1482 The Cornell Reading-Courses 



With each addition to the house, the kitchen retreated to the rear of 

 the structure, where, by its very distance from the living-rooms, it con- 

 fined the housewife to her post of duty. As the family decreased in numbers 

 and helpers became few, the front part of the house was closed and home 

 life was centered within the radius of the kitchen and its activities. 



The reaction of so monotonous a life on the worker and the family is 

 inevitable. Seen always from the same angle of vision, life appears 

 dreary and uninteresting, and health is at length enfeebled. What a 

 load of misery lies at the door of wasteful planning ! However picturesque 

 a rambling house may be, it either enslaves the workers or degenerates 

 into a small inhabited area and a large closed-up area that is useless and 

 unhealthful. 



Such of these old structures as are soundly built are worth replanning 

 and equipping with running water, electric light, sound floors, and a 

 good heating system. Alteration should be undertaken only after the 

 complete project has been worked out on paper; otherwise remodeling 

 may result merely in remuddling the arrangement. 



In Fig. 61 is illustrated a rambling plan of the traditional farmhouse 

 of the upright-and-wing type previously described. The original and 

 the remodeled arrangement are shown in A and B, respectively. The 

 main faults of the old plan, A, are two: first, the plan is deficient in cor- 

 rectly located hall space; second, the distance from the kitchen to the 

 front of the house is too great. Since a person must pass through one 

 room in order to reach another, the whole floor virtually becomes a 

 passageway. This condition destroys privacy, interrupts work, and 

 entails much extra cleaning. The right amount of hall area placed in 

 the heart of the plan would give separate entrance to each room and 

 would save the whole house. Hall space should be regarded as the 

 developer of the plan. It is the kernel within the shell. If the plan is 

 compactly arranged and the hall is centrally placed, great service may 

 be obtained from even a small allowance of hall space. The presence 

 of five, six, or seven doors in a room indicates poor hall-planning, and 

 therefore poor house-planning. It is well to remember that the number 

 of doors in a room diminishes in proportion to the excellence of the plan. 



In plan B there is introduced enough central hall area to give direct 

 access to each of the rooms. The kitchen is placed centrally at the rear 

 of this hallway. This brings the kitchen nearer the living-rooms and 

 shortens all working distances. If the distances from the center of the 

 kitchen to the center of each room in plans A and B are computed, it is 

 found that the remodeled plan saves an average distance of fifteen feet 

 per round trip over the old plan. Such a saving multiplied by days and 

 years would in the course of a lifetime aggregate a great amount of 

 economy. 



