Peeking Through the Keyhole. The Evolution of North American Houses. By Avi Friedman and David Krawitz. (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-773-524-398, cloth.)

Montreal architect Avi Friedman is best known for the Grow Home, an inexpensive, efficient house with a large capacity for change — if it can grow with the addition of children, so can it shrink when they leave. Both a polemic against megacities, megasuburbs and megahouses and an intelligent system for low cost housing, the Grow Home might be seen as part of the simple life movement where we really ought to be able to afford accommodating spaces in which we can live happily and freely. Peeking Through the Keyhole is an exegesis, a post-Grow Home justification of why we should be thinking smaller, kinder house thoughts. The premise is that since the Second World War spatial practices have changed enormously. Families are smaller, fragmented; everyone works, stability in the home is no longer a shirtwaisted mum in the kitchen. The kitchen in fact is more a centre of operations where the family meets in fleeting and chance encounters. While this change has been taking place, everything else has become very large: three garages rather than one, double height living rooms, a bedroom and a king-sized mattress for each individual. Life now is wide, fast and selfish. Friedman and Krawitz discuss this in seven chapters, dense with information and ideas, starting with the deconstruction of the kitchen, once an adjunct to the house, now the heart, the hearth, the command centre. This locational centrality is undermined however by the plugged-in nature of the house where each occupant has their own phone, TV and computer. The house has become the workplace, the school, the club — or rather the computer desk has. Electronic interface also undermines the centrality of the business district in the city, already fragmented by the demands of automobile access. The spatial discontinuity between workers and work itself has never been greater. The question here is how this dislocation, increasingly common in North American life, is mirrored in changing house form. The profound questions raised by this discussion of the evolution of the house over the last fifty years can be paraphrased as — does the house fit its occupants? We tend to think about fitting ourselves into the houses available to us. We change, we adapt — it’s easier and cheaper, but results in a misalignment that can be profoundly unsettling. The urge to move on to an ever-newer house is both wasteful of energy and casts housing into a state of temporal gratification. No roots can grow here. The sheer diversity and shifting nature of the family unit today force changes on any dwelling. Rooms are reassigned roles as the family needs. As well, ideological shifts in child rearing routinely blow apart traditional hierarchies built into house form. Our expectations of what the house has to give us are completely conditional: if a high degree of personal autonomy is desired, the house can become a straitjacket, unless it is huge, but most people can’t afford huge. Friedman and Krawitz state, “the priority in finding a home should not be the pursuit of an unsuitable or unattainable goal. Obvious as it may sound, the focus should be on finding the right kind of home and on using it well” (115). The book ends with discussion about the city, its extravagant distances, its megamalls, its freeways, its essential incoherence — again, much energy wasted. The conclusion is an admonition to think smaller, think local, try to find a sense of community and gain some serenity, some sort of calm. Or, if this is too impossible, at least be aware that the state of hyperactivity knows as exhaustion …