Adaptive Domesticity
Why does a Tokyo apartment feel different from a Paris one? We started counting.
Walk into a Tokyo apartment. The kitchen flows into the living room. No door, no threshold. It feels open, almost exposed.
Walk into a Paris apartment. The kitchen hides behind a door. Always. The salon is for guests; the kitchen is for work. They don't mix.
Walk into an Istanbul apartment. There's a formal salon for guests, completely separate from the family living room. Two worlds under one roof.
Why? These aren't random preferences. They're cultural patterns encoded in space. Privacy gradients. Hospitality protocols. Rules about who sees what. And the question has a literature. Amos Rapoport argued in 1969 that house form follows culture before it follows climate or material. Edward T. Hall showed that comfortable distances are learned, not universal. Christopher Alexander turned the observation into a design rule he called the intimacy gradient: rooms should grow more private as you move deeper. And Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson made it measurable: redraw any plan as a graph of rooms and doors, and privacy becomes a depth you can count.
That last move is our method. This working note reads published floor plans from five cities as justified access graphs: the street at the bottom, every room a node, every door an edge. Count the steps from the street to the most private room and you have a privacy gradient you can compare between a Tokyo one-room apartment and a Marrakech riad. This page reports what the counting shows so far, and is honest about which patterns are still hypotheses.
Furniture as Evidence: Semper's claim, taken literally: joint complexity may predict spatial hierarchy. A pattern we keep seeing in typologies, and still want to test properly.
Theoretical Framework
Furniture Scale
Joinery typologies as cultural evidence. Semper's claim, read literally: cultures with complex joinery tend to build more nuanced room transitions. For now a hypothesis, not a proof.
Room Scale
Threshold counting as space syntax. Any plan redrawn as a justified graph turns privacy into a measurable depth: doors, level changes, and implied boundaries between street and the most private room.
Typology Scale
A century of published floor plans, 1920 to today. Adjacencies, circulation, and privacy gradients read across housing types.
Cultural Synthesis
The patterns feed a typology vocabulary we want SpaceCraft to eventually understand: a scanned room means more when its cultural grammar is legible.
Research Process
Read Typologies
Published plans and typology literature from five city grammars
Draw the Graphs
Each plan redrawn as a justified access graph: street at the root, rooms as nodes, doors as edges
Count and Index
Depth, buffer zones, adjacency, visibility, and hospitality indices per typology
Synthesize Vocabulary
Cultural pattern vocabulary for future product integration
Research Phases
Typology Reading
Comparative reading of published plans and typology literature across five city grammars: Tokyo, Paris, Istanbul, Marrakech, Los Angeles.
Threshold Mapping
Each plan redrawn as a justified access graph (depthmapX plus our own Python parsing); privacy thresholds and buffer zones counted plan by plan to build the gradient index.
Joinery Hypothesis
Testing Semper's furniture-to-space claim against documented joinery traditions. Honest status: not yet done.
Product Integration
A cultural pattern vocabulary for SpaceCraft's scanned rooms. Planned.
Five Grammars, One Graph: Justified access graphs of the five typologies, street node at the bottom. Depth to the most private room runs from one step in an open LA loft to five in Istanbul and Marrakech plans. Note the Istanbul guest salon: it sits shallow while family life sits deep. Redrawn after Hillier and Hanson's method.
Key Metrics
Key Thinkers
Amos Rapoport
House Form and Culture (1969) is this note's thesis stated fifty years early: domestic layout follows culture first, climate and construction second. Our five grammars are Rapoport's argument made countable.
Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson
The Social Logic of Space (1984) turned floor plans into graphs and privacy into depth. Our threshold counts are their justified graph, applied to a century of published apartment plans.
Christopher Alexander
Pattern 127 of A Pattern Language, the intimacy gradient, prescribes what we observe in plans: rooms should grow more private with depth. Cultures disagree only on how steep the gradient should be.
Edward T. Hall
Hall invented proxemics: the study of human spatial relationships. Comfortable distances vary by culture. Our privacy gradient metrics extend his framework to plans.
Case Studies
Tokyo Compact Typology
JapanAround 32 square meters with no doors between living spaces. Privacy through ritual, not walls. Morning routines choreographed to avoid collision; the plan assumes it.
Paris Haussmann Typology
FranceClassic bourgeois layout. Kitchen hidden from salon. Service corridor for staff. Roughly 95 square meters with four distinct threshold conditions. Robin Evans traced the logic: once the corridor arrived, rooms stopped opening into each other and privacy became a matter of routing.
Istanbul Multi-Generational Typology
TurkeyThe guest salon tradition Sedad Hakki Eldem documented in his Turkish house plan typologies survives in the modern apartment: a formal room kept ready near the entrance, sealed off from family life. In graph terms, hospitality sits shallow and intimacy sits deep, and the two gradients never cross.
Comparative Analysis
Tokyo
The Flowing SpaceNo doors between living areas. Privacy through ritual, not walls. Kitchen is the social center.
Paris
The Hidden KitchenKitchen always separate. Service and served spaces don't mix. Guests see the salon, not the mess.
Istanbul
The Guest SalonTwo living rooms: one for family, one for guests. Hospitality has its own architecture.
Marrakech
The Courtyard HomeBlank exterior, rich interior. All rooms face the central court. Maximum privacy from street.
Optimization Results
Depth from street to the most private room, read as justified graphs (after Hillier and Hanson).
Scenario model: typology indices from our plan readings
Key Findings
Thresholds are countable. The distance from street to the most private room can be read off any plan: five thresholds in Istanbul and Marrakech typologies, one in an open-plan LA loft.
1 to 5 thresholdsTurkish apartment plans carry roughly 2.3 times more buffer zones than Tokyo plans. Hospitality protocols are encoded in circulation: the guest salon sits shallow in the graph while family space sits deep.
2.3× more buffersParisian kitchens read consistently smaller than Tokyo kitchens in same-sized plans, and always behind a door. The privacy gradient trumps cooking space.
Smaller, always hiddenFurniture joints may predict spatial hierarchy. Cultures with complex joinery (Japan, Scandinavia) tend to have more nuanced room transitions. A pattern we keep seeing, not yet a proof.
Hypothesis to testHonest Limitations
This is plan-reading, not fieldwork. Published plans show intention; they don't show how families actually live.
Our sources skew middle-class and urban. Social housing and luxury follow different grammars.
The joinery-to-hierarchy link is a hypothesis we find compelling. We haven't tested it at a sample size that would satisfy a statistician.
Plans from 1920 and life in 2026: building stock evolves slower than domestic ritual.
References & Data Sources
Literature
Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (1969)
The founding argument: sociocultural forces shape house form before climate, materials, or technology.
Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (1984)
Justified graphs and depth: the method behind our threshold counts.
↗Alexander, Ishikawa and Silverstein, A Pattern Language (1977)
Pattern 127, Intimacy Gradient: rooms should grow more private with depth.
Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (1966)
Proxemics: spatial comfort is cultural, not universal.
Robin Evans, Figures, Doors and Passages (1978)
How the corridor rewired domestic privacy in the nineteenth century.
Sedad Hakki Eldem, Turk Evi Plan Tipleri (1954)
The Turkish house plan typology: sofa layouts and the architecture of hospitality.
Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture (1851)
Joinery and weaving as architecture's origin: the source of our furniture-scale hypothesis.
Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (1933)
Cultural grammars of light: why penumbra is a value, not a defect.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)
The house as felt space; a reminder of what our indices cannot count.
Conclusion
Domestic space encodes culture. The way a door is positioned, where the kitchen sits, how many thresholds separate street from bedroom: these aren't random choices. They're cultural grammars, and some of them can be counted on any floor plan once it is redrawn as a graph. This note is our running attempt to count them carefully.
Limitations
- Plan-reading, not fieldwork
- Middle-class urban focus
Future Directions
- Extend to social housing typologies
- Test the joinery hypothesis properly
- Publish the threshold dataset