What Does Your House Reveal About You?

"The guru of New-Urbanism, Andres Duany, talks about a suburban monster house built recently outside Dallas. It is so full of domestic amenities that the owners have little need to leave. According to Duany, it represents suburban America's response to a public realm so degraded that people avoid it whenever possible....the home has grown larger, more suburban, less formal and certainly less rational; the hierarchy of public and private spaces, upstairs and down, has given way to a paradigm of pleasure. The hearth has been replaced by the television. It's the new centre of the home, the place where the family gathers to be together...In the suburbs, where the average family generates 13 car trips per day, the single biggest change in the architecture of domesticity is the multiple-car thrust garage, a structure so big it dwarfs the house to which it is attached."