The permanence of the maid’s room in the apartments: a comparative study in the decade of 1960 to 1990 in Maceió/AL

Abstract

Living in the big cities represented a slow transition from single-family to multi-family buildings. The initial plans of the apartments reproduced the functional tripartition of the urban bourgeois house and maintained the complete dependence of maid, with distinct access by the service sector. The presence of the domestic maid in Brazilian households is a cultural factor, especially in the Northeastern families of the middle and upper classes. The purpose of this article is to trace a trajectory of the maid's dependence on apartment buildings constructed in the city of Maceió, State of Alagoas, Brazil, in the 1960s to 1990s. It was used as a database the research done by the Group of Studies in Architecture Project (gEPA) of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the Federal University of Alagoas, which comprises 228 vertical multifamily buildings of various typologies. It was observed that, in the 1960s and 1970s, all the apartments had the maid’s room, even those of the typology of 02 dormitories. Only in the 1980s did the apartments with the third reversible dormitory appear, with signs of flexibilization in the plants. In the 1990s, the maid’s room remains only in the typologies of 3 and 4 bedrooms apartments. It was concluded that the presence of the employee’s room prevailed over the offer of apartments produced in the four decades analyzed, mainly in the typologies of 3 and 4 dormitories; and that the changes announced by the 1988 labor legislation did not significantly change the living habits of the higher income Alagoanas families.