How the Corridor Changed the Way We Live Together
The surprising social consequences of hallways
If you were a wealthy British person during the Victorian Era and you wanted to build yourself a home, Robert Kerr had the perfect formula. In his book The Gentleman’s House, he argued that the mark of an impressive home was not its size or its cost but its design:
Let it be again remarked that the character of a gentleman-like Residence is not matter of magnitude or of costliness, but of design, — and chiefly of plan ; and that, as a very modest establishment may possess this character without a fault, all unadorned ; so also the stately Seat of a millionaire may perchance have so little of it that the most lavish expenditure shall but magnify its defects.
The qualities which an English gentleman of the present day values in his house are comprehensively these :
Quiet comfort for his family and guests,
Thorough convenience for his domestics,
Elegance and importance without ostentation.
To this end, he offered some “fixed and final rules, of which no compromise ought to be offered.” The first of these — before comfort, convenience, spaciousness, or importance — was privacy. The most important type of privacy was the kind that kept the various classes apart from one another:
It becomes the foremost of all maxims, therefore, however small the establishment, that the Servants’ Department shall be separated from the Main House, so that what passes on either side of the boundary shall be both invisible and inaudible on the other.
Kerr relates with horror what can happen in an improperly-designed house:
Not to mention that most unrefined arrangement whereby at one sole entrance-door the visitors rub shoulders with the tradespeople, how objectionable it is we need scarcely say when a thin partition transmits the sounds of the Scullery or Coal-cellar to the Dining-room or Study ; or when a Kitchen window in summer weather forms a trap to catch the conversation at the casement of the Drawing-room ; or when a Kitchen doorway in the Vestibule or Staircase exposes to the view of every one the dresser or the cooking-range, or fills the house with unwelcome odours.
The family that owns a home should have “free passageway” without “encountering the servants unexpectedly,” and the servants are likewise entitled to do their duties without constantly running into the family. Kerr concludes:
The idea which underlies all is simply this. The family constitute one community : the servants another. Whatever may be their mutual regard and confidence as dwellers under the same roof, each class is entitled to shut its door upon the other and be alone.
Kerr wrote his book in 1864, at the height of the Victorian Era. Victorians were all about shutting the door on one another.
The hallway is, it turns out, a relatively recent invention. The corridor was invented by John Thorpe in the late 1500s or early 1600s.
Before this, there had been no internal hallways in buildings. In warmer climates, people used outdoor porticoes to move between rooms; in colder places, buildings were just a collection of interconnected rooms. To get from one part of a house to another, you’d have to pass through rooms full of other people. There was precious little privacy in a pre-corridor world.
In fact, in earlier periods, privacy had carried a negative connotation. The word is etymologically linked to deprivation and had long been associated with loneliness or selfishness. But by the 1800s, people in England and America had begun to enjoy the ability to have private lives behind closed doors. The home became a sanctuary for the nuclear family, and privacy allowed them to maintain the respectability that had become so important.
Kerr, like many architects of his era, believed that the key to privacy was the use of an unsung innovation: the corridor.
A British grand house would have several types of corridors:
A principal corridor reserved mostly for the use of the family of the house (”Care ought to be taken that the domestics have not to trespass too much on the privacy of a Principal Corridor”);
Bedroom corridors, in which the staff may appear — they’d need to attend to their employers, after all — “without in any way appearing to make the Corridor their own;”
And smaller passages through which servants might be able to move more freely.
Historian Robin Evans explores the transition to corridors in his famous essay, “Figures, Doors, and Passages.” He notes that, while Victorians like Kerr favored rooms with one door, preferably to a corridor, Italians in the 1500s thought that the best rooms had lots of doors that connected them directly to other rooms so that people could gather “to pass the time, watch, discuss, work or eat.”
The invention of the corridor didn’t just make house design more efficient; it had profound social consequences. It “inscribed a deeper division between the upper and lower ranks of society” by making sure servants were “always on hand, but never present unless required.”
Where did the corridor come from? Evans links the development of the corridor to Puritanical impulses to cut short any pointless or idle interaction. Architect Brian Hwui Zhi Cheng attributes the Victorian heyday of the corridor not only to wealthy people’s desire for privacy but a 19th-century emphasis on efficiency and the need to carve tenement buildings into small spaces for individual families. Some utopians, meanwhile, envisioned the corridor as a communal meeting-place rather than a method for separating people.
All this brings up a chicken-and-egg conundrum: was the corridor a cause of or a reflection of social values? Probably both; it represented and accelerated prevailing ideas. Physical separation made it easier to maintain privacy and class boundaries, which in turn made these values more important in daily life.
Like so many very simple design choices from the structure of a social-media feed to parking requirements around new construction, the corridor represented something profound about the society that created it, even if that society didn’t think much about it.
Corridors — those simple, seemingly utilitarian passages in our buildings — eventually came to represent and encourage all sorts of social realities.
By the 20th century, they became associated with inhuman, institutional architecture — long, empty hotel hallways or corridors in hospitals or even jails. The pendulum swung against them once again; now, the corridor is something to be avoided in modern architecture rather than encouraged. Newer offices and homes are much more likely to be open-plan and eschew hallways as much as possible.
These choices, too, likely have all sorts of unintended consequences that future historians will someday pontificate about.
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Ah, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ and, more recently, ‘Downton Abbey’ come to mind. The infamous British system of class distinction and everyone occupying their ‘proper’ place in the order of things. It still exists in a much watered-down way but thank goodness that the worst of those days is over.