HOUSES AND GARDENS 



the central function of the hall, the dining-room may form a recess which 

 will be described later on. The process, in short, involves an examination of 

 the evolution of the house, and consists in substituting a partial for a 

 complete differentiation from the hall in cases where the functions of cells 

 make it possible and desirable. 



It is felt that to merely reduce the various special rooms to their 

 minimum size and then to add a hall or living-room is not only expensive in 

 that it adds to the already large number of special rooms yet another room, 

 but that this room, so added, being deprived of all its functions by the special 

 rooms, hardly justifies its existence as a dominant note in the plan. The 

 term living-room for such an apartment is misleading ; for life in the home is 

 composed of so many functions, and when these are all provided for by 

 separate compartments the hall or living-room must necessarily dwindle 

 away. By retaining, therefore, those original functions of the hall which do 

 not demand a complete isolation from it, either in the hall itself or where 

 means allow in the form of recesses, the hall regains its ancient place and 

 constitutes to a great extent the house. 



It is only in the large house, indeed, that the spacious hall may still 

 justify itself, although it still remains a passage. Here, as in the hotel, 

 it constitutes an expansion of the route plan of the house, where one may 

 observe, as it were, the full current of the household life. It bears much the 

 same relation to the private rooms as the busy market does to the homes of 

 the people who meet there. 



