stephanieNY

While writing my paper for my Urban History class just now, I came across this guy, Robert Owen from early 19th century England, and his novel idea of the apartment building. He thought maybe people could live together in one building, but have their own homes inside of it.

Owen, on apartment buildings:

"buildings, placed under some public control, might be erected for the joint occupation of many families or individuals, and so arranged that each tenant might feel that he had the exclusive enjoyment of a home in the room or rooms which he occupied, and yet might partake, in common with his neighbors, of many important comforts and advantages now utterly unknown to him."

I love the idea that this hypothetical tenant can't even imagine the joys that close neighbors might bring him. This guy doesn't know what he's missing. And it's also so interesting how he puts it as though tenants would almost be fooled into thinking that their rooms were some equivalent to a house.

It made me think of the situation in reverse. If apartment buildings came before houses, maybe Owen would have said something like this:

"homes, private groups of rooms, might be owned by individual families or persons, and so arranged that each group of rooms was allotted its own plot of land, and shared walls and corridors with no other group of rooms, so that its owner might partake in solitary comforts now unknown to him, and might feel that his ownership extended beyond his walls to the earth around his rooms."