House - Concepts

Matheus Oliveira about 22 hours ago

Save this picture!

Residência do Infinito / Alberto Campo Baeza. Image © Javier Callejas

“A House is a place (…) as physical as a set of feelings.

(…) a home is a relation between materiality and mastery
and imaginative processes, where the physical location
and materiality and the feelings and ideas are united and
influence each other, instead of being separated and
distinct. (…) a house is a process of creation and
comprehension of ways of living and belonging. A house
is lived, as well as imagined. The meaning of house and
the way it materially manifests itself, it´s something that
is created and recreated in an unceasingly way through
every day domestic tasks, which are themselves
connected to the spacial imaginary of the house”1
The sentence above is the starting-point of the current
reflection, in an exercise that will mark meaningfully my
approach to the way of projecting houses.

Save this picture!

La cuarta habitación / Fran Silvestre Arquitectos. Image Cortesia de Fran Silvestre

Arquitectos

As I have an affinity for the house theme, namely the

single-family house, the mentioned sentence allowed me
to do a kind of introspective brainstorming, that searched
for a redefinition of a set of concepts related to the
theme. Therefore one imposed an exercise of self-
questioning, where it becomes essential to search the
core of that concepts, that till today seemed to me as
basic, familiar and in a certain way, natural and inherent.
After all, I always knew them in myself, but never truly
understood them.
Even though this journey approaches me to the answers,
it also takes me to more questions and, consequently, to
new reflections.

1. House | Home VS. House | Domicile

As a first step, there stands out the need, pragmatically,

to define and to distinguish concepts. I’m interested in
what is a house?

I’ve been using the term house to define the idea of what
I want to discuss, however, what really matters to me is
the house as a home. Not as a domicile.

In a simple etymological analysis of the words, one can

verify – in home – an aspect that, saying particularly
anything, it says it all. The concept of home is associated
to some transcendence that others synonyms of house,
such as domicile, don’t have.

In fact, there is a fundamental issue in this idea of home

that fascinates me, which is evident in Monteys and
Fuertes words, when they affirm, “a home is a dwelling
plus its residents and the objects it keeps” 2, in other
words, the house is beyond its materiality lacking of
essence. Therefore, the idea of home that interests me
carries, specially, a meaning, patent on the relation that
the house is capable of establish with the ones who live
it. Nevertheless, I don’t discredit the house as a physical
structure! Besides, as an architect, I couldn’t do it, but
also, ARCHITECTURE is not capable of producing objects
without any content.

Then it’s obvious that, in this dichotomy HOME vs.

DOMICILE I intend to separate myself from those houses,
that are no more than machines to inhabit, incapable and
disable to conceive an effective bond with whom inhabits
it. These aspects, in addition to exalt the house as a
concept to be considered, it leads me to another stage of
reflection: the existence of different concepts of house
implies the existence of different concepts about the
ones who project them and the ones who inhabit them?

Save this picture!

Casa en Ourém / Filipe Saraiva. Image © João Morgado

2. Architect VS. Draftsman & Resident VS. User

Let’s begin by who draws the houses. It is up to whom is

entrusted with such a hard chore, the capability of being
able to analyse “in depth the habits, the needs and the
aspirations of the family that will live it. It’s necessary a
thorough analysis in order that the designed answer can
be detailed, regarding the program, the functions and the
aesthetic aspect” 3. It lies in the Architect that capability
of achieving the project of a house that’s able to establish
with who will live in it, empathy, affinity and compatibility.
This ability, translated into the full overlap of the spheres
of function and use, will make better houses, once they
respond to what it is expected. On the other side, its
absence is reflected in a meaningless drawing, incapable
of creating homes and creator of packages with low
significance.

In this context, a house only becomes effectively a home,

when it has someone who provides that skill, since it is
marked by the experiencing of the ones who live there. In
fact, is that degree of habitability that truly gives, or not,
to the building the designation of home. This capability is
clearly explained by Akiko Bush when he refers that
“there are moments when the very idea of house seems
like an impossible preposition. There are other moments
in which our houses express infinite possibilities, when
they reflect exactly who we are, what we could and might
be” 4. In this way, this duality implies, on its own, different
types of inhabitants: the ones that actually live in the
houses, the residents and, the ones who just use them,
the users. Thus, these last ones are not capable of
building an empathic involvement with the house they live
(because of them and/or its own house), by limiting
themselves to use them as an object, and by using it
without any emotional connection, emptying the house of
any meaning besides being an utility object. In
opposition, the ones I call by residents, they assume it, by
the way they coexist with the home, with the sense of
mutual belonging. Indeed, one aspect, not at all
insignificant, is the fact that the term of belonging
appears frequently when we discuss this relation.
Ingemar Lindberg mentions that “the basic structure of
(the home) is the cooperation and the sense of
belonging” 5.

Therefore, concisely, what matters in my reflection is to

emphasize that capability of symbiosis between the
home and its resident and, that is translated into a
relation as physical as emotional between both, in such a
way that “a home (can) be, more than anything, the place
of each one and that each one that lives in it, could feel it
as one, in the sense that “a house is always connected to
someone who represents it, or that allows to be
represented by it”” 6.

Save this picture!

Cabana Flutuante / Tomohiro Hata Architect and Associates. Image © Toshiyuki Yano

3. Inhabiting | Function and Usage

The aspects abovementioned throughout the present

text, lead me to a new point of reflection: what is
inhabiting and in what way within that concept, the sub-
concepts function and usage, can relate with themselves.

In fact, by extending my reflection beyond the cold

architectural character, we can verify in these relations
house/inhabitant, the existence of factors that have a
significant influence in this relation. The aspect of family,
the duality privacy/intimacy and the social setting,
establish themselves as the most significant factors of
that point of view. By the sociological look, “the concept
of inhabiting allows us to focus attention on the social
phenomenon that occurs in the concrete connection that
each society establish between their residents and the
houses they inhabit. (…) The inhabiting concept nucleus,
just as of the resident, refers to the family that lives in a
home and at the same time is part of a society” 7. In other
words, we understand that, in a more widespread sphere,
we begin to have – as a more external layer of the
involvement of the problem – the social reality that
involves it, which basically is evident, natural and
inevitable.

However, it is the question of the individual that appears

as the central nucleus of the problem, in the sense of the
relation that he can create with the house and vice-versa.
As we saw previously, what matters to me is
fundamentally the homes and the residents who interact
towards promoting the best of each other, which
consequently, will take us to situations where function
and usage tend to merge and grow in a bigger
operational range, fill with meanings. This aspect is
especially rich in the contemporary western houses,
where the spaces assume themselves the promotion of
multi-functional and multi-significant intense livings. The
example given by Adam – quoted by Susan Kent – is
categorical in that sense: “(In this matter, by the real
human behaviour, there are no mono-functional places in
any European-American house) The “typical” bedroom is
used for many activities. The bed is used to receive a
body over it, but its function also includes the supply of a
place to sleep, to rest, to chill, to die, to have sex, to
procreate, to watch TV, to read, to nurse a baby, to
unwrap gifts, to lay the coat, and to serve as a
trampoline… I’m sorry, but the notion of mono-
functionality in the European-American culture doesn’t
exist and, probably never did” 8.

Nonetheless, I will restore the idea that such living full of

meaning it is only possible when the homes assume
themselves as I defined previously and when the people
who live there are true residents. Besides, it is crucial that
the relation, either physical or emotional, holds up
between them in a respectful balance, in the sense in
which the dominance of one over the other can subvert
one, the other, or even both in their own essence (let us
remind the importance of the architect, illustrated by
Adolf Loos in the story “Poor Rich Man”), intrinsic aspect
in Gilles Barbey words, when he refers “life can only be
emancipated and can develop a positive personality
when it is in a favourable environment. But the spacial
models we consider are extremely fragile and always
prone in become its opposite” 9.

As a result, and beyond the inherent meaning of these

examples, the function of the home, in its (almost)
complete usability aspect, has to allow either the privacy
of its resident and the family who lives there, and the
intimacy of each individual who constitutes the family.
Therefore, wouldn’t it be the main function of the house
to allow itself to be assumed as a physical space whose
characteristics provide to those who really live there, the
ability of finding themselves introspectively?

Save this picture!

Cabana H - Eva / A6A. Image © Agnès Clotis

4. The essence of living | The essence of the home

Deep down, it seems like it. The true essence of the

home and the way its resident lives it, it’s there. In the
capability that the home and the resident has to combine
themselves, in the way the home is thought and
materialized in order to allow that bond with those who
live it. And this aspect is fundamental to the house
architecture… and, basically, to everything that surrounds
us, since “examined by a wide variety of theoretical
horizons, it seems that the image of the house transforms
into the topography of our intimacy” 10. All of these
aspects, so portentous, impute to Architecture and whom
makes it, a huge responsibility demanding a reflection
surrounding theses questions related with the house we
make, again and again, towards the comprehension of
how we can promote, between home and resident, a
candid and completely valid relation, either in its physical
dimension, or its emotional dimension, and even
symbolic.

Bibliography:

7ALCALÁ, Luís Cortez, “La question residencial – Bases

para una sociologia del habitar”. Madrid: Editorial
Fundamentos, 1995.

10BACHELARD, Gaston, “A Poética do espaço”. (trad.

António da Costa Leal e Lídia do Valle Santos Leal) In:
Col. Os Pensadores. 3.ed. São Paulo: Abril, 1988.

9BARBEY, Gilles, “L’Evasion Domestique – Essai sur les

Relations d’Affectivité au Logis”, Lausanne: Presses
Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 1990.

1BLUNT, Alison; DOWNING, Robyn, Home. Nova Iorque:

Routledge, 2006.

4BUSH, Akiko, Geography of Home – writings on where

we live. Nova Iorque: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

8KENT, Susan, “Domestic architecture and the Use of

Space – An interdisciplinary cross-cultural study”. Nova
Iorque: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
2MONTEYS, Xavier; FUERTES, Pere, Casa Collage – Un
ensayo sobre la arquitectura de la casa. Barcelona:
Gustavo Gili S. A., 2001.

5REED,Christopher, “Not at Home – The suppression of

domesticity in modern Art and Architecture”. Londres:
Thames and Hudson, 1996.

6RODRIGUES, Ana Luísa, A habitabilidade do espaço

doméstico: O cliente, o arquitecto, o habitante e a casa.
Tese de Doutoramento em Arquitectura. Guimarães, UM,
2008.

3SIZA, Álvaro, Imaginar a Evidência. Lisboa: Edições 70,

2000.