a very ordinary house

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                                                                            Ordinary things contain the deepest mysteries...

This Royal Institute of  British Architects exhibition could not have been better timed for me! Radical Rooms: Power of the plan (architecture.com)
'This exhibition explores the power relations embedded within the layout of our domestic spaces. It uses stories from architectural history and highlights moments when the architectural plan has challenged or changed the conventions of domestic life.'


Though the exhibition takes a much longer historical view, the curators start with much the same assumption as I did this sabbatical journey; that the spaces in which we live and how they are laid out shape our perspective on life. It does not focus on the external appearance of the houses it reveals, but on how the spaces are divided and laid out. This focus on the layout offers me a way of introducing another home in which my family lived during my teenage years. Four turbulent years after putting a penny in the foundations of a house being built in Cramlington New Town in 1973, we eventually moved to a house situated within sight of it. (A later blog will reveal more on that one!)


Even by 1970s standards it could never claim to be the most attractive house on the outside as the then and now pictures of Ringwood Drive show here:
            

It was functional though, and had some very attractive features like a door leading straight out into the back garden. And, I could spend hours poring over the details, because I had proper architect's drawings of the design. This was manna from heaven for me and the plans were fixed to my bedroom wall all the time I lived there. Of course I still have those drawings given to me by the first owners of the house.



It was a small space and a love of the ordered and compact became important to me. Having lived in some rather strange Methodist manses this plan renews a longing in me to live in a very 'ordinary' house again! (only one manse offered an exception, newly built when we moved in the plans will feature here eventually!)

A simple, functional place to live - this house was the base from which life's real adventure began. I often looked from bedroom window at the house with the penny in the foundations and wondered how things might have been. But our emotional and spiritual foundations are not confined to one physical location, they are part of us and we take wherever life takes us. These truly are the deepest of mysteries...


the view from the front garden was a bit more attractive!


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