The Art of Building a Home: A collection of lectures and illustrations

Transcriber’s Note
MANCHESTER: Chorlton & Knowles, Mayfield Press. 1901.
THE ART OF BUILDING A HOME.
A Collection of Lectures and Illustrations by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin.
Longmans, Green & Co., 39, Paternoster Row, London, New York, & Bombay, 1901.
Some time ago I published a reprint of two of my articles with illustrations which had appeared in “The Building News.”
This little publication, though long out of print, being still constantly asked for; and the need of something to take its place being felt by us; the question of re-issuing it arose. Instead of doing this, however, it seemed better, as being a later and fuller expression, to collect two or three of the lectures which my partner and I had from time to time written for various audiences; and to add by way of illustration some of the sketches and photographs we had by us.
So came into existence this book in its present form.
BARRY PARKER, The Quadrant, Buxton, 1901.
The way we run in ruts is wonderful: our inability to find out the right principles upon which to set to work to accomplish what we take in hand, or to go to the bottom of things, is simply astonishing: while the resignation with which we accept the Recognised and Usual as the Right and Inevitable is really beautiful.
In nothing is this tendency more noticeable than in the art of house-building. We begin by considering what, in the way of a house, our neighbours have; what they would expect us to have; what is customary in the rank of life to which we belong; anything, in fact, but what are our actual needs. About the last thing we do is to make our home take just that form which will, in the most straightforward manner, meet our requirements.
It is too often evident that people, instead of being assisted, and their lives added to, by the houses they occupy, are but living as well as may be in spite of them. The house, planned largely to meet supposed wants which never occur, and sacrificed to convention and custom, neither satisfies the real needs of its occupants nor expresses in any way their individuality.