Home. Les sens d'une maison / Index

The spatial design of a home has an affinity to intimacy that might have been overlooked by many practicing architects. In this paper, the subject matter of housing will be discussed with a shifted focus from domestic buildings to the space of home and intimacy that scatters in a city. In recent years, some sociologists (Illouz, 2013 & 1997; Turkle, 2013; Jamieson, 2012) have underlined a social translation of a new spatial home by analysing an intimacy in a city that has been enabled by ICT technologies; business models i.e. Airbnb and Couchsurfing also indicated a new form of dwelling by demonstrating how share-economy can assist this spatial home and, in particular, assist the distribution of it so as to assist a city dweller to find and make home without possessing a house. And yet, neither of these examples of home are designed by architects who might actually know the best about the subject matter - this space of home and intimacy. What if the critical spatial design that an architect can produce isn’t the domestic buildings but the visualisation of this space? What is this critical spatial design of the home to cope with the shifting social needs already seen? Through Jeremy Till’s way of looking at buildings and beyond - the lens of Spatial Agency (2011) - the paper will further speculate these examples of home by architectural-writing this spatial design - this architectural-writing, as Jane Rendell describes in chapter of Essay Collections of Critical Architecture (2007), similarly to art-writing, “the very form of the writing itself is taken to be integral to the way in which a critic positions him/herself… The personal and autobiographical enter the debate, not in order to assert an ego criticism, but as part of an on-going political exploration of subjectivity.”

2017

Cultural Geographies, 2004

PROCEEDINGS OF THE 10TH WORKSHOP ON METALLIZATION AND INTERCONNECTION FOR CRYSTALLINE SILICON SOLAR CELLS

Residential architecture is the first and most difficult way of making architecture. Apart from being one of the most urgent needs in people's lives, it also represents one of the most legitimate aspirations of human beings, whatever their social condition. Housing is the greatest exponent of architecture; it means working with human beings and their needs. The nature of our dwelling, regardless of the type of culture and time period, conveys an undistorted vision of the human condition. In that sense, housing has always shaped the quality of human life. A good dwelling is one in which we can live well. Its essential quality is that of being livable. Since domestic dwelling cohabits mainly with private life, the value of housing lies primarily in its capacity to convey the feeling of shelter / protection and of a discrete relationship between the 'interior' spaces themselves; its architectural value lies in the capacity that the spaces themselves have to express, through their form, this relationship. The house problematic is wide and complex, it requires technical, artistic and functional knowledge, and a clear vision of the new values and social needs of our time-new means to improve people's lives. The present document aims to clarify the following concepts and the gradual relationship between them-the house, the collective dwelling and the city. To this end, a first approach will be made to the relationship between the concept of house, home and the inhabitant, and subsequently, a progressive passage to collective living and its interaction with the city.

Gender Place and Culture, 2012

This article explores the politics of diasporic dwelling in domestic spaces. Heidegger's concept of ‘dwelling’ is popular in studies of diasporic life as it articulates a sense of belonging in mobility without the problematic connotations of rootedness conjured up by ‘home’. However, the way Heidegger's ‘dwelling’ functions in diasporic contexts is rarely considered, an absence this article seeks to address by exploring the concept in more detail, focusing in particular on ‘the fourfold’ and preservation. This discussion is grounded in the domestic spaces of two Palestinian women living in Britain. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the article explores how these women's houses, and particular spaces within them, enable and constrain their dwelling. I argue for greater attention to be paid to the expansive and integrative capacities of domestic space and demonstrate the need to address houses in their social context and as internally heterogeneous. This article also contributes to ongoing debates about material and symbolic dwelling and diasporic identities that include but also exceed territorialised belonging.Este artículo analiza la política de la vivienda diaspórica en los espacios domésticos. El concepto de “vivienda” de Heidegger es popular en los estudios de la vida diaspórica ya que articula un sentido de pertenencia en movilidad sin las connotaciones problemáticas de arraigo conjurado por el “hogar”. Sin embargo, la forma en la que funciona la “vivienda” de Heidegger en los contextos diaspóricos es pocas veces considerada, una ausencia que este artículo intenta abordar explorando el concepto en más detalle, centrándose en particular sobre “el cuádruple” y la preservación. Esta discusión está fundamentada en los espacios domésticos de dos mujeres palestinas viviendo en Gran Bretaña. Apoyándose en entrevistas en profundidad, el artículo analiza cómo las casas de estas mujeres, y espacios particulares dentro de éstas, permiten y limitan a su vivienda. Invito a prestar mayor atención a las capacidades expansivas e integradoras del espacio doméstico y demuestro la necesidad de abordar a las casas en sus contextos sociales y como internamente heterogéneas. Este artículo también contribuye a los debates actuales sobre la vivienda material y simbólica y las identidades diaspóricas que incluyen pero también exceden la pertenencia territorializada.

Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, 2013

Inhabited space transcends geometric space.

Sustainable Living: Professional Approaches to House Work (E-Book), 2011

m o h a m e d g a m a l a b d e l m o n e m The article investigates the practice of home as an everyday system for sustainable living in Old Cairo. The idea of home in this historic urban space has long involved fluid socio-spatial associations and made efficient use of space-activity-time dynamics. As in the past, a individual's sense of home may here extend beyond or shrink within the physical boundaries of a particular house, as spatial settings are produced and consumed according to time of day, gender association, or special events. The article argues that architects working in this context must understand the dynamics of this complex traditional system if they are to develop locally informed, genuine designs that build on everyday spatial practices. Work by the architect Salah Zaki Said and by the Historic Cities Program of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture is described to illustrate the potential of such engagement, especially as it contrasts to more abstract architectural proposals.

Art/Research International , 2020

What does it mean to be home? We began asking this provocative question well before COVID-19, well before the collective crisis the world experienced which sent both of us back into our current homes. Exploring such a question through poetry writing may provide insights about individuals’ lived experiences, and, therefore, we contend it is worthwhile for scholars, artists and educators to widen possibilities for poetic method and craft related to writing about home. In this paper, we, two poets, arts-based education scholars, and Pittsburgh natives, offer pathways into exploring notions of home through the writing of poetry grounded in the ideas of Gaston Bachelard’s (1958/1964) seminal text, The Poetics of Space. To do so, we each offer and discuss two original poems on the topic of home to illustrate a number of compelling avenues scholars and research participants; educators and students might explore as they write poems evoking their own unique conceptions of home.

This paper is based on in-depth interviews with three informants who are living on two locations – in a fl at and in a summer cottage, or in a fl at and in an old family house respectively. It discusses the qualitative concept of the living space (home). It deals with questions about the relationship between one’s identity and living space (home), as well as of the change in roles, quality and the way of life related to the specifi c location (the old or the new homes), through permanent interfusion and comparability between the old and the new homes. „The sense of place“ (home) is seen as a social construction, as a place of living, feeling, sharing, performing one’s rituals, reviving the tradition, as well as a place of one’s personal remembrances.