The British History Podcast page has a fascinating essay on the transformation of houses:
Somewhere in the 16th and 17th centuries, ordinary people started building differently – private buildings, public buildings. They used brick, glass, decoration and portraiture; and it wasn’t just the aristocracy; Yeomen, merchants, towns, husbandmen. The historian W G Hoskins gave it a name – the Great Rebuilding
From the hall to the small house, from mud and wattle and timber to brick, to chimneys, to multiple rooms, to removing the pigs from the parlor to barns, etc. From smoke holes to chimneys.
And it includes asides such as how "reformers" distrusted art, which deteriorated, but that when the monasteries were destroyed by Henry VIII (and given to the nobles and made them rich), it meant that the poor now no longer had help in times of troubles, but that eventually the small towns had to establish secular institutions to do the work of hospitals and schools.
Gresham college has a lecture on the rebuilding of London after the great fire.
and of coures, James Burke's Tv series Connections is about the evolution of technology.
here in the Philippines, over the last 25 years, the small bamboo thatched houses have gradually been replaced by termite proof but ugly concrete blocks.
wanderingbakya has illustrations of traditional houses of the Philippines
Our town, in an attempt to make us a tourist area, is trying to rehabilitate the traditional houses, which are sort of like split level design with capiz windows).
because of frequent flooding, in most traditional houses, the main room is raised to stay dry, and in Lolo's ancestral house, the floor boards have slits in them so that dirt will simply fall to below the house, which is used for animals and storing things.
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