What My Brilliant Friend has taught me about space
And how much of it we really need?
I’ve been watching My Brilliant Friend, the story of friendship and feminism based on the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, it’s taking me a while to get through all the episodes because I have to concentrate on the subtitles and my ability to focus is a bit limited. Being unexpectedly made redundant is a difficult and emotional journey and I’m not totally out the other side of the pain zone yet. With that state of mind all my good intentions of getting this out more often sunk into very muddy water.
My Brilliant Friend follows the lives and friendship of Elena and Lila, from their childhoods in post war Naples, right through to their sixties. So far I’m up to watching the young women navigate how to get the pill in 1969 when it was only acceptable as a way of regulating your cycle, not as contraception. Elena and Lila are adults and have homes of their own but the apartments the girls’ families call home have not changed too much, they have telephones and TV’s which they are loving and there is a lot of cooking. Italian families, as we know are often large and it was normal, if you were a working-class family, for much of the space in your apartment to be multi-functional. There was no shame bedding down in the kitchen or the living room. In every episode of My Brilliant Friend, we see kids and adults rolling out of beds in living rooms, which in the daytime were used as seating and it not weird.
Our obsession with separate spaces for every singular activity is a modern phenomenon. I’d suggest we don’t really need utility rooms in city apartments, or for small families to be living in four-bedroom houses and still dreaming of expanding into the loft. Why are we happy paying to heat and maintain spaces which are empty 80% of the time? Surely, this doesn’t make sense to anyone but Captain Capitalist? Over-spacing does seem to be a very British, American and Australian thing. Europeans and Japanese folk are very happy living in well maintained small spaces with communal areas designed into urban spaces, as are folk on the African Continent, across the Caribbean and in the Central America’s. In Sweden you might live in an apartment block with a separate flat which all the residents can book for visiting guests so you don’t need a spare room. Swedes often have communal storage areas and gardens that are properly looked after so residents can go out and enjoy where they live not spend all their time and cash constantly fixing things and putting more emotional investment into the barriers serving to keep communities separate. We in the UK on the other hand are obsessed with how much space we have, it defines our success, not our happiness. Which I have to say, is pretty sad. I’d rather a well designed small home than a large one I can’t afford to heat or look after and maybe if we all lived in the space, we need not want there would be bit more suitable housing for everyone and the environment would be able to take a breath. Rob Adams, a City Architect and Urban Planner who I found via Never to Small, discusses this with passion. He’s trying to break Australian habits and design homes and neighbourhoods well, for everyone. A bit like we did with those New Towns and modern estates of the 1960s when planners were allowed to give social housing developments adequate windows.
Love them or hate them, these award winning homes in Camden designed by Neave Brown were designed for communities to live their best lives in. Neave believed in well ordered space and that “every home should have its own front door opening directly on to the street, as well as its own private open space.”
Would you be happy living in a well designed small space ? I know I’d love it, I’d particularly like a communal laundry room, which are still going strong in the US and come with a handy etiquette guide.
If you see another email from me in your inbox soon you’ll know the mud is settling.
xox