in the form of lightly-incised ornament by the same architect's hands. Closer to home, my great aunt Olive's Edwardian house was grand for the tiny hamlet of Harris, Saskatchewan, but its exterior decoration and colours were of one stroke with the over-stuffed furniture, ruffled damasks, wainscoting and spittoons of her living room.

Even B.C.'s high Modern houses by Ron Thom, Arthur Erickson, Barry Downs and others proposed a unity of interior with exterior — and not just through floor plans inspired by that era's "Indoor-Outdoor Living" philosophy. Quarter-sawn cedar, shiplap, glulam wooden beams, and rough-surfaced bare concrete were all favourite cladding for West Coasters, but the same palette of materials also served inside for daily living.

The slow separation of inside and outside design in North American houses began between the wars with two innovations. The first was the ersatz, invented history of such places as Santa Barbara. After an earthquake's devastation in the late 1920s, there was exactly one Spanish Mission Colonial building left in the Southern California city — the old Mission itself. With film industry exiles like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks advocating for heritage preservation, the small city adopted a mandatory 'Mission Revival" design code for the city's re-building. Urged on by Santa Barbara's success, Santa Fe, New Mexico did the same thing for its own well-heeled refugees from winter. But in both places — with only a few exceptions — house interiors were as Jazz Age Deco or Moderne as anywhere else in the Lower 48.

Tract housing builders then adapted these techniques for their mass-produced dwellings of the 1940s and 50s — the second major step in the inside/outside split. These developers applied techniques of mass production and mass marketing to housing for the first time. Builders of large subdivisions came to realize that they could personalize the impersonal with minor decorative flourishes at the late states of construction.

The bungalows on the street in Edmonton where I grew up all had slightly different mock-masonry forms inscribed on the stucco surrounding their front doors. Later, Ukrainian-Canadian residents would paint the implied stone blocks in wildly different Easter-egg-inspired colours, and a real local idiom was born.

These inside-outside splits resonate with other societal fractures. The phenomenon of house exteriors differing from interiors is comparable to the new electronic pseudo-agora we have shaped with the Internet's networked social sites. "MySpace" is anything but "My" "Space", but rather a beehive of imagined personal celebrity, just the democratic thing for our fame-obsessed times.

Similarly, spend an hour or two with FaceBook and the opposite of its friendly name becomes quickly apparent - this is a book, ironically, for the faceless. Is it just me that finds this e-village creepy, like the banality of Pleasantville, with its smiling barbers and mandatory chocolate malteds? Hal Niedzvicki's 2004 book Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity, was a prescient in proposing that what often seems to be personal expression is actually the mass-mind, manipulated magnificently.

He should write an appendix about suburban houses.