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Except for the fairly elaborate chieftains houses, Greek dwellings remained simple through classical times. A passageway led from the street into an open appeal off which three or four rooms were reached, the whole being fairly small in scale. The Roman houses, as seen, for example, at Pompeii, also stood at the streets edge. Past a vestibule was an open space called the atrium, from which the sleeping rooms were reached a colonnaded garden often stood in back. In ancient capital of Italy most people lived in the equivalent of apartment houses, three to five stories high, with apartments ranging from three to six rooms some were like tenements, others were elaborate. At ground take were rows of small shops. The rich had huge villas outside the cities that were composed of living quarters and pleasure pavilions.IV. Houses of Medieval EuropePrint regionThis comparative sophistication in housing disappeared during the so-called Dark Ages in Europe. Although castles and primitive ma nors housed legion(predicate) people, most of the remaining population were packed into simple, unsanitary dwellings huddled within the walls of small cities and towns. The countryside was unsafe, and agriculture and population twain declined the prosperous farms of classical antiquity disappeared. Slowly, after AD1000, conditions improved, first around the great monasteries and then in the expanding cities. The rise of a prosperous mercantile class resulted in the construction of large town houses and in due time country manors. Comparatively peaceful conditions brought some improvement in housing for farm serfs, exclusively the living conditions of the poor town-dweller continued, on the whole, to be miserable. By the end of the Middle Ages the concept of the palace had evolved from the idea of the grand town house. These palaces were elaborate dwellings for ranking ecclesiastics, merchant princes, or ruling families they might occupy a whole block and contain, in addition to c eremonial and private apartments, quarters for large numbers of retainers and hangers-on.V. From the renascence to the 19th CenturyPrint sectionThe palace was perfected during the Renaissance and remains one of architectures most enduring images, a dignified, large-scale city element that has been adapted and ingeminate ever since. Palaces were first built in Florence, Italy, and then throughout the Western world. In France... ...ouses that broke with historical architectural styles were slow to be accepted. As first as 1889 the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright built a house embodying new concepts of spatial flow from one room to another. He and others, both in Europe and in the United States, soon moved toward a domestic architectural style of metric forms and simplified surfaces largely free of decoration. Contemporary changes in painting and sculpture were allied to this movement, and by the 1920s modern architecture, though by no means universally accepted, had arrived. Glass, steel, and concrete reinforced with steel gave architects many new design options, and by the mid-20th century the modern house was commonplace. Glass boxes, freely curving styles, and stark, austere geometric forms were all possible but at the same time traditional styles persisted, and in the U.S. many homeowners found a more or less standard, one-floor, two- or three-bedroom ranch house satisfactory.VIII. Houses of the Far EastPrint sectionHouse types in India vary greatly according to region, climate, and local tradition. The villages have courtyard houses as well as simple, single-volume dwellings in the cities,