House and Home

Cultural Contexts, Ontological Roles

Thomas Barrie

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317366492
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Arquitectura
• Categoria: Arquitectura general

House and home are words routinely used to describe where and how one lives. This book challenges predominant definitions and argues that domesticity fundamentally satisfies the human need to create and inhabit a defined place in the world. Consequently, house and home have performed numerous cultural and ontological roles, and have been assiduously represented in scripture, literature, art, and philosophy. This book presents how the search for home in an unpredictable world led people to create myths about the origins of architecture, houses for their gods, and house tombs for eternal life. Turning to more recent topics, it discusses how writers often used simple huts as a means to address the essentials of existence; modernist architects envisioned the capacity of house and home to improve society; and the suburban house was positioned as a superior setting for culture and family. Throughout the book, house and home are critically examined to illustrate the perennial role and capacity of architecture to articulate the human condition, position it more meaningfully in the world, and assist in our collective homecoming.

1
HOMELESSNESS AND HOMECOMING

Cultural contexts, ontological roles, and the task of architecture

The American poet Wallace Stevens writes:

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began:
Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs; that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.¹

Humans have consistently sought to understand the world – its beauty, mysteries, fecundity, and threats – and been troubled by its capricious and indifferent nature. When Stevens describes a world that is “complete” and exists independent of humans, he evokes an ontological condition of estrangement – even homelessness. But when he suggests that the “poem springs” from the recognition that the world is “not our own and, much more, not ourselves,” he assigns a unique role to poetry to address the human condition. Could not the built environment, like poetry, be similarly positioned as an essential means used by humans to articulate their understanding of the world and their place in it? And, if so, isn’t the house, as a preeminent cultural artifact in the history of human habitation, a potent medium to do so? The home, as observed previously, is a complex word typically charged with multifarious and often deeply personal meanings. However, as I will suggest, in its most potent renditions – or aspirations – home, and the house, essentially served as the locus for people’s corporal lives, while providing the settings to transcend them. That is, house and home may be mere shelter but can also embody a sense of being in the world and express understandings of the world and, in doing so, facilitate a homecoming to the world. And, if homecoming is something attained, then its obverse, homelessness, is what is experienced when one is without home.

FIGURE 1.1 Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise, Paul Gustave Doré

Homelessness

The condition of homelessness, and the desire for homecoming – for founding and inhabiting a home in its broadest definitions – has enjoyed significant attention, especially in the West. Even though homelessness is often described as a modern condition of alienation, it appears in other Western philosophic, religious, and literary traditions. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in Book VII of The Republic presents the isolation of humans trapped in the sensible world and human existence as one of exile and imprisonment in incarnate life.² The “strange prisoners” Socrates shows Glaucon are held not only by chains but ignorance. Centuries later, Christian Gnostics would mourn humanity’s bodily imprisonment and estrangement from the original condition of true being. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, humans are often characterized as lost, wandering and homesick for an elusive god. This dislocation is evocatively described in Genesis as the lost Eden; man eats from the tree of knowledge and subsequently is alienated from the paradise garden where such separation does not exist.³ In Psalms, David depicts himself as a “sojourner on earth,” and cries, “How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Ps 119:9 and 13:1), a plaintive expression of exile from the divine.

At the beginnings of the modern era, questions regarding the relationship between humans and the world were embedded in confrontations with scientific discoveries and attendant social and cultural displacements. The mathematician, physicist, and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in Thoughts that in contemplating the universe, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread,”⁴ articulating the mystery and even terror of alienation in the cosmos. The seventeenth-century German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer Johannes Kepler was profoundly affected by his discoveries that dramatically changed understandings of the universe and earth’s position within it. As the science of the universe has expanded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the result has been a type of existential loneliness and a longing for other intelligent creatures, or homes in other planetary systems. Scientists have listened for extraterrestrial radio signals, and sent their own, and searched for earth-like exoplanets. So far, they have found only silence and emptiness.⁵

Stevens observes in the same poem, “The death of one god is the death of all,”⁶ echoing Holderlin’s lament⁷ that the gods have “fled” the modern world. When more open and dynamic societies replace closed, static, traditional ones, and religion becomes a choice not an intrinsic condition, what remains is relative individuality and cultural autonomy. The hegemony of non-dogmatic thought and recognition of an autonomous human rationality, which some say began with Socrates, also resulted in the loss of certitude of belief of humanity’s place in the universe typically provided by religion. Martin Heidegger identified the capacity of humans to view the world from a separate, individual perspective as a source of anxiety. When one is no longer enclosed within the limits of their world, in the homely (heimlich), then broader perspectives appear. In seeking to understand the world, one must paradoxically stand apart from it, and this separation from the familiar is felt as anxiety. For Heidegger, homelessness was an enduring philosophic theme. “Uncanny homelessness” (unheimlich) was the condition of estrangement from the familiar, provoking a mood of homesickness. Sigmund Freud described it as fear and dread resulting from estrangement where the familiar has become strange. For Freud, it was the shadow of repressed emotions or a secret revealed, and could initiate psychological integration.⁸ Heidegger, consistent with the ontological phenomenology he advanced, was interested in how it might affect homecoming.⁹

The West has typically positioned itself as exceptional, where the modern condition of alienation is situated in its preoccupations with mechanization, rationality, and a certain type of cosmopolitanism. But, even though its specific postulations of ontological homelessness may be remarkable, they are certainly not unique. Instead, in a variety of ways, estrangement from the world is found pan-culturally and trans-historically. In the East, however, homelessness can offer certain rewards. Hindu asceticism values the stage of life where the householder renounces the ways of the world in favor of the homelessness of the sadhu. Mendicant monks who eschewed any stable dwelling distinguished the practices of early Buddhism. The Buddha in The Dhammapada states:

Let the wise man leave his home life and go into the life of freedom. In solitude that few enjoy, let him find his joy supreme: free from possessions, free from desires, and free from whatever might darken his mind.¹⁰

In some cases, the condition of homelessness can be redemptive. World mythology contains a panoply of stories regarding hero-redeemer figures and the necessity of leaving home to gain insights and benefits for others. The Buddha must renounce the comforts and sensual pleasures of his palaces to achieve enlightenment; Muhammad’s solitary vigils in the cave on Mount Hira are required to receive the revelations of god; the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho must wander homeless to access the insights he records; and American Plains Indians embarked on solitary vision quests to pass from one stage of life to another. The hero’s journey is one of separation from the familiar and a journey to the unknown, followed by a return “home” with insight or knowledge gained along the way.¹¹

The Buddha and his disciples were deeply concerned with how to live in the world, and their simple huts were emblematic of the renunciant and essential lives they cultivated.¹² The Buddha even described enlightenment as dissolution of the final house:

Vainly I sought the builder of my house
Through countless lives.
I could not find him.
How hard it is to tread life after life!
But now I see you, O builder!
And never again shall you build my house.
I have snapped the rafters:
Split the ridgepole
And beaten out desire.
And now my mind is free.¹³

This is very different from Greek and Christian place and time situated narratives. Instead, the Buddha and his disciples believed enlightenment was made possible by abandoning home and all it represented. The religious scholar Jonathan Z. Smith named these complementary visions of the world “locative” and “utopian,”¹⁴ and the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan observed that religion either embeds a people in a specific place, or frees them from it.¹⁵

And so, paradoxically, in these brief examples the abandonment of home is a very different kind of homecoming. But these symbolic journeys are only one part of the homecoming enterprise. For Heidegger, poetry was a means to confront and reconcile an imperious and impenetrable world.¹⁶ Wallace Stevens positions poetry as “the supreme fiction,” the ultimate construct to render the inexplicable familiar, an art that through artifice materializes the immaterial. Stevens explains:

What makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.¹⁷

In other words, poetry reveals what otherwise would remain hidden. However, the arts have also been essential agencies to assist this ontological task and, of all the arts, architecture has been particularly charged with creating legible, dependable, and meaningful places – a home in the world.

Vitruvius, in his observations on the origin of the dwelling house, states that it was the unique human capacity to stand “upright and gazing upon the splendour of the starry firmament,” to realize and consider their place in the universe, that was, in part, the impetus for the birth of architecture.¹⁸ In other words, the recognition of a certain kind of estrangement from the world was catalytic of creating one of their own making. Consequently, humans have demanded that architecture not only shelter them from the storms of the environment but the storms of existence as well.¹⁹ Karsten Harries argues that poetry and myths, as well as other art forms such as architecture, serve to “so re-present the world that it no longer seems indifferent to our needs, arbitrary and contingent, but is expressed as a place we call home.”²⁰ According to Harries, architecture has a special and perhaps preeminent role, which “answers to the human need to experience the social and natural world as a non-arbitrary meaningful order.”²¹

All of this suggests that one of the functions architecture has been asked to serve is to ameliorate humanity’s homeless condition. In the poem “Anecdote of the Jar,” Stevens describes how even a simple object, once placed in the “slovenly wilderness,” brings a particular kind of order, rendering it “no longer wild.”²² Norman Crowe argues that the human quest for order and stability in an often capricious and unpredictable world produced the need for a “new nature” of the “domicile and the settlement.” Cicero characterized human habitation as a second world:

We enjoy the fruits of the plains and of the mountains, the rivers and the lakes are ours, we sow corn, we plant trees, we fertilize the soil by irrigation, we confine the rivers and straighten or divert their courses. In fine, by means of our hands we essay to create as it were a second world within the world of nature.²³

As Crowe states, “With Eden left behind,” humans ne...