2 If the mortifying austerity for which modern architecture became notorious won it few friends, later architects have been wary of overcompensating by providing an excess of comfort, because it could so easily be interpreted as camp.
Many early modernist architects sympathised with this point of view – for example, the Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld, when criticised for the patently inadequate heating apparatus he had provided in a particular house, replied 'I think it is indeed very unhealthy in winter not to feel the cold and in summer not to feel the heat'. Insulated, as Behne put it, within 'a dull vegetative state of jelly-like comfort', they had lost touch with their surroundings, and each other: only by stripping away the layers of padding would people be shocked into social re-awakening. To him, the task of the architect was to strip off the cocoon in which the nineteenth century bourgeoisie had encased itself. For the German critic Adolf Behne, writing in 1919 - and he spoke for many of the first modern architects - 'comfort' was degenerate. Too little, and the inhabitants are all too likely to see themselves - as did poor Edith Farnsworth, Mies's client - as victims of the architect's sadism and cruelty. Too much comfort, and you run the risk of kitsch. Does that mean they would like them to be comfortable? Just asking this question immediately sucks us into one of the more turbulent areas of architectural debate. The Comfort of Strangeness Adrian Forty 'Away with comfort! Only where comfort ends does humanity begin' 1 (Adolf Behne) Like most reasonable architects, Sergison Bates want the inhabitants of the dwellings they design to feel at home.
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