Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Inside The House

Many houses have several rooms with specialized functions. These may include a living/eating area, a sleeping area, and (if suitable facilities and services exist) washing and lavatory areas. In traditional agriculture-oriented societies, domestic animals such as chickens or larger livestock (like cattle) often share part of the house with human beings. Most conventional modern houses will at least contain a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen (or kitchen area), and a living room. A typical "foursquare house" (as pictured) occurred commonly in the early history of the United States of America, with a staircase in the centre of the house, surrounded by four rooms, and connected to other sections of the house (including in more recent eras a garage).

Types of Houses

A house is a building lived in by people. The word "house" may also refer to a building that shelters animals, especially in a zoo.
It generally has walls and a roof to shelter its enclosed space from precipitation, wind, heat, cold, and other elements. Domestic pets and "unwanted" animals (such as mice) often live in houses.
The social unit that dwells in a house is known as a household. Most commonly[citation needed], a household is a family unit of some kind, though households can be other social groups, such as single persons, or groups of unrelated individuals. Settled agrarian and industrial societies are composed of household units living permanently in housing of various types, according to a variety of forms of Land tenure. English-speaking people generally call any building they routinely occupy "home". Many people leave their house during the day for work and recreation but typically return to it to sleep or for other activities.

1-Structure

Structure
The developed world in general features three basic types of house that have their own ground-level entry and private open space, and usually on a separately titled parcel of land:
Single-family detached houses - free-standing on all sides.
Semi-detached houses - houses that are attached, usually to only one other house via a
party wall.
Terraced house (UK) or row house (also known as a townhouse) (USA) - attached to other houses, possibly in a row, each separated by a party wall
.
In addition, there are various forms of attached housing where a number of dwelling units are co-located within the same structure, which share a ground-level entry and may or may not have any private open space, such as apartments or flats of various scales. Another type of housing is moveable, such as houseboats, caravans, and trailer homes.
In the United Kingdom, 27% of the population lived in terraced houses and 32% in semi-detached houses, as of 2002. In the United States in 2000, 61.4% of people lived in detached houses and 5.6% in semi-detached houses, 26% in row houses or apartments, and 7% in mobile homes.
People build "face houses" in one or more faces; though they occur most commonly as a fort or playhouse for a child, this design sometimes serves as a house for adults.

2-Shape

Shape
Archaeologists have a particular interest in house shape: they see the transition over time from round huts to rectangular houses as a significant advance in optimizing the use of space, and associate it with the growth of the idea of a personal area (see personal space)

3-Function

Function
Some houses transcend the basic functionality of providing "a roof over one's head" or of serving as a family "hearth and home". When a house becomes a display-case for wealth and/or fashion and/or conspicuous consumption, we may speak of a "great house". The residence of a feudal lord or of a ruler may require defensive structures and thus turn into a fort or a castle. The house of a monarch may come to house courtiers and officers as well as the royal family: this sort of house may become a palace. Moreover, in time the lord or monarch may wish to retreat to a more personal or simple space such as a villa, a hunting lodge or a dacha. Compare the popularity of the holiday house or cottage, also known as a crib.
In contrast to a relatively upper class or modern trend to ownership of multiple houses, much of human history shows the importance of multi-purpose houses. Thus the house long served as the traditional place of work (the original cottage industry site or "in-house" small-scale manufacturing workshop) or of commerce (featuring, for example, a ground floor "shop-front" shop or counter or office, with living space above). During the Industrial Revolution there was a separation of manufacturing and banking from the house, though to this day some shopkeepers continue (or have returned) to live "over the shop".