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Rybczynski keeps differentiating between what a house looks like and how it functions, and charges that architects all too often concentrate on the former. A case in point was Le Corbusier's celebrated "New Spirit" pavilion at the Paris exposition of 1925: bare white walls, stairs made out of steel pipes, only a few restaurant-style chairs. "The house is a machine for living in," said Le Corbusier. This concept became very fashionable, but Rybczynski finds it hopelessly contradictory: "Marble kitchen counters and bamboo window shades . . . a Matisse on the wall and a sleeping mat on the floor."
He is quite specific in his views of how to make houses more pleasant. "Reexamining bourgeois traditions means returning to house layouts that offer more privacy and intimacy than the so-called open plan, in which space is allowed to 'flow' from one room to another," he writes. "A reexamination of the bourgeois tradition of comfort is an implicit criticism of modernity, but it is not a rejection of change."
Only after writing a whole history of the idea of comfort does Rybczynski attempt to define it. The simplest definition would be just "feeling good," but that is too simple. The scientific definition would be a "condition in which discomfort has been avoided," but that is too negative. Since Rybczynski is not a scientist but an architect, and a subtly witty analyst of how people live, he prefers to end with a metaphor, "the Onion Theory of Comfort." In this, the slowly evolving attributes of comfort -- privacy, intimacy, domesticity, pleasure, ease, leisure, efficiency, convenience -- form a series of layers, partly transparent so that all can be partly seen at once. And then, "common sense will do the rest."