What Does a House Do?

There are many kinds of buildings. They range from a metal cage with a little wheel for housing a gerbil to a huge underground concrete bunker for housing a nuclear warhead. The operative word here is “house.” Every building is designed to house something. Though you can use the information in this knowlege base to build a shed to house tools, our primary goal is to learn about buildings meant to house humans. Cleverly, we call these buildings “houses.”

A house, then, is a building designed to sustain human life. This is an important concept, because it points out that houses do the same job as some other familiar structures designed to sustain human life: our bodies.

The human body, the original house, sustains human life by providing four basic functions. First, it’s a self-supporting structure that defines an inside (you) and an outside (the world). This structure is an interconnected network of bones—our skeleton—that creates a space for our heart to beat, lungs to breathe, and stomachs to digest.

Second, the body maintains a stable temperature inside in the face of fluctuating temperatures outside. Our bodies accomplish this in two ways: (1) by creating temperature—heat through metabolizing foods, and cool through sweating, breathing, and other heat-dissipating maneuvers—and (2) by storing heat, especially in the wonderfully efficient heat sink that is the water that makes up some 70 percent of our mass.

Third, the human body creates a separation from outside elements that could damage us. For example, our skin keeps out unfiltered water and air, and our immune systems fight off invading pathogens.

Finally, the body maintains a constant connection, or exchange, with the outside. Oxygen, food, and water come in while carbon dioxide, urine, and feces go out in a constant cycle that must be perpetuated almost completely uninterrupted from the day we’re born to the day we die. We see then that the body is a miraculous house delicately and exquisitely crafted to create space, regulate temperature, and maintain a constant separation from and exchange with the outside.

Initially, the body was all the house we needed. But as we started moving about the planet, humans encountered climates that pushed our bodies beyond their job descriptions. Not a species to be denied, we used our bulging brains to come up with ways of augmenting our bodies. Clothing was an innovation, a second skin, that allowed our bodies to maintain a stable interior temperature while exposed to lower outside temperatures. Housing was another, more ambitious innovation developed to help our bodies sustain human life in the difficult climates and environments we encountered as we fanned out across the planet.

So we’re ready to answer our first question: what does a house do? From a functional point of view, the answer is simple. A house sustains human life by mirroring and augmenting the four basic functions the body provides: (1) A house is a self-supporting structure that defines an inside and an outside. (2) A house maintains an interior temperature that sustains human life in the face of exterior temperatures that wouldn’t. (3) A house creates a separation from the outside that protects both the house and its inhabitants from destructive forces. (4) A house allows the constant exchange with the outside that its inhabitants need to survive.

© Clarke Snell, 2005