Home is a feeling/Home is a process
Neave Brown, 22-32 Winscombe Street, London
House becomes alive with people and in Pallasmaa’s words ‘our domicile is the refuge of our body, memory and identity’. Therefore, public houses should be designed to gather wider range of occupants and current domestic spaces should provide some degree of flexibility in order to reflect identity and address the change of time.
Consideration on domesticity and sense of home
Home is a feeling and simultaneously is an image, an idea which embodies certain principles of living. Very often the image of domestic space designed by architects is the illusion of stillness and tidiness, a place to look at rather than live in.
As G. Perec says in his ‘Species of Spaces’, living a place means take possession of it. But when does a place really belong to us? Creating home is a process which usually starts with populating it with our belongings and it concludes with building memories.
‘Home should allow us to express our unique selves […] In turn, our identities should be reinforced by where we live. Good homes can help us to express our true selves. Bad homes are so austere or overdesigned that leave little room for homemaking, for adding biographical texture’ says Dr Paul Keedwell in his book ‘Headspace. The Psychology of City Living’.
The images of internal spaces from Lacaton and Vassal project The Cité Manifest, Mulhouse are provocative in this sense. What interested them the most is the evidence of daily life rather than the perfectibility. Their interiors show the way people live and occupy the space which has been deliberately left empty. The idea of the French architects is the house as a shell, an envelope where domestic uses unfold one after another in a continuous open space.
Home is a process, it follows the passage of time, it grows with its inhabitants until it cannot grow further to contain any other changes. Despite that, the current housing model, generally based on functionalism, with a different function assigned to each room, sleeping, cooking, washing and relaxing, is not flexible enough to allow this changes to take place.
Lifestyles have been generally standardised into a few family models, single, couple and couples with children and they have been translated into a few standard layouts: studio, 1 bed, 2 bed, 3/4 bed apartment.
G. Perec describes very well this model of today apartments, where every daily activity is related to a specific moment of the day and where every hour is related to a specific room. This model implies that daily activities of sleeping and cooking are spent in the house and others such us work and free time are spent outside the domestic world.
In his book ‘Liquid modernity’, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman introduced the notion of liquid modernity to describe the condition of constant mobility and changes in relationship, economy and social life of contemporary society.
Today many people work from home or live temporarily in a city and work in another, others temporary share accommodations or push the boundaries of the traditional family system living within communities. Therefore a ‘liquid’ form of social life better reflects the contemporary lifestyle.
Despite that, domestic space is still based on a more traditional and static way of living. Apartments rarely include extra spaces for any other activities such as working from home, collecting books and art, producing music or developing specific hobbies the inhabitants might have. Internal space is compressed to the minimum standard required and doesn’t leave much room to flexibility, creativity, personalisation and identity. Dwelling buildings don’t provide guest rooms and co-housing is not yet considered a tenure.
Many questions arise from these considerations:
Is contemporary architecture considering new form of living?
Is the composition of a family the only driver to define a lifestyle and consequently a typical layout?
Are the new ‘fluid’ needs being addressed in the domestic space?
Standardisation has always been a key factor in developing housing schemes mainly to speed up and facilitate construction process, but the resulting risk is that apartments within a building appear identical, an infinite repetition without identity.
Recent housing projects across London have been focused on addressing the lack of identity and variety of the urban fabric designing ‘family of buildings’ but there is not enough research about ‘family of homes’.
As J. Pallasmaa says in his ‘The eyes of the skin. Architecture and the senses’, ‘Homogenisation of space weakens the experience of being and wipes away the sense of place’.
House becomes alive with people and in Pallasmaa’s words ‘our domicile is the refuge of our body, memory and identity’. Therefore, public houses should be designed to gather wider range of occupants and current domestic spaces should provide some degree of flexibility in order to reflect identity and address the change of time.
Domestic space and flexibility
Research in flexibility find its roots in Japanese architecture. Indeed, many Japanese architects looked at different way of living and conceive the domestic space.
Shigeru Ban, amongst them, breaks barriers in housing design with its Nine square grid, Wall-less house and Naked house. While the first two projects share the same principle of ‘making rooms’ in an open space through sliding partitions, the latter is a house naked of partitions. Roof and floor define the domestic envelope in which flexible rooms on wheels are capable of reconfiguring the space all the time. In all these examples fixed elements of the house, bathroom, kitchen and wardrobes are packed on the edges to free the central communal space or occupy strategic positions within the open plan.
Also amongst modern British architectures there are examples of dwellings exploring some degree of flexibility.
The layout of 22-32 Winscombe Street terrace houses by Neave Brown provides an independent children room divisible into two separate rooms by a sliding wall enhancing the family to grow within the same house.
Likewise, Type 20 layout of Barbican Estate by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon provides a generous one bed flat with an additional space in continuity with the living room which could be separate by a sliding doors, creating a room with flexible uses.
This layout anticipated in a way the primary need for space dedicated to nourishing the mind of inhabitants rather than mere functionality. The house is not just a ‘machine to live in’ but it’s a place where inhabitants can express and develop their own identities.
SoHo - small office home office - Shininome Canal Court Block 1, Japan in Total Housing, Alternatives to Urban Sprawl, 2010, Actar
Interesting in this sense is Shininome Canal Court Block 1, Yamamoto’s project in Japan, the only example which introduces the so-called SoHo - small office home office. SoHo depicts an additional room to the flat which interface with the circulation space through a transparent envelope. SoHo is an in-between space capable of mixing the domestic space with communal space by visually opening part of the flat to create a communication with neighbours and animate the corridor.
SoHo not only creates an additional room which the tenant could benefit of but redefine the residential use and the relationship between public and private.
If working from home or any other evolving needs could be incorporated into the design of our homes, unexpected solutions could be found. Perhaps, current regulations and briefs could be challenged, deconstructing the mere functionalism to prioritise comfort, sensory pleasure and domesticity as experience of inhabiting, shaping new way of living capable to express and reinforce different personalities and a personal sense of home.
G. Perec, Species of Spaces, 1974, Penguin Classic
Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 1999, Polity Press
J. Pallasmaa, The eyes of the skin. Architecture and the senses, 1996, John Wiley & Sons
Dr Paul Keedwell, Headspace. The Psychology of City Living, 2017, Aurum Press, London
M. Swenarton, Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing, 2017, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd
S. Orazi, C. Rudquist, The Barbican Estate, 2018, Batsford Ltd
Total Housing, Alternatives to Urban Sprawl, 2010, Actar