For Gustavo, Evans’ analysis is illuminating but a simple observation of the floor plan has its obvious limitations. The plans show that the house has two storeys with the communal spaces and the garage located on the ground floor, and the bedrooms and private rooms situated on the upper level.Įvans explains that by the 20 th century the principles that led the day-to-day production of contemporary housing had changed drastically from the matrix of interconnected rooms observed in the Italian villas of the 16 th century. The Spanish artist Iñaki Lizarralde has produced the floor plan illustrations of the Simpson’ house (including those of the domestic settings in other sit-coms), which Gustavo used in his analysis. What do the house and the family interactions inside it reveal about the life-style of the average American family in its domestic setting? The ground floor of the Simpson’s house by Inaki Lizarralde First floor The Simpsons’ house has appeared in every single episode and is integral part of the ways in which the sit-com satirises American life, culture and society.
#Simpsons house layout series#
The show was released in 1989 and is the longest-running series in American TV with more than 600 episodes. What an analysis of the floor plans of the spatial settings of these shows can reveal about values and norms of behaviour? In order to answer this question Gustavo explored the home floor plan of The Simpsons, one of the most popular animated sit-coms created by Matt Groening and the Fox Broadcasting company. A range of sit-coms such as Friends, Will and Grace, Fraser, Sex and the City have projected and shaped ideas about contemporary modes of living through the representation of domestic settings. By 2017, TV shows had reached more than one and half billion households worldwide (Digital TV Research, 2018). Since mass media shows began streaming popular culture to a great range of audiences far in space and time, they critically changed the definition of art and culture.
However, as Gustavo observed, painting is no longer the most common narrative expression of ordinary ways of living.
Gustavo’s starting point was the seminal essay of architectural critic Robin Evans ‘Figures, Doors and Passages’ (1978), who argued that house plans and narrative expressions in paintings and literature can provide substantial evidence regarding what type of inhabited space society considers as ‘ordinary’. He began by explaining that from ancient stone drawings to current TV-shows, humans have used narrative to represent fundamental social relationships. Can narrative expressions in mass media help us understand contemporary social behaviour in domestic spaces? Gustavo Maldonado, a student in my Architectural Phenomena module at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (2019-20) raised this question for his final essay in the module.
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