Parker Morris and the Fordist House

6.00 pm. If people like watching T.V. while they are eating their evening meal, space for a low table is needed (Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Space in the Home, 1963, p. 4).

This paper re-examines the 1961 Parker Morris report on housing standards in Britain. It explores the origins, scope, text and iconography of the report and suggests that these not only express a particularly modernist conception of space but one which presupposed very specific economic conditions and geographies.

Also known as Homes for Today and Tomorrow Parker Morris attempted, through the application of scientific principles, to define the minimum living space standards needed to accommodate household activities. But while early modernist research into notions of existenzminimum were the work of avant-garde architects and thinkers, Homes for Today and Tomorrow and its sister design manual Space in the Home were commissioned by the British State. This normalization of scientific enquiry into space can be considered not only as a response to new conditions in the mass production of housing – economies of scale, prefabrication, system-building and modular coordination – but also to the post-war boom in consumer goods. In this, it is suggested that the domestic interior was assigned a key role as a privileged site of mass consumption as the production and micro-management of space in Britain became integral to the development of a planned national economy underpinned by Fordist principles. Parker Morris, therefore, sought to accommodate activities which were pre-determined not so much by traditional social or familial ties but rather by recently introduced commodities such as the television set, white goods, table tennis tables and train sets. This relationship between the domestic interior and the national economy are emblematized by the series of placeless and scale-less diagrams executed by Gordon Cullen in Space in the Home. Here, walls dissolve as space flows from inside to outside in a homogenized and ephemeral landscape whose limits are perhaps only the boundaries of the nation state and the circuits of capital.

In Britain, Parker Morris was the last explicit State-sponsored attempt to prescribe a normative spatial programme for national living. The calm neutral efficiency of family-life expressed in its diagrams was almost immediately problematised by the rise of 1960s counter-culture, the feminist movement and the oil crisis of 1972 which altered perhaps forever the spatial, temporal and economic conditions it had taken for granted. The debate on space-standards, however, continues.

Agentes polinizadores e produção de grãos em cultura de café arábica cv. “Catuaí Vermelho”

Coffee (Coffea arabica L.) plants had the pollination process of their flowers studied in three coffee producing regions in Brazil: the first in Ribeirao Preto, state of São Paulo, in September of 2004, the second in Carmo do Paraiba, in the state of Minas Gerais, in October of 2006, and, the third, in Altinopolis, state of São Paulo, in September of 2007. In all these locations the coffee variety used was the 'Catuai Vermelho'. The pollinator species visiting the flowers, the frequency with which the flowers were visited by the insects, and the type of material collected by them ( nectar and/or pollen) were determined by counts taking place at the first 10 minutes of each hour from 7:00 AM till 6:00 PM during the months mentioned above. To estimate the fructification percentage, 25 branches were identified with color threads and protected with wire frames covered with a nylon fabric to prevent them from being visited by insects. Another group of 25 branches was similarly identified but remained without any covering so that their flowers were thus freely visited by insects. on the average, the most frequent pollinator was the Africanized bee Apis mellifera (73.7%) followed by the bee Trigona spinipes (14.5%), and Tetragonisca angustula (9.5%). The Africanized bee collected nectar and pollen to almost the same extent: 58.5% of the first and 41.5% of the second. To collect nectar, that species increased its visiting frequency up to 1:00 PM. To collect pollen, A. mellifera visited the flowers up to 1:00 PM with frequency peaks between 8:00 and 9:00 AM. T. spinipes collected pollen (58,5%) and nectar (41.5%). T. angustula collected only pollen. The branches freely visited by insects produced 181 grains on the average whereas those covered with the nylon fabric produced only 81 grains, this meaning a reduction of 55.25% in grain production. Coffee grains produced on the freely visited branches had a mean weight (1.13 g) significantly superior to that of those produced on the covered branches (0.94 g).