[건축 영어공부] 벽난로 - FIREPLACE

Perennial emblem of home

 

FIREPLACE

 

Fire and human dwelling were inseparable in most climates until recently and the fireplace or hearth-source of heat and means of cooking-has been seen by many as the beginning of architecture. Fire was both practical necessity and social focus and the earliest known houses had fireplaces in the form of an open pit built into the ground.

 

The smoke from such fires would escape inefficiently through holes in the roof. Despite the development of chimneys and cetral heating these early fire pits remained in use in rural houses well into the nineteenth century.

 

The Romans used ceramic tubes inside walls to draw smoke out of bakeries, but true chimneys-tall structures designed to draw gases and smoke up from the fire and disperse them into the atmosphere-dis not emerge in Europe until the twelfth century. By the seventeenth century the chimney had become such an important feature that houses were frequently built around it, with a centural stack acting as a supporting structure for one or more dwellings. In the late eighteeth century Count Rumford designed a fireplace with a tall, shallow firebox that was better at drawing the smoke up and out of the building and greatly improved the amount of radiant heat projected into the room. His design became the model for modern fireplaces.

 

Architecturally, the fireplace's focal role in a house or room, combined with the desirability of a fireproof surround, was celebrated with elaborately carved openings and surrounds. French Chateux such as Blois, Chambord and Fontainebleau(opposite) are known for the size and artistry of their chimneypieces, while in the  Baroque and Rococo periods fireplaces were usually smaller but richer in decoration. The proliferation of fireplaces generated the picturesque roofscapes of great houses such as Burleigh in England, and socially its implications were even more significant: providing fireplaces throughout a dwelling made possible "a room of one's own," and the development of the modern sense of privacy and individuality.

 

Few modern homes have open fireplaces, due to the convenience of cetral heating and regulations on emissions, but gas fires and wood burners are still valued as a means of offering the ambience of a "real" fire. The fireplace, rather surprisingly, was valued by Le Corbusier as a powerful emblem of home, and evne in his Unites d'Habitation he saw such a "sacred" focus as essential for a family "even if," as he put it, "the 'fire' comes courtesy of electricity." In Alto's Villa Mairea, heated by a form of air conditioning, a large white-plastered fireplace dominates the living spaces, recalling vernacular models. Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie houses were organized around a central fire and the later, and cheaper, Usonian houses, which had underfloor heating, similarly featured a focal fireplace that Wright considered "the psychological center of the home." In grander houses such as Fallingwater and Wingspread, a large chimney became the core around which Wright wrapped the entire dwelling, and a central fireplace and chimney were also famously deployed, with more than a trace of irony, in Robert Venturi's "Mother's House": built for his mother in suburban Philadelphia in 1962 its deliberately "houselike" front was to become one of the most celebrated emblems of Postmodernism.