House descends from an Old English word for shelter
A house is a residential building, from hut simplicity to timber, masonry, or concrete complexity. The people inside form a household, often a family but not always. English house comes from Old English hus, itself from Proto-Germanic roots meaning dwelling or shelter.
The letter B descends from a house. An early Proto-Semitic sign depicting a dwelling was called bayt, bet or beth, and it became the Greek beta before passing into the Latin alphabet. Measurement habits differ too: an American house's square footage counts only living space, while European square-metre figures include the walls' full footprint, garage and all.
The earliest homes grew from simple shelters, and one exceptionally preserved house from the fifth millennium BC, contents intact, was dug up at Tell Madhur in Iraq. The Roman architect Vitruvius argued that architecture began with a frame of branches plastered with mud, the primitive hut. Medieval manor houses sheltered families, relatives, servants and guests who lived communally, eating and meeting in the Great Hall and sharing beds in the solar. Renaissance Italian palazzi were chains of rooms, each with several doors, so people walked straight through one chamber to the next.
Privacy arrived with the corridor. At Beaufort House in Chelsea, built in 1597, architect John Thorpe wrote "A Long Entry through all" on his plans, giving each room a single door onto a passage. Writer Witold Rybczynski sees this as the start of splitting homes into day and night, formal and informal zones. Seventeenth-century Dutch houses were smaller, home to four or five people who relied on themselves instead of servants and kept work out of the family space, a separation that suited the coming factory age. American doctors still saw patients in a front parlour into the 20th century, until equipment pushed them into hospitals and offices.
Materials follow circumstance. American builders favour light timber frames where wood is plentiful and adobe or rammed earth in dry regions. In Manila's Payatas district, homes are built from rubbish-dump scraps, and in Dakar recycled-material houses stand on a mix of garbage and sand that also resists floods. Sears, Roebuck began selling catalogue homes in 1908, and prefabrication took off after World War II.
Source: House
