introduction

Home Is the Answer,

but What Is the Question?
Joseph Grima

This is a book about what was formerly known as It is about the often-overlooked realm of the
the home. “Architecture,” Le Corbusier once wrote, interior as a space of negotiation and compromise
“is one of the most urgent needs of man, for the between one’s condition and one’s aspirations;
house has always been the indispensable and first about the house as the elementary particle of
tool he has forged for himself.”1 Even in a time of society, and a stage upon which, for millennia, the
diminished confidence in architecture’s ability to theater of everyday life has unfolded, mediated by
face up to society’s challenges, we still sit at tables, the objects and furnishings we choose to surround
sleep in beds, rest on sofas, cook in kitchens, wash ourselves with. Through the book’s three chapters,
in bathrooms, just as we have done for centuries. Radical Domesticities, From Dream to Bust, and
Aren’t we still as dependent on the same essential The Dematerialized Home, we examine how the
functions of architecture that every epoch has place we live in could come to be so recognizable
grappled with? Has anything really changed? yet unfamiliar.
Why formerly?
A chair is still a chair
This book is less about the house as a physical Even when there’s no one sitting there
envelope, the mechanistic challenge of providing But a chair is not a house
shelter, than it is about the extended notion of And a house is not a home
the home—that complex universe of overlapping When there’s no one there
cultural references, daily rituals, practical needs,
unspoken desires and aspirations in perpetual As Dionne Warwick suggests in her 1964 hit
evolution that converge in architectural space. “A House Is Not a Home,” the domestic sphere

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is so much more than the sum of the functions technology (mile-high skyscrapers, flying cars,
it performs; it is a unique moment where and the like), but that the essential relationship
architecture acts as a bridge between intimacy between architecture and daily life would remain
and sociality. A year later, Reyner Banham, never the same—namely that the latter would largely
one to miss the opportunity for a pop-culture take place within the former, according to the
reference, borrows the song’s title, inverting it as same familiar protocols. In part, of course, this
the point of departure for his satirical critique of the is down to the dramatization of storytelling—
unfolding technological takeover of the American dystopia should at least look good—but it also
home, “The Home Is Not a House.” Banham’s highlights how difficult it is to speculate on the
provocation is to strip the dwelling of its more nuanced and less easily represented ways
recognizable form, replacing it with a mechanically in which everyday life changes, while leaving the
serviced “environment bubble” that ticks all the architectural envelope untouched. It is in the
boxes (through technological means, naturally) of space between the definitions of “house” and
each one of the home’s functional prerequisites. “home”—architectural typology versus elementary
As such, despite its radical appearance, Reyner particle of the social sphere—that the changes
Banham’s and François Dallegret’s domesticity that are most meaningful, yet most difficult to
package remains the means to an end that has parse, take place.
not changed substantially for millennia, and
which coincides with pretty much every proposal [—]
of domestic architecture from Levittown to the
Maison à Bordeaux: to provide protection from the “Remember when a house was somewhere you
world outside. lived, wine was drunk because it tasted good,
and art was something to be considered not
When Fritz Lang traveled to New York in October appraised? Probably not,” quips this morning’s
1924, the strength of the architectural experience Quartz.com homepage. “They are all ‘asset
was enough to inspire a film that would lay the classes,’ things to invest in for the reasons that you
foundations for one of the enduring myths of can and, perhaps one day, somebody else will pay
modernity: that the urban landscape is destined you more for it.”2
to undergo dramatic change at the hands of Of the “asset classes” mentioned above, houses

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enjoy a condition apart from the rest: whereas to go shopping. In both cases, their value as tools
most people can comfortably get by without is derived from their condition of scarcity.
owning classic cars, works of art, or cellars full of So great is the demand for ultra-high-end luxury
vintage wines, everyone needs a home. As anyone properties in global hubs such as London, New
who has attempted to buy (or even rent) a place to York, and Hong Kong that it is not unusual for
live is painfully aware of, the privilege of inhabiting buyers to race to purchase them before they even
an investment doesn’t come cheap. Ironically, there exist. In 2013, the penthouse of 432 Park Avenue
is an uncanny resonance between the article’s in New York, the tallest residential building in
opening lines and a famous passage of Vers une the Western hemisphere, was snapped up for
architecture (published almost a century earlier): $95 million—even though only ten floors had
been completed at the time. In the same city, so
A house will no longer be this solidly-built profitable is the luxury investment market that
thing which sets out to defy time and decay, developers can only be lured into putting up
and which is an expensive luxury by which “affordable” housing with the promise of support
wealth can be shown; it will be a tool as the from the municipality, highlighting the widening
motor car is becoming a tool.3 gap between the very wealthy and the middle class
in a city where the median family income has fallen
The accuracy of Le Corbusier’s prophecy is such 8 percent since 2008. Rafael Viñoly, the building’s
that it seems to almost make a mockery of the architect, put it this way: “There are only two
author’s earnest ideologies. In the white-hot real markets, ultraluxury and subsidized housing.”5
estate markets of late capitalist economy, houses As is frequently the case with the former, the
(and indeed cars) are tools of an entirely new and majority of 432 Park Avenue’s units will only be
singular variety. A house-tool will no longer be occupied occasionally (making the term “luxury
a solidly-built thing, since its primary function— residence” something of a misnomer). “Homes”
accumulating value on the market, currently to the of this kind, especially desirable ones in global
tune of £4,500 per week on average in London 4— cities, represent an easily concealed parking lot
bears little or even no relation to its ability to for capital—a Swiss bank account hiding in plain
perform as a dwelling, any more than a collectible sight, so to speak—which carries the added benefit
car’s value is related to its usefulness as a means of lightning returns: 2013 saw a 30-percent price

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increase on the average Manhattan property, It is therefore unsurprising that an abyss separates
which analysts attribute primarily to sales in the the city’s sprawling peaks of domestic grandeur
high-end market. 6 Paradoxically, the unquenchable from its cramped valleys of indigence; nor is it
thirst for football-pitch-sized billionaire pads is astonishing that this abyss, in line with a broader
thus giving rise to a dramatic growth in all other polarization of wealth in the city, is growing. What
market segments. is visible in Manhattan is less of an exception than
The ongoing race to one-up previous records the exacerbation of a trend equally present in less
at the high end (latest offering: a nine-story competitive markets. From the 1970s on, not only
penthouse in the Woolworth Building for $110 did both the average and median size of dwellings
million) is distorting the market so significantly increase, the gap between the two increased as
that those who could previously afford a one- well. While in 1980 the difference between average
bedroom apartment are being forced to downsize. square meters and median square meters in the
As a consequence, residential typologies such as US was 13.5 m2, by 2010 it had surged to 20.7 m2,
the kitchenless apartment, outlawed in New York under pressure from the powerful distorting
City in 1929, are now making a return. In early effects of a few very large properties.7
2012, Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched the There are many statistics that can offer insight into
adAPT NYC competition with the aim of soliciting the accelerating divergence between income and
proposals for microhousing from alliances the cost of housing over the past forty years. The
of developers and architects. A pilot project origins of this polarization at all scales (supersizing
comprising fifty-five units ranging in size from at the top end of the market versus contraction at
250 to 370 square feet (23 to 34 m2) was erected the bottom end, shrinking in dense city centers
on 27th Street in Manhattan. Yet, replicating the versus expansion in the suburbs, and so on) can
prototype would require the city’s zoning laws, be traced back to the early 1970s, and the onset of
which currently specify a 400-square-foot (37 m2) what Tyler Cowen called the Great Stagnation.
minimum for dwelling units, to be rewritten. Had the salary of an ordinary North American
“Manhattanism,” Rem Koolhaas points out in worker continued to grow at the rate it did
Delirious New York, “is the one urbanistic ideology between 1945 and 1970, he or she would now
that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors be making over $200,000 a year—which one can
and the miseries of the urban condition.” safely assume would be sufficient to provide a

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comfortable dwelling. No such thing happened; latter ballooning—the US mortgage industry took
from the 1970s on, wages flattened out, and if off through the role of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac,
one discounts the richest 10 percent, then annual enterprises that buy mortgages on the secondary
incomes have only risen by about 10 percent, market to pool and sell them as a mortgage-
while the average price of homes has more than backed security to investors on global markets.
doubled. Or take the increasingly precarious nature On the one hand, widespread access to credit
of jobs in late-capitalist economies, which offer (or rather, to debt) provides the missing bridge
few long-term guarantees of one’s ability to pay a between stagnant incomes and vertiginous house
mortgage. There seems to be no end to the gloom prices; on the other, it signals the completion of
in the future outlook for the young or dispossessed: a conceptual shift so fundamental that it went
not only are those aspiring to live alone asked to almost unnoticed: the financialization of the home.
settle for less space, they must settle later. More If, in the 1920s, Le Corbusier could convincingly
years of higher education, the burden of student describe a house as “a shelter against heat, cold,
debt, historically low starting salaries, stringent rain, thieves, and the inquisitive” 10—all demands
credit rules, and a jittery housing market have that could be satisfied through architecture—to
aligned to create an environment of unprecedented do so in the present context of speculation-driven
hostility to those wishing to buy a home.8 As for markets would be to ignore its core function
renters, they hardly fare better; surging demand within the economy as an instrument of profit-
fueled by those unable to purchase has left making. The home is no longer a tangible product
an entire generation with the choice between that has inherent material value; its value is as an
protracted sharing, and an ongoing struggle to immaterial entity on the global financial market
contain housing costs below the “recommended” capable of generating capital—split up, pooled,
30 percent of income.9 and sold on at the speed of light with millions of
others. Through this somewhat perverse inversion
“God didn’t die,” Giorgio Agamben once stated, between the financial and the real, homeowners
“he was transformed into money,” and perhaps one themselves come to be viewed as financially
could say the same of the modern home. Around exploitable. The home becomes the place of a
the time growth trends in income and property virtual encounter between everyday life and global
value parted company—the former stationary, the economic infrastructure.

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The extent to which the two have become inch spiked heels and asbestos-lined gloves is
entangled was laid bare in 2008 when the markets sent out; as she unscrews him from the socket,
crashed, as if to vindicate Engels’s insistence that an impulse spreads across the electric grid,
there is no such thing as a housing crisis, only a and every bulb everywhere, at the speed of
crisis of capitalism. 11 It’s as if, at the dawn of the light, is aware of what has happened. Sentient
twenty-first century, no clear line separates the appliances are no longer a matter of fiction; they
physical space of the personal from the immaterial are populating our homes, transforming them into
space of the financial: we are asked to witness social spaces not just for people but for objects,
the convulsions of the housing market (rocketing intent on communicating with us and among
up today, crashing tomorrow) with the same themselves. If one could once speak of a spatial
helplessness we feel in reaction to the spasms equivalence between intimacy and the walls of the
of the stock market. In 2013, Thomas Piketty home (the shield against “the inquisitive”), these
shocked Western countries by exposing them to a barriers are now dissolving, torn down by “smart”
pitiless snapshot of the structural inequality their technologies and connected devices.
economies engender. Unsurprisingly, a share of Once a sanctuary from prying eyes, the home
his research revolves around the question of real is now a geotagged broadcasting studio from
estate; through the parsing of epic amounts of where we share our most intimate moments and
data, he demonstrated that housing has been the display our carefully curated online identities.
primary source of the growth of capital since 1970. Smartphones and laptops transform every space
We literally inhabit one of the primary assets of our into a workplace—according to an IKEA survey,
economies. 12 percent of employed Londoners have worked
from their bathrooms.12 In the age of networked
[—] everything, technology is the silent observer of
our daily lives, and the home the locus of a final
In an aside halfway through his 1973 novel transaction exchanging privacy for convenience.
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon tells the If data is the new oil, the home is the next Texas.
story of Byron, a sentient lightbulb who, having The contemporary home is indeed a machine, not
reached his 800th hour of service, requires to in the Jacques Tati-esque sense of an assembly
be maintained. A technician wearing seven- of moving parts, but as a factory of data where

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every activity of its inhabitants is quantified and with inhabitation that transcends the stability
broadcast, to the tune of one gigabyte per week of the home and replaces it with the notion of
(such is the estimated output of a connected “drifting nomadism” practiced by its founder,
home in 2014). the former industrial designer Brian Chesky, who
The rise of network technology, paired with claims not to have owned a home since 2010.
conditions of widespread economic hardship, “At our core,” he stated, “Airbnb is not about
has made possible a scenario not unlike the homes. We want to make sure every trip you have
one described in the mid-nineteenth century by is an amazing experience.” 14
bourgeois social reformer Emil Sax, cited (and In many ways, Airbnb’s global domination could
refuted) by Engels in The Housing Question. Sax be described as a late-capitalist, neoliberal
suggested that extending homeownership would fulfillment of Constant Nieuwenhuys’s dream for
transform workers into capitalists, by enabling New Babylon—a city whose denizens “wander
them, in difficult times, to generate income from through the sectors … seeking new experiences, as
real estate. The meteoric ascent of the short-term yet unknown ambiances … without the passivity of
rental platform Airbnb has arguably just as much tourists.” At the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale,
to do with the arrival of “hard times” as with the a group of architects devoted an autonomous
ease with which it connects demand and supply, pavilion to Airbnb to question the effects on the
or with the increase in travel. “For those of us trying city once its constitutive element has become
to survive in some of the most expensive cities in a financial tool. Dedicating a pavilion, normally
the world—where everyone wants to live, but fewer reserved for the self-portrayal of countries on the
and fewer people can afford to,” one author on Vice international stage, to a corporation underlined the
put it, “[Airbnb] might even be what allows us to be extent to which Airbnb constitutes a transnational
able to pay the rent.” 13 urban entity of a new kind. In a moment of
Active in 190 countries with 300,000 listings, unprecedented economic pressure on the home,
Airbnb is transformative primarily through its the allure of “free money” in the form of monetizing
pervasiveness—the implied assumption being your own domicile is a powerful one, one that can
that sooner or later every home will be on the reshape both the city and our relationship with the
market and available for rent. It propounds a home. As the market seeps through its walls and
narrative of post-domesticity, a new relationship into the bedroom, the paradigm of the home as a

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space of intimacy, separate from work, is replaced 1 Le Corbusier,

Towards a New
7 “Characteristics of
New Housing,” United
11 Friedrich Engels,
The Housing Question
ENDNOTES

with that of the home as an asset, in which no Architecture (New York:

Dover, 1986), 13.
States Census Bureau,
2014, census.gov/
(1872; Marx and Engels
Internet Archive,
distinction exists between the private sphere 2 Kabir Chibber, “Meet
construction/chars/
completed.html.
1995), part 1, marxists.
org/archive/marx/
and the marketplace: the ultimate realization the Latest Investment
You Can’t Afford,” 8 Jonas Fisher and
works/1872/housing
-question/index.htm.
of the neoliberal ideal of making everyone an Quartz, August 30, 2014,
qz.com/258128.
Martin Gervais, “Why
Has Home Ownership 12 IKEA, “Life at
entrepreneur of themselves. As Engels anticipated, Fallen Among the
Young?,” International
Home: Report #1,” 2014,
lifeathome.ikea.com.
3 Le Corbusier,
“all wage workers can be turned into capitalists Towards a New Economic Review 52,
no.3 (2011): 883–912.
Architecture, 237. 13 Alice Speri, “Airbnb
without ceasing to be wage workers.”15 Will Probably Get You
4 Juliet Stott, “The 9 It is interesting to Evicted and Priced Out
House Price Windfall compare the present of the City,” Vice, April
that Is Seeing Londoners recommendation of not 24, 2014, news.vice.com/
Vers une architecture ends with the famous Cash In and Move Out,” spending more than a article/airbnb-will
Guardian, June 7, 2014, third with Mrs. Beeton’s -probably-get-you
admonition: gu.com/p/3pq53. advice to Victorian -evicted-and-priced
Londoners: “The rent -out-of-the-city.
5 Charles V. Bagli, “Sky of a house, it has been
High and Going Up Fast: said, should not exceed 14 Brian Chesky at the
Architecture or revolution. Luxury Towers Take New one-eighth of the whole “Disrupt SF” conference,
York,” New York Times, income of its occupier.” September 8, 2014.
Revolution can be avoided.16 May 19, 2013. Isabella Beeton, The
Book of Household 15 Friedrich Engels,
6 Andrew Rice, “Stash Management (London: The Housing Question,
Pad,” New York, June 29, 1868), 20. part 2.
It is hard not to perceive Le Corbusier’s words 2014, nymag.com/news/
features/foreigners- 10 Le Corbusier, 16 Le Corbusier,
as having been ignored, and not to see recent hiding-money-new-york Towards a New Towards a New
-real-estate-2014-6. Architecture, 114. Architecture, 289.
uprisings (both global, such as the rise of the
Occupy movement, and local, as in the protests of
young people against the cost of rents in Tel Aviv
in 2012) as early indications of the fulfillment of his
prediction. One thing is certain, however: there is
no turning back, and the home as we once knew it
no longer exists, not so much in its physical form
as in the place it holds in our culture.
This book is an attempt to state the problem of the
house—past, present, and future—just as we have
done so many times before.

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