Building facades, the most visible aspect of a structure, typically draw the most comments from the public. They are, after all, the sights that furnish our surroundings and command our quotidian attention.
Home buyers, however, often overlook a building’s elevations, however attractive, gaudy or grotesque, in favor of livable, functional floor plans. According to Chicago Apartments, A Century of Lakefront Living:
The skill of architects was best displayed in how they organized and manipulated the spaces they worked with into commodious, efficient, and engaging settings for those who slept, ate, entertained, and sometimes worked within them.
Debates about principles of organization for apartment layout go back … to the 19th century. Through many decades, articles rain in American architectural journals evaluating various approaches, foreign and domestic, to exploiting the peculiarities of site shape and size, meeting the need for light, air, and privacy, establishing minimal sizes for kitchens and bathrooms, and providing clear separation of service, public, and private areas. The long, strung-out halls, bisecting apartments of an earlier era, were succeeded by more efficient and elegant layouts, which varied according to budget and architectural skill …
The pressure from developers to squeeze every foot of buyable space from a building’s footprint led architects in later years, even in luxury buildings, to emphasize different features. While bedrooms might grow smaller, closets and master bathrooms took up more space. The addition of washes and driers, media or family rooms, and home offices consumed the space that had once been allotted for live-in servants. The maids’ rooms so ubiquitous a part of the earlier floor plans, along with the occasional servants’ hall, were absent from even the grandest schemes of the 1990s. Internal family privacy and self-containment took over from the kind of privacy ideal that had supported anti-apartment sentiment a century earlier. A common elevator landing today is more tolerable, apparently, than strangers in the household.