On House and Home Part 7, Postscript

Wrapping up with Rybczynski’s book Home: a Short History of an Idea, continues its concerns with the nature of comfort. “Comfort…has become a mass commodity.” (P. 220) The democratization of comfort has been achieved through the efficiencies of “…mass production and industrialization….” (P. 220) Manufactured goods become accessible to the average citizen through technology, with hand-crafted objects become rare, expensive, and luxurious, in an ironic inversion of the etymology of the term manufacture; to make by hand. 

Rybczynski seems to take a turn in his final chapter. Where throughout most of the book he has remained somewhat objective, reporting on his research more than making judgments, he begins to make some big totalizing claims near the end. He directs us to a particular agenda: “what is needed is a reexamination not of bourgeois styles, but of bourgeois traditions.” (P. 221) Is it? Is this ‘needed’ for all of us or only some? It seems to me that reexamining bourgeois traditions may be fruitful for some but not for others. 

He makes a critique of ‘open plan’ homes as not providing enough privacy and intimacy in the home. He points out that “…not since the Middle Ages have homes offered as little personal privacy to their inhabitants.” (P. 222) Interestingly, his tone in the earlier part of the book discussing the ‘big hall’ of the middle ages implied that we have lost the sense of family and community that the open, common living space provided when we made smaller homes to accommodate the needs of the developing nuclear family. So how then are we to nurture that ‘lost’ sense of family? His argument seems weak and homogenizing; he doesn’t seem to recognize that inhabitants of homes are a diverse group, not easily subject to such homogenizing agendas. He suggests that the needs of the modern home include multiple entertainment systems which the open plan doesn’t allow simultaneous use of. Isn’t this continuing the trend of individuation we’ve seen in society recently? It is apparently rare that families sit down to common meals anymore, and it seems the expectation is that each individual member of the household has the ability to pursue his/her own activities without regard for other family members. Wouldn’t an open plan work to establish a context for family cohesion? Family members would have to co-ordinate their activities so as not to interfere with each other, and perhaps give rise to more occasions for unified family activity. 

It seems to me that the floor plan of a house and the nature of its traditions would be dependent on the inhabitants’ lifestyle, and should be designed accordingly. An open plan is well suited to entertaining. An open plan facilitates family interaction and gatherings. An open plan allows a parent to incorporate and observe toddlers while carrying out household activities. Perhaps Rybczynski needn’t be quite as exclusive about his agenda. Why can’t one have an open plan on one floor of their house and smaller rooms appropriate for intimacy and privacy on other floors? It seems that there are solutions that Rybczynski doesn’t consider. 

His exclusive position continues in his comments about utility and aesthetics. He states that a chair should be comfortable and not make and artistic statement. Why could a chair not accomplish both? He says that we should return “…to the idea of furniture as practical rather than aesthetic…” (P. 222) Again, why not both? Why the valorization of use-value? Why the devaluation of the aesthetic? I would suggest that what we need is a more inclusive notion of what may be considered homely and comfortable and that there is no homogenous conception of these. The idea of home and of comfort are situated and contingent upon the cultural and historical context of the inhabitants. Let’s encourage people to develop their homes in ways that suite them best. Isn’t that really what we’ve always attempted to do anyway?

Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts

Set shortly before the onset of WWII in 1939, Between the Acts takes the domesticity of the home and extends it to include the village, the country, and the present. Woolf’s home is a multisensorial one: her descriptions are not restricted to the visual. She seems to have a sense of the many aspects of home. Both the Bachelardian daydream and Freud’s uncanny are present throughout the the novel. 

Comments of comfort, security and domesticity identify areas of the home of significance to Woolf’s characters. 

A foolish flattering lady, pausing on the threshold of what she once called “the heart of the house,” the threshold of the library, had once said: “Next to the kitchen, the library’s always the nicest room in the house.” Then she added, stepping across the threshold: “Books are the mirror of the soul.” (P. 12)

The library as a place of contemplation and reverie through reading. The kitchen as center of the household. Woolf refers to kitchen noises echoing throughout the house, signaling to everyone by the increasing density of the sounds emanating from it that a meal is approaching. 

References to auditory events pervade the novel. The clock ticking in the house is a constant reminder of the passage of time. The silence and emptiness of empty rooms evokes a stillness and refers to a possible era before humans inhabited the earth. 

Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell,singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence. (P. 26)

Silence, of course, doesn’t exist: the clock is always ticking. Silence belongs to mute objects, to the visual world, the world of stasis. Sounds are always dynamic and are always events. Sound cannot be static. While the view from the house is mute and static, the activities in the house are full of life, as is the pageant.  

The uncanny is present by the ‘invasion’ of the house by strangers arriving for the pageant. “The family was not a family in the presence of strangers.” (P. 34) While this statement is referring to arriving local visitors, it seems suggestive also, of the potential invasion of the German air force in the pending war. The formation of war planes makes this manifest with the roar of the engines making it impossible to ignore. “The future disturbing our present.” (P. 57) The ongoing march of time, history in the making, the inexorable forces of nature and culture uproot and transform the characters’ lives. What is home may change through outside forces: “…dispersed are we…” (P. 66) The home, the family unit, the village, and the country may be dispersed at any moment: is in fact dispersed continually through the cycle of birth and death, through immigration and emigration. Change is constant and is an affront to the familiarity of home. Stability and stasis may be desired, but only as an abstract utopian dream. “…Change had to come, unless things were perfect; in which case she supposed they resisted Time. Heaven was changeless.” (P. 118) Stasis equals death, yet change disrupts the homely. The opposing forces may reach a deadlock. How to act? How to choose? What to do? What to do next?

On House and Home Part 6: the city as home and the architectural uncanny

Anthony Vidler, in his book The Architectural Uncanny, takes Freud’s notions of the uncanny, or unheimlich (unhomely), from the domain of the self and the home, out into the city as a whole. He investigates the notion of the city as home and its more fearful aspects. Vidler refers to the experience of reading a ’scary’ novel (Hoffman, Poe etc.) in the cosy comfort of one’s own home as a vicarious experience of the dangerous “…only intensified by shifts in media.” (Vidler, P. 3) The contrast between the secure home and the “…fearful invasion of an alien presence…” (P. 3) is a manifestation of the return of the repressed as a replica of the inner self. 

Quoting Benjamin, Vidler identifies the uncanny as “…born out of the rise of the great cities.”  The big city is a ‘post-anthropomorphic’ place. It transgresses human scale and can only be apprehended as an abstract idea from a privileged, panoramic point of view. The only way to “…preserve a sense of individual security…” (Vidler, P. 4) is to conceive of the city as a purely geometrical place from an abstract ‘above.’ It isn’t possible to maintain this sense of security from ground level, where a pervading sense of anxiety and uncertainty prevail in our daily practices. Local customs and localized behaviour become marginalized: custom becomes estranged and uncanny, and subsumed to the panoptic centrality of power, politics, and culture. We move from a transformation of the village, the community, to the post-anthropomorphism of Bemjamin’s great city. In De Certeau’s term the ‘tour’ of the village community becomes the ‘map’ needed to apprehend the city. The “…act of passing by…” (De Certeau, P. 97)is replace by the totalizing surveillance of the panoptic city. Space becomes abstracted from activity. The city becomes ‘other’ as it becomes merely geometric space rather than inhabited space. 

Where the village is clearly created by, and connected to, the individuals and families who comprise the community, the big city has lost this connection to the agency of its inhabitants. The big city has, rather, developed its own agency and agenda, severed from its inhabitants who are now subjects of the city’s agency and not the opposite. So while the village is heimlich the city is distinctly unheimlich. This unhomeliness may be seen as a psychoanalytical and aesthetic response to the ’shock of the modern’ compounded by the events of WWII. (Vidler, P. 9) By extension we can look at our contemporary situation as a response to globalization compounded by the 9/11 attack and other atrocities. The global community has becoming distinctly unheimlich, has become the mirror reflecting our double. We feel an unease at the return of the repressed animosity toward the other and the possibility of our own barbaric impulses surfacing. 

The “…conspicuous austerity…”(Rybczynski, P. 197) of the modernist interior may be seen as an adjunct process that supports the development of the unhomely in domestic spaces. Modernist architecture valorizes the visual while desensorializing architectural space. The needs of the dwelling inhabitant are displaced to make visual, geometric space primary. This seems to be part and parcel of the modernist urge to reduce to essences. Reacting to fin-de-siecle excess and driven by the triumverate of science, technology, and commerce, there is an escalation of the ‘cult of utility’ begun in the Enlightenment, where utilitarian instrumental value becomes the greatest value. We can see the culmination of this in Le Corbusier’s zeal for standardization in architectural production, where the individual must conform to the space of the home (a hermit crab model) as opposed to the individual shaping his/her own space (Bachelard’s bird’s nest model).

So how can the big city become homely? How can we regain the heimlich from the panopticon? De Certeau’s notions of walking in the city may give some indication of possible tactics to regain the homeliness of the village within the big city. Perhaps the homely can be regained, at least partially, by the “…forest of gestures…”(De Certeau, P. 102) of individual spatial practices. De Certeau focusses his attention on ‘ground level’ lived experience.

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates, makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place…under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City.”(De Certeau, P. 103)

While for Freud, the uncanny is “…to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream.” (Vidler, P. 7) for Bachelard and De Certeau “…the memorable is that which can be dreamed about a place.” The unreality of the dream is not necessarily abject, but may be liberating.  The space of the daydream, and the spatial practices of individuals are a move toward recognizing the ‘other.’ “To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other.” (De Certeau, P. 110) To daydream is to be subsumed by otherness and to open to the freedom of the imagination to generate meaning. The unhomely may be seen as an impetus to an aesthetic and embodied engagement with our world. “Estrangement from the world…is a moment of art.” (Vidler, P. 8 quoting Benjamin)

On House and Home Part 5: Le Corbusier and the ocularization of domestic space

Le Corbusier’s famous statement, “a house is a machine for living in…” (Rybczynski, P. 173) is a quintessential modernist call to break with the past. While during the 18th and 19th centuries there was rapid development of urban technologies, particularly with the introduction of electricity on a large scale to the urban environment, the appearance of the home didn’t change very much. The new technologies of the home were absorbed and assimilated into the interior design fashions of the day. By conceiving of the house as a machine and furniture as equipment, Corbu continued the scientistic agenda of increasing rationilization of the home with his designs emphasizing increasing the efficiency of the house: the appearance of domestic interiors would no longer be dictated by the fashions of decor. His focus was on standardizing the construction methods of building houses so as to be more efficient, although without a similar concern for the work of the housekeeper. US interior design on the other hand continued its concern with the customization of domestic interiors to suite the needs of the inhabitants, and particularly the homemaker. Ellen Richards wrote: “…the house as a home is merely outer clothing, which should fit as an overcoat should, without wrinkles and creases that show their ready-made character….” She saw the home as clothing, where individual need determined the structure, technology and layout of the home. The home as Bachelard’s ’shell,’ conceived as an extension of the person who designs and manages it. The ‘touch’ of the homemaker determining personal standards rather than technological standards, or rather, the order and design of the home was imposed from within rather than without, or externally by manufacturing and economic concerns at the forefront. In Richards’ conception the home is adapted around the needs of its inhabitants, whereas Corbu saw “…the house as a mass-produced object…to which the individual should adapt…”(Rybczynski, P. 190)

Corbu’s rationalization was an ocular one: the eye was central to his notion of architecture and human experience. Continuing in the Enlightenment tradition he equated seeing with knowledge, creation, imagination and invention. Consequently the window was a prime concern of his. The house became a frame for an exterior view with the deployment of windows delineating the possibilities of seeing outward. The function of the window changed from one of providing light and ventilation, to being the equivalent of a lens, with the house becoming a camera (which etymologically means ‘chamber’). The home becomes a photographic apparatus and a “…system for taking pictures…[becoming] a mechanism for classification…. The view from the house is a categorical view. (Colomina, P. 311) The house as framing device ‘domesticates’ the exterior view through categorization. “To inhabit means to employ that system.” (Colomina, P. 323) The house has become a montage, a series of views ‘choreographed’ by the movement of its inhabitants. Each visitor to a house creates their own ’storyboard’ in moving about the interior space. One can even see this bias in Corbu’s drawings where a disembodied eye dwarfs the ‘person’ in the landscape. This shows an ocularcentric and cinematic conception of architecture from a disembodied, omniscient viewpoint: the perspective of the ‘panorama,’ and De Certeau’s view of New York city from the top of a skyscraper. This is the moving crane shot in cinematography. This is a desensorializing of the home. Sight displaces site: the opposite of what Bachelard, Heidegger, Bourdieu, and De Certeau insist on when discussing our habitation of spaces of the home and city. Giordana Bruno, in her book Atlas of Emotion also insists on a move back from sight to the site as a lived experience, with the texture of the situated, the mundane, and the here and now. 

The exterior view has become part of the interior design. Windows as frames interrogate the distinction between inside and outside, between private and public, and “…the relation between domestic space and spectacle.” (Colomina, P. 319) The view enters the home through the central frame of the picture window in Ethel Wilson’s short story Window. (P. 196) The view through the framing ’screen’ of the picture window inscribes (as Colomina might say) the spectacle of the outside onto the interior: both the physical architectural interior and the psychological interior of Mr.Willy, the inhabitant. “The exterior world…becomes artifice; like the air, it has been conditioned, landscaped – it becomes a landscape.” (Colomina, P. 319) In an interesting transformation Wilson’s picture window with a view becomes a mirror at night: a reversal, a doubling, and a locus for the uncanny as the psychological interior of Mr. Willy is projected outward and backward onto the screen of the window/mirror. It reflects Willy’s interior state back to himself turning his home, his shell, into a temporary heterotopia. Willy is present in the real space of his home, but at the same time has his domestic and personal interiors reflected back. The familiar becomes strange,disembodied, and ultimately, unhomely.  At the same time, Willy’s domestic space is projected outward through the picture window to the public, who, in the person of the patiently waiting burglar, gazes into Willy’s interior making him vulnerable. Public and private, outside and inside are comingled and indicate possible challenges to urban living.

On House and Home Part 4

Rybczynski continues documenting the ongoing rationalization of domestic space in the 18th and 19th centuries. Chapters 6 and 7 of his book concern themselves with the development of lighting and ventilation technologies and the process of making the home increasingly efficient. Compared to previous eras, the home was becoming increasingly densely populated with objects. Furniture and books for example were becoming easily available to the middle classes, not only the elite.

Science was increasingly brought to bear on the development of control of systems within the home. Lighting received a big boost with the discovery first of kerosene and shortly afterward of petroleum. Gas lighting made fast inroads both within public spaces in the city as well as within the home. The clean and reliable light provided by gas made reading and other activities at night possible, encouraging literacy and a heightened awareness of cleanliness. (Rybczynski, P. 142) Gas lighting may be seen as the first successful mass technology in some way: it was a product of science and technology and was financed by businessmen. Private funding for the development of the products and the dissemination of the necessary infrastructure paved the way for the development of urban technologies. This process took off with the discovery of electricity. Not only did electricity provide improved lighting, but it also provided the ‘missing link’ for the mass development of urban technologies: the ability to provide power for other devices. By providing power for fans for heating and ventilation systems, as well as other products over time changed the interior landscape. “The greatest saving produced by the new electrical devices was not time but effort; they allowed household tasks to be performed in much greater comfort.” (Rybczynski, P. 154)

The increasing technologization of the home reduced the need for domestic help and drove the move to smaller homes which could be managed efficiently by the homekeeper and the help of new technologies. Smaller homes were easier to maintain and therefore more comfortable. Principles of scientific management were applied to housework in the same way as factory work was analyzed and made more efficient. Comfort and efficiency became almost interchangeable terms. Domestic interiors were being designed from the standpoint of efficient housekeeping rather than on visual principles alone. The habitability of the home became paramount. The home as place of leisure came increasingly to the fore. 

Arguably a book like Bachelard’s Poetics of Space could not have been written before technologically mediated comfort came to the home. Bachelard’s home is one of comfort and leisure to allow daydreaming and the unfettered flight of the imagination. His chapter entitled Shells, continues with themes concerning the workings of the imagination. “An empty shell, like an empty nest, invites daydreams of refuge.” (P. 107) He subdivides the home in this chapter, or at least has the home occupied by a single tenant. The shell is the personal refuge, the personal space: both physical and internal to the psyche. Bachelard’s home and his shell is an inhabited one: it is multi-sensorial, not merely visual. The shell (liek the nest) is a haptic refuge. “The shell confers a daydream of purely physical intimacy…[and] expresses the function of inhabiting in terms of touch.” (P. 131)

Bachelard’s is an embodied habitation echoed by Ingold in his paper Building, Dwelling, Living. It is a continually made and remade thing, always becoming, never in a static state of simply being. Ingold states that “…it is through being lived in, rather than through having been constructed along the lines of some formal design, that the world becomes a meaningful environment for people.” (P. 58) He refers to this as the ‘dwelling perspective’ where the subject is not separate from the environment but rather that they are mutually constitutive. He elaborates on the notion of the home as an organism: something that has a history and develops in various ways through time with its interaction with dwelling inhabitants. Like Bachelard, Ingold also understands imagination as being central to humankind’s existence. 

Human beings do not construct the world in a certain way by virtue of what they are, but by virtue of their own conceptions of the possibilities of being. And these possibilities are limited only by the power of the imagination. (P. 63)

It is only through actively using the imagination in engaging with the world that we can dwell in it. 

Foucault, in his paper Of Other Spaces, Heteroropias see our current era as almost making dwelling in the sense that Ingold uses the term as no longer possible: or at least not common or simply possible. He says that we are in the “…epoch of space.” (P. 1) He see this as an era of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, where we have the primacy of the visual, of abstraction, of universiality and stasis. There are echoes of Virilio here with suggestions of an accelerated culture where time is not a lived time, where the acceleration of events compresses to to an experience of simultaneity, where the world is reduced to a set of spatial relations. In Foucault’s words: “…we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites….”(P. 2)

Heterotopias, in Foucault’s conception are hybrids of ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ spaces: spaces that are simultaneously “…mythic and real.” (P. 4) ‘Crisis’ heterotopias are privileged, sacred, or forbidden places (boarding schools, military service, honeymoon) that are being displaced in our time by heterotopias of deviation (rest homes, psychiatric facilities, prisons) and others. Can a heterotopia of deviation be inhabited and experienced as a home? There are interesting ties with Aaron Wilson’s article regarding the notion of home at a half-way house in Vancouver. Interviews with some of the residents showed that the answer could run either way. Many felt that ‘Horizon House’ couldn’t be home while others felt that it gave them the security and freedom necessary to inhabit the institutional heterotopic space in a way that feels like home. Home seems to be most certainly more than merely the built geometrical form of architectural space.

Click, Stamp, Fold: Exhibition at CAG Vancouver

The subtitle of the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) Vancouver’s exhibit is ‘radical architectural magazines.’ The show is extensive: the 1.5 hours I spent there was no where near enough time to even get through everything, let alone have time to contemplate. 

The main gallery’s displays of original radical architecture magazines from the 60s and 70s was nicely laid out. The magazines were deployed in acrylic bubbles throughout the center of the floor space. Lining the walls were facsimiles of magazine covers with brief text descriptions of the contents. I got about a third of the way through these. There were also 6 ’sound domes’ distributed throughout the space, hanging from the ceiling. These were acrylic bell shaped chambers with a downward facing speaker in each. Recordings of interviews with the various architects/publishers were being played back on a continuous loop in each of the sound domes. This produced a cacophony of voices as one walked into the gallery. It produced the effect of walking into a train station. The acoustics of the space were quite reverberant, although there was none of the strong slapback echo effect typical in most galleries with parallel flat reflective walls. The wall mounted displays were half-tubes which produced diffuse reflections of the sound albeit quite strong. The intelligibility of the recorded interviews became stronger as one approached any particular sound dome and intensely clear when standing immediately below one. The sound domes articulated the space in a very architectural way: almost like columns of sound and even almost visual and tactile in some sense. I felt as if I could ’see’ and ‘touch’ these columns of sound as I walked around the space. The cacophony of the voices matched the visual cacophony of all the magazine covers on display. 

A number of the magazine descriptions caught my attention. 

op.cit. no. 1 Sept 1964. As this was the first issue they laid out their theoretical agenda: “…to reduce the visible to the realm of the spoken, based on the argument that perception cannot be abstracted from conception.”

op.cit. no. 38 identified “four different lines of contemporary architectural research: conceptual architecture, rhetorical architecture, anthropomorphic architecture and the architecture of catastrophe.” I was very curious to read the full text to see how these notions were developed, particularly the architecture of catastrophe.

Design Quarterly No. 63 purported to investigate “…the relationship beetween technology, art and design…and offered a theoretical context for conceptualizing an architecture of indeterminate form assembled from expendable components.”

Architecture Principe 1966 had articles by Paul Virilio and his ‘crew.’ Stated theme of the issue was to “…reconsider the importance of human orientation in relation to the inclined plane and oblique axis as a platform for creating a new urban order.”

Metabolist Architect featuring the work of Fumihiko Maki with a focus on “three prototypes of morphological forms: compositional, mega form and group form.”

As expected no strong themes really emerged from such a diverse range of publications and interests. It all had a ‘fresh’ feeling to it: as though the young architects of the time were newly engaged with the theoretical themes in the literary and visual fine arts worlds. A palpable sense of adventure and seeking for the ‘new’ whatever that may be ran through the texts. Often the focus seemed to be on generating ‘what if’ scenarios. What if one were to look at architecture as a biological form, or a literary form, or a 2-dimensional form, or a social form etc. I got the sense that the writers themselves had no answers before they launched into these investigations or proposal, but were thinking out loud in a public, somewhat collaborative forum (as much as magazine publication can be collaborative). 

This was echoed in the associated talk held at Inform Interiors in Gastown. The talk began by addressing issues of a ‘changing zeitgeist’ within society and reflected in the architectural community. A spirit of collaboration, but also of the pursuit of self-fulfillment or the betterment of one’s self as opposed to societal concerns. They saw the growing cult of the individual emerging in the 60s, where the individual was the master of their own destiny. There was questioning of modes of operations in relationship to the workspace of architectural production. It was suggested that the ’small’ magazines with quick publishing turnaround led to much collaboration among architects, and that it was a form of professional networking relying on current technologies (ie not having to rely on large offset web printing presses to make copies) enabling small and inexpensive production runs. This was seen as almost a precursor to the internet and its collaborative properties. This suggestion led into the consideration of blogs currently. I was expecting a valorization of blogs, but instead the discussion devolved into a criticism of blogs as ‘not being really collaborative.’ I found this highly strange as a blog certainly has more collaborative potential than small magazine runs in my opinion. 

The discussion definitely showed the ocularcentrism of the participants. Architecture seems to still be dominated by the visual medium which produces a very particular bias in the representation of architectural spaces. Of course magazines and blogs lend themselves to visual representations, but there is an increasing contingent of architects who specifically address the multi-sensorial nature of architectural experience over the merely geometric forms of visual representations (Peter Zumthor etc.) How to represent and explore this is, of course, a difficult question. We have developed technologies to record sound and image, but how to communicate the more haptic aspects of architecture? Comments are welcome.

On House and Home Part 3

We begin this time with Rybczynski’s claim that privacy and domesticity are the two great discoveries of the Bourgeois Age, to which he adds a third discovery: the idea of comfort. (P. 77) He  points out the the household had changed by the 18th century, in that it was no longer primarily a workplace, and that homes became smaller and less public in nature. This led to the rise of the  modern family unit which was more isolated, and centered on family life and domesticity, which all set the stage for the development of the idea of comfort. 

The changing conception and use of the chair from the middle ages onwards symbolizes in some ways the development of the home. In the middle ages the chair’s function was primarily ceremonial: the chair symbolized authority. Gradually the chair was used for more utilitarian purposes and eventually for relaxation which shadowed the development of interior design as a discipline distinct from architecture through the Rococo movement. 

The “…domestication of comfort…”(Rybczynski, P. 106) is tied to the rise of the bougeoisie in England in the 19th century. Country homes were common and because they were located away from the amenities of the city (theatres,concerts etc.) people would spend increasing amounts of time visiting one another’s homes. The home became a major locus for social activity. 

…the home acquired a position of social importance that it had never had before, or since. No longer a place of work as it had been in the Middle Ages, the home because a place of leisure.

The ongoing development of a sense of inner self and individuality led to increased need for privacy in the home of leisure. The internal segregation and individuation of the home continued with the development of private rooms for each individual member of the household. This indicated a newly forming distinction between the family and the individuals within it. (Rybczynski, P. 110). Along with the creation of private spaces within the home grew the ongoing increasing awareness of “…a growing personal inner life – and the need to express this individuality in physical ways.” (Rybczynski, P. 110-11) So the room “…began to be seen as a locus for human activity…(Rybczynski, P. 119) in a way the household was seen earlier. The idea of comfort became an ideal to be sought after, not just an agreeable arrangement of domestic interiors. 

The McKay, Culhane and Wilson texts are all situated within more contemporary events of the 20th century but share the thread that the home is not only more than a house or form of shelter, but that ideological, social, and political factors have shaped, and continue to shape, the physical form of the domestic built environment while in a mutually constituting way, the physical form of the house proscribed particular social relations that were desired and valued by the dominant cultural institutions. 

McKay investigates the post-war development of high-rise self-owned apartments in two very different neighbourhoods in Vancouver: the West End and Strathcona. The West End was a space of privilege with beaches and park spaces that were highly sought after and lent themselves to commodification, while Strathcona was adjacent to areas of industry. The economic and political development of these communities shaped the notions and forms of domesticity that developed in their neighbourhoods. Commerce, class, gender, ethnicity, and the moral values of the dominant culture all contributed to the development of domestic spaces in these communities. Both communities were born of processes of rationalization by the nature of the planned buildings and the types of residents. 

Strathcona developed largely light industrial building whose residents were ethnically diverse and often considered families in need. The housing projects in this neighbourhood meant to accomodate that demographic but with a moral and didactic subtext. The high-rises developed here were “…an exposition on function, efficiency, and economy, [which functioned as a] pedagogical apparatus, a place of neighbourly scrutiny and tutelage.” (McKay, P. 27)

The West End developed from similar forces and interests, but with the opposite result of Strathcona. The parks and beaches of the area were see as “…places of elite representation…[which] rendered rational the historically developed spatial differentiations of the city.” (McKay, P. 19) This was promoted as a good area for investment, privileging local businesses and property investors, with profitable luxury high-rise apartments near business, parks and beaches intended for a largely white middle-class populace of office workers and artisans. (McKay, P. 20-21) The goals here were to maximize profit and investment and to “…establish and maintain social status via privileged domestic and aesthetic accoutrements.”(McKay, P. 29) The views of spectacular English Bay were commodified and the form of the high-rises reflected that strategy. The increasing isolation in high-rise apartments of its residents from the community of their neighbours “…allowed sequestered solitude and undisturbed participation in the spectacle of urban investment.” (McKay, P. 33) The isolation of all the senses other than vision contributed to the ongoing ocularcentrism of western culture since the Enlightenment which contributed to the increasing alienation of urban citizens from their own city. The spaces of the city become abstract and conceived as being outside of the contingencies of culture, community, and history.

Those who fit into the appropriate cultural and ideological categories, and who fully embraced the dominant political morality were rewarded with growing investments and the stability and sense of self that accompanies it. Those who didn’t were punished by colonial and didactic uses of the built environment. Culhane cites a compelling situation where the local aboriginal people were more or less forced to move from their traditional homes where extended family and forms of kinship thrived, into smaller ‘western’ home designed for the nuclear family. Housing in this case takes on the colonial role and needs of cultural assimilation rather than the more mundane needs for shelter.  Housing becomes proscriptive of social relations.(Culhane, P. 99)

Wilson also highlights the coercive and didactic role of housing in his examination of the heterotopia of a half-way house in Vancouver. He uses Foucault’s notion of heterotopia as a space ‘in-between’ clear cultural forms where two opposing concepts occupy the same physical space. The half-way house (clearly in between!) is an peculiar hypbrid of medical institution and home. Wilson sees the modern home as a product of middle class ideology and is therefore “…associated with stability, support, protection growth, and the development of individual potential.”(Wilson, P. 127) So, while the residents of ‘Horizon House’ all live on-site and could certainly call it home, that relationship is complicated by the institutional nature of providing long-term care in such a setting. The staff and resident areas are clearly demarcated and establish an agenda of power and control. This isn’t even meant as a criticism so much as to point out the deep rooted difficulties inherent in such a project. The practical requirements of sequestering staff in privileged areas is a practical necessity, but contradicts and makes problematic in many way the overt mission of such an institution. 

Domestic space can clearly be seen as mutually constitutive of social relations, culture, ideology, politics, and economics. The changing nature of our built environment embodies values and instructs us in acquiring them. While home is a place of freedom, safety, imagination, and personal growth it may also be place of coercive deployment of strongly  naturalized and normative cultural agendas.

On House and Home Part 2

There are numerous points of contact between Rybczynski, De Mare and Birdwell-Pheasant, but some themes recur more often than others. The emergence of a modern sense of domesticity,  the increasing polarization of the public and private in domestic spaces, and the gradual feminization and rationalization of the home are addressed in this week’s readings. 

Rybczynski cites a a move towards smaller homes with fewer inhabitants as being instrumental in establishing a more private homelife, where home became centered around the family with children and child-rearing as central activities of the household. While the lower floor was still considered to be part of the public realm, connected to the street, going upstairs crossed a newly emerging public/private divide, where activities conducted upstairs were considered distinctly separate from the more public activities of the main floor. (Rybczynski, P. 66)

The smaller home meant that fewer servants were needed so the home became increasingly ‘feminized’ since women did more of their own chores than previously.  Women became central to the household as they took responsibility for and managed the “…arrangement and disposition of the home.” (Rybczynski, P. 73) This allowed for the development of manners, intimacy and domesticity, with the home embodying these attributes. Birdwell-Pheasant echoes this in her notion that the family and the household are mutually constitutive, with the house (the built environment) as a mediating element. (Birdwell-Pheasant, P. 3) She sees the house as “…a technical and cognitive instrument, a tool for thought, as well as a technology of shelter.” (P. 4) To Birdwell-Pheasant the house has a capacity to convey and generate meaning as a “…mechanism of communication” (P. 3) which regulates social interactions both within the household and between separate households in the community. 

The strengthening distinction between public and private realms in the home led the way towards an increasing rationalization of space with the development of rooms specialized for particular tasks. New appliances and areas reserved for particular tasks made the house more efficient and enhanced domestic productivity. Rooms became “…sovereign spaces…” (De Mare, P. 18) where control of the various rooms in the home was clearly delineated. The house, in De Mare’s estimation, became “…a complex metaphor for a new civil status and dignity….” (P. 19)

While Rybczynski posits that this notion of domesticity was emerging in the 17th century, particularly in Holland, De Mare counters with the argument that “…the all-embracing concept of domesticity proves to be a creation not of the 17th century but of the 19th century.” (De Mare, P. 14) De Mare concurs that the 17th century saw the development of a “…spatial separation between the indoor and outdoor world,…[but that] inside the house public codes prevailed…,” and that it wasn’t until the 19th century that the commonly related emotional differences between public and private took hold. (De Mare, P. 20) She suggests that we have projected our more recent emotional feelings regarding domesticity back onto the 17th Dutch domestic interior. We are, according to De Mare, in fact creating a ‘myth’ of 17th century Dutch domesticity. By examining several paintings by 17th century Dutch artists she makes the argument that the Dutch of that period were largely concerned with the physical house and the developing public/private distinction rather than more emotional ideas developed later in the 19th century. 

Birdwell-Pheasant continues on in time in her paper and brings up an interesting, fairly post-modern notion, that the house, and all artifacts, have agency.  She states that the “…house not only is a product of individual or social agency but embodies the ‘distributed personhood’ of their makers.” (P. 5) In other words, houses exercise an agency of their own! Because houses are typically built by men and “…made into homes by women…” (P. 17) the house and home both express and reproduce gender differences. Also, where the home used to be a place of work, a center for production, this gradually changed to becoming “…a locus of consumption; [with the] domestic environment…commodified.” (P. 20)

The emphasis of the home being something more than a house resonates with other recent thinkers. Bachelard’s notions of the home as the place of freedom for the imagination to develop, Bourdieu’s habitus, Heidegger’s dwelling and De Certeau’s distinction between place and space, are all in sync with and reverberate Birdwell-Pheasant’s notions of the development of home as something beyond the built environment.

Sounding Interiors: Daydream, Imagination, and the Auscultation of Domestic Space

Here’s the link to my final paper in LS819-Domestic Spaces.

sounding-interiors

Freud’s Haunted House

My presentation notes regarding Freud’s article The Uncanny.

Enjoy!

freuds-haunted-house