Home is where you are (not)

A tactile quest for the spatial tactics employed for (re)constructing Home in a state of permanent uprootedness.

Brussels Sint-Joost-ten-Noode

Lydia Karagiannaki

Home is where you are (not)

Home is where you are (not)

Lydia Karagiannaki Dr. Burak Pak

Master Dissertation Project Academic Year 2015-2016 Published June 2016

International Master of Science in Architecture, Urban Projects Urban Cultures KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels

To fuck, to sleep. To be at home. And in that mortal coil perhaps to flee.

Alas! What form does the notion of home have in the head of a fugitive?

Something to be reminded of? Something to forget about? A distant past, a near future?

Why not consider oblivion the basic structure of dreaming, homelessness the basis of a new architecture, morphing a return to order?

Tom Van Imschoot

preliminary notes

p. 8

introduction (Re)constructing Home in a state of permanent uprootedness

p.10

Room #1 A House is not a Home

p.14

Room #2 Archaeology of a Home

p.22

Room #3 The Interviews

p.36

Room #4 The borders-trespassing, ever-evolving, all-encompassing Common Home

p.60

epilogue

p.78

appendix #1 Additional Interviewees Sketches

p.80

appendix #2 Presentation Materials

p.86

bibliography/image credits

p.91

preliminary notes

The present booklet appears as the accompanying publication for my Master Thesis project, Home is where you are (not). Rather than a mere theoretical introduction of a research question leading

through a linear approach to a design response, it is a logbook of a tactile quest towards the notion of ‘Home’. Logbook in the sense of a collection of preliminary notes on observations, readings and conversations, of mappings, both academic and personal, of sensual and intellectual experiences and reflections, of memories between the personal and the collective. Quest in the sense of a circular and poly-directional research trajectory, wherein different methodologies are tested and applied and hypotheses are open to modification.

I avoid here the term ‘definition’, for the fact that during the work of the previous months, the term ‘Home’ acquired such a diversity of meanings and interpretations, that they could by no means be combined under a uniform denomination. ‘Definition’ (in Greek: ορισμός, from the word όριο=border) implies a clear delineation of the semantic territory of a notion and is insofar based on the exclusion of irrelevant significations. Therefore, even if in the context of the current research question I was concentrated on the spatial references of the notion of ‘Home’, the term is open to a multitude of interpretations and experiences beyond strict spatial reference. Whereas a ‘definition’ implies a possibility of fixation, of stasis, ‘Home’ is something personal and fluid, a fleeing moment, it is both a place and a concept, the imaginary locus where reality and fiction coincide.

In this sense, the Master Thesis project is exactly that: a project in the making, an endeavour, a process with open end. This does not imply that the project did not reach specific conclusions, rather that the conclusions are expressions of the research process, of the multiple and diverse findings, instead of finalized, frozen architectural morphologies. In this sense, and due to its subject, aims and tools, the project is located in the threshold between Architecture, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and artistic practices. It does not negate the architectural discipline, but it seeks to reframe it within the personal experience, to open it to a discourse of the importance, intimacy and imagination our most private spaces represent for us. The project, exactly as the ‘Home’, cannot be fixated in a defineable moment.

introduction

(Re)constructing Home in a State of permanent Uprootedness The realization of the fact that our societies are premised on the condition of constant migratory flows is not a new one. Indeed, this has been the process of how populations expanded and inhabited the planet, the history of national formations and colonization, of slavery and exile, refugees and swashbucklers. Nevertheless, there is something unique about our age, namely the technological advances accessible to a much larger part of the world population which render it possible both to travel to distant places and at the same time to remain highly connected with the place of one’s origin. Traveling by plane is not the privilege of an elite anymore, exactly as it is not calling one’s relatives on a different continent via a smartphone application. We live under a condition of digitalised nostalgia and hyperconnectedness. The quest for better education, work possibilities and a life in dignity and safety have led to the formation of an imaginary global community of world travellers, who might join the categories (either externally- or self-defined) of expats, immigrants or refugees, while sustaining a strong virtual link with the places of departure.

Sometimes voyaging without material baggage, those travellers bring with them their very own cultures and practices, but also their spatial tactics of appropriation, modification and navigation through space. They make our modern cities richer and more diverse and introduce us to novel forms of spatial production. Their children (our children?) play on the streets, their fruit is imported and sold in the corner stores, they gather outside of telephone or money-transfer shops to chat in the late afternoon, they wait in the rear streets to get picked-up for an illegal construction job which pays the day’s salary, they have weekly apéros at ‘Place Lux’ as interns of the European Commission. The city is not more ‘ours’ than it is ‘theirs’, and yet, they do challenge our capacity for tolerance and social cohesion.

There is indeed extended literature on the reciprocal ways immigrant populations adopt to and modify the urban space of their destinationcities, but it has been little said yet about what happens in the shadow of this theatre of the public action, the backstage of our daily lives:

the very private domain of the domestic. What is at stake when these very people who make our urban space super-diverse withdraw into their four walls, behind closed doors, in the intimacy of their houses, apartments and rooms? What are the spatial tactics which they have to invent there in order to appropriate the space? How much of their culture do they bring and project on the generic architecture of row-houses, modern flats, ‘Maison de Maître’ or even accommodation centres for asylum seekers? And what is the format of this culture? Does it consist of matter, new walls, colorful tiles, furniture, decoration, precious memorabilia, or is it a tactic of immaterial quality, a spatial practice, a way to use the space different than the neighbours, a mental image of domesticity and belonging? How do they turn their houses into homes, where does the demarcation lie? And how can one construct and reconstruct a home in a state of permanent uprootedness?

For my Master Thesis project I investigate precisely those practises of transference of the mental image of Home. What are the cultures of domesticity for a population in constant flow?

How is the notion of home defined for each individual and how can it be transferred and reinstalled into a new spatial context? What are the images we seek to reproduce? What are the dreams we are after? What have we left behind and how do we acquire it back? How do we construct our identity, negotiate its diverse fragments? When, how, why and where do we feel at home?

For this process of mapping of the notion of Home I followed multiple ways, such as readings, interviews with various inhabitants of Brussels of diverse cultural backgrounds, analyses of case studies and even an archaeological excavation of my own domestic territory and references of home-ness. The research is inexhaustible, exactly as the images associated with Home.

Every time my airplane approaches Athens leaning upon its surrounding fields, my heart leaps on the sight of the beloved landscape I define as home. And yet - I am writing these lines from my living room in Brussels, a place which couldn’t feel more homely right now.

Room #1

A House is not a Home Doubling, tripling, homing When reading Henri Lefebvre’s1 book The production of space, a threefold interpretation of space is suggested: the Conceived Space (as conceptualized and represented by scientists and planers), the Perceived Space (the spatial practices of a society bringing the social space into being) and the Lived Space (space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols).

This triangular approach to space brings me to another triad, although a very different one: Jacques Lacan’s2 concept of the three orders of the structure of the subject, a theory formulated in the field of psychoanalysis. The three orders consist of the Real (that which resists representation, the pre-symbolic, the pre-imaginary, the archaic), the Imaginary (the internalized image of the ideal, whole self ) and the Symbolic (the formation of signifiers and language).

Although the two triads originate in very different disciplines and cannot be one-to-one translated from the one field to the other, it is nevertheless interesting here to compare and expand Lefebvre’s spatial triad into Lacan’s psychoanalytic one, under the perspective of the notion of ‘Home’. The Home differentiates itself from the House in the sense that it juxtaposes a mental image of belonging and identity, safety and snugness, on the merely spatial situation of the latter. Similarly to the psyche, it is equally structured in a threefold way: it consists of a physical/ measurable space, stripped to its bare geometry and materiality, pre-political, pre-imaginary and pre-symbolic.

It is the product of mathematical calculations and the laws of physics. At the same time, it is an imaginary space, inasmuch as it requires that the inhabitant/ subject of that home is capable of creating its double picture, an imaginary space where one can belong, be themselves, ‘feel at home’, according to its individual interpretation of what this home might entail, which are the presuppositions for its existence. Lastly, through the meanings communicated by its contents

for both its subject/inhabitant and an external spectator, the home is a symbolic territory, a signifier of cultural/architectural language, as it inescapably reflects the identity of its owners, their taste, practices, struggles, their trajectories through time and space, their interpretation of the equilibrium between individuality and collectivity.

This approach to the domestic territory is important insofar as it sheds light to the multiple layers of its perception and conception. Home as a signifier, a carrier of meanings and narrations, of dreams, of the ideal of wholeness, an eternally suspended fulfilment. We recognise here not only the impossibility for any suggested definition of ‘Home’ to contain this multiplicity of layers which could be applied to any individual in each particular moment, but moreover the impossibility of the architectural discipline to fully express this dense structure of the notion when contained within the strict limits and methodologies of its traditional practice.

Home is this imaginary locus where the space of where you are coincides with the person of who you are. In this sense, the imaginary order of Lacan’s threefold has a crucial position for the understanding of Home. This is exactly where the passage from the House to the Home lies: in order to possess the materiality of the physical space we inhabit, we need to create a double image of it.

Home is the canvas where we project our dreams and memories, our most intimate thoughts.

The physical space opens up to imagination, a universe of endless possibilities, of absolute freedom. Tom van Imschoot3 compares this freedom, or rather liberation from the fixation of reality, to the forgetfulness we find in sleep or in making love: ‘Fiction is there to remind us of the very forgetfulness we experience in sleep and it is the return to this forgetfulness that I call being at home, home being exactly this endless point of return (…) Sometimes you need the detour of a minor fiction, an inner distance, a temporary forgetfulness for something to hit home’.

It is in the transcendence of the mere materiality

1_ Lefebvre, H., 1991. The production of space (Vol. 142).

Blackwell: Oxford.

2_ Lacan, J., 1949. The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.

3_ Van Imschoot, T., in the introduction of the publication to the exhibition You make a better door than you do a window, Hans Demeulenaere & Emi Kodama, 5.2-30.4.2016, Beursschowburg, Brussels.

“The very physical space we inhabit is largely dependent on our capacity to construct an imaginary double of it in order to call it our ‘home’ at all. We take possession of space by creating an image of it. We make it our own and in doing so we attempt to make sense of that image or to attach meaning to it, humanizing by way of personalizing. Yet, in the end all we possess is nothing but this anthropomorphic construct itself, which is constantly at the brink of falling back into a state of indifference - where you can no longer differentiate between its real and its imaginary qualities. In fact, this is the reason why it is hard to imagine that all houses surrounding you are actually people’s homes.”

4_ Van Herck, K., 2005.

‘Only Where Comfort Ends, Does Humanity Begin’: On Architecture, Modernity and the Warmth of the Hearth.

Negotiating Domesticity. Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, pp.123-44.

“Whereas Taut and Benjamin understand the bourgeois concept of home as an oppressive power structure and as an immobilising factor of human experience, according to Simmel the home is a practice through which the different poles of human existence are negotiated. He describes the home as an ‘intermediate entity, laying between production out of the creative self and the mere reproduction of prescribed forms of activity’. It is a domain of a ‘secondary originality’: an ‘achievement which takes place within given forms and on the basis of given presuppositions, but which also demonstrates initiative, distinctiveness and creative power’. In other words, it is a semi-productive area, laying between creative production and passive reproduction, between subjective and objective culture (...) The home constitutes a middle ground in culture and it is, according to Simmel, exactly this quality that determines its place in the social scale of values.“

of space and the agency of the individual where the link between the triads of Lefebvre and Lacan is located: Analogous to how social space becomes reified in and through its appropriation by means of the interactions which take place within it, Home comes into being in and though the capacity of one’s imagination to create its doubling, as ‘the point of no return’, the origin of all references.

An intermediate field Returning to Henri Lefebvre’s The production of space, one of his most important theses is that space, considering its various modes of production, more importantly acquires a social dimension beyond its material one. As he famously declares, ‘(social) space is a (social) product’. In this sense, space is constructed and signified by the practices of the various groups and individuals within it, as well as by their interrelations. The materiality of our surrounding is not a mere architectural given, it comes into being through our everyday actions in each present moment and functions as a palimpsest of significations and memories. Space cannot be thought separately from content and, as a result of that, space becomes political, as it creates both the scenery of our everyday dramas and the very possibility and conditions for them to take place.

There is a reciprocal relation between the space and its users. Architecture is not an empty vessel, but, on the contrary, one of the basic actors of life’s theatricality.

The notion of the social constructed-ness of space becomes more complex when moving to the scale of the private home, as a result of the fragmentation of the social body mentioned above. The collective character of the spatial production dissolves into individual homes, even if they are inhabited by more than one individuals.

And yet, it is impossible to think about a Home isolated from the cultural environment in which it is located, decontextualized from its temporal and spatial position. In any case, its inhabitants

belong to a society, a collectivity with a particular tradition and culture of domesticity. Where is the Home located then, from a socio-spatial point of view?

The particularity of the Home is traced precisely in its unique location on the threshold between the collective and the individual. As Karina Van Herck4 in her reading of Georg Simmel remarks, the Home constitutes a middle ground in culture, a territory upon which both collective and individual rituals and practices, expectations and imageries are continuously and simultaneously projected and therefore negotiated. It is where the violence of a culturally emerging architectural tradition is being confronted by the interventions and modifications of the inhabitants. It is where individual realities suggest alternative appropriations to originally otherwise signified spaces. As a result, ‘the home is a practice’ within which the ‘production of the creative self ’ and the ‘mere reproduction of prescribed forms of activity’ are constantly related to each other, bringing about a space of ‘secondary originality’.

Subjectification by isolation Beyond its status as the field of negotiation and confrontation between the individual and the collective, or rather precisely due to its capacity of being that very field, the domain of the Home becomes an important locus and, at the same time, apparatus in the construction of one’s identity. It functions as a refuge from the battlefield of the social domain, offering a filter, a screen through which selected fragments of experiences, reflections and expectations are gathered and related to each other. Precisely the possibility to isolate oneself within a private domain, to draw the demarcation from the public, over-stimulating sphere, is crucial for the construction of subjectivity. Freed from the gaze and control of the external eye, the individual shifts its attention from the public observation and performance to an intimate introspection, an inner gaze necessary for commencing a process of

personal formation. External stimuli gathered in the public domain are brought, re-worked and evaluated in the intimacy of one’s solitude.

It is for instance the library of Michel de Montaigne, as described by Adi Ophir5, which offers the possibility for isolation and private introspection, the possibility for the construction of a subjectivity. It functions as a place ‘where one can gather oneself into oneself in order to become fully oneself, entirely in control and autonomous.

Solitude is not sought there for the sake of knowledge, as a vehicle or a precondition for its attainment. Solitude, and the whole demarcating mechanism that separates the private from the public, makes possible the constitution of the very object to be known, one’s self.’

On a similar level, in her influential essay A room of one’s own, Virginia Woolf argues for the importance of having the possibility of isolation in the construction of female authorship. The woman, being constantly under the supervising eye of her husband, her family and the society, even within her very private domain, demands a place of solitude and reflection as the absolute condition under which she can create her literary self. ‘A lock on the door means the power to think for oneself ’6. I allow myself here the freedom to use this reference, even if it concerns the singularity of one room (the study) in relation to the whole of a private house, as the mechanisms of isolation and privacy which render possible the construction of female authorship work on the same level as the spatial conditions necessary for a possibility of introspection and subjectification in the case of the private home vs. the public realm. In order for it to be a domain of ‘secondary originality’, the Home needs to establish a protected and clearly framed capsule within the collective landscape.

A fragmented identity To reflect on the double function of the Home as both a display of one’s identity as well as an apparatus of its very construction by means of isolation and

introspection is important, insofar as it establishes a link between the ontology and phenomenology of this identity. For ultimately, how can we think of what something is without depending on how this something appears to us? It is not only the Home that needs to appear in order to be perceived7, but also our very own identity needs to be expressed in a moment of both production and reproduction: we encounter here the performative aspect of identity.

Our Home (as display and apparatus) functions then as a process where the various and sometimes even contradictory fragments of one’s identity, like ingredients of a recipe, are collected, condensed and negotiated. Images and associations of belonging, comfort, warmth, acceptance, love, equilibrium, safety, satisfaction, either in the form of a serene peacefulness or an ecstatic gratification.

In the framework of my Master Thesis project, this becomes particularly interesting when considering individuals with a different cultural background as the one of their current context of residence.

The place of origin and the place of destination, or even just the current place of habitation, and even all the places one has traversed in their global trajectory of movements and re-installments: they too become part of one’s identity. And what is even more important is that those fragments and associations acquire material and spatial dimension.

Expressing diverse spatial practises, displaying and using household objects which stem from different cultural contexts, negotiating between the collective and the individual (Van Herck), this is the moment of the reification of our (domestic) identity.

It is mentioned above that architecture is not an empty vessel; under this new perspective, it is tempting to imagine of architecture, and precisely of Home, as a vessel which contains all fragments of our inherently heterogeneous identity. There is an interesting reference at this point, stemming from folk art: the case of memory jugs. Those were jars, possibly originating in black southern American communities and widely used in Victorian England, prepared upon the decease of a person. Memory jugs were made ‘by placing small everyday objects (of the missing one) such as

5_ Ophir, A., 1991. A place of knowledge re-created: The library of Michel de Montaigne.

Science in context, 4(01), pp.163190.

6_ Rosner, V., 2008. Modernism and the architecture of private life.

Vancouver: Columbia University Press.

7_ And this might be the reason why the notion of Home is impossible to sufficiently describe: We have difficulty perceiving it in its wholeness, as it never really ‘appears’ to us.

Romania has a huge capital of residential blocks which were erected en masse during the communist era. Fascinated by the anthropology of those identical spaces, photographer Bogdan Gîrboveanu set out to photograph the studio flats of his own block.

“The rooms may be regarded as a psychological chart of those who live in them, reflecting their history and relation to present times. (...) (S)ome have said that I was trying to show a mix of social classes, but I simply photographed the apartments of my neighbors. The lady whose face you can’t see is a journalist with academic credentials. There was a lady on the first floor who used to be an illustrator for the National Bank of Romania; another lady was a house painter, and a gentleman—who told me his nickname was Don Lukas— made his money working abroad.

They all have a story.”

keys, screws and nails, glass vials, shells, nuts, and jewellery on the surface of bottles or ceramic jugs using putty, cement, or other adhesive material’8.

Although these objects are nowadays on the threshold of kitsch, memory jugs nevertheless constructed and represented in a unique way both identity and memory. They were thought as a substitute for the loss of the beloved ones, ironically taking their place in the inventory of the house by becoming monuments. Memory vessels are such interesting and loaded objects, as they merge in their conception the cult of romanticism, the culture of collecting, the prevail of materialism and the fascination for exoticism.

They act as semantically over-densified signifiers, with an excess of fragments which were believed to represent and embody the identity of the missing person. It is important here to note that the memory jugs were made by the relatives of the deceased, the fragments were collected by them, and in this sense there was already a ‘reading’, an interpretation of what the identity of the missing one might have been.

Could it then be possible for us to reflect on Home as a memory vessel, an object which creates its double, imaginary image, condensing memory and identity in a unique moment? A memory and identity which is greatly fragmented and diverse, similar to our trajectories through time and space?

To think of Home as a memory jug which stands for a missing place, a place in memory, or constant anticipation?

Home is where you are (not) Memory and anticipation, the past and the future: Referring briefly to the Christian tradition, the Home resembles the Paradise, a place which is either lost or promised9. How are these two temporal imageries acquired and reified into the present? How are we to reproduce the image of the Paradise? Where are we at Home?

The elusiveness of the notion of Home lies partly in its diverse (temporal) perception by each individual. While some people would easily define

Home as the place where they currently live, affirming a feeling of safety and belonging, others would trace it in a place of their previous experience, a place they (permanently or temporarily) have left behind. Moreover, Home might be a place where one has not yet arrived, a place one is heading to.

Home is where you are or where you are not, and in this sense, while the mental image of it follows the displaced along their journeys, its physical double does not always follow. Nostalgia is a crucial term connected with the notion of Home, indicating the desire for return, the pain associated with absence.

The mental image of Home craves for its reification in the present moment.

Nostalgia, a Modern Latin word coined in the 17th century by Johannes Hofer10, derives from the Greek νοσταλγία, which is composed by νόστος (=return) + άλγος (=pain, grief). Nevertheless Nostalgia is a rendering of the pre-existing German Heimweh, ‘homesickness’. Here it becomes interesting to interrelate the two German words, Heimweh and Fernweh: on the one hand the desire to return, on the other hand the desire to depart, to travel, to escape, a Wanderlust. Home as the origin or a place in anticipation. Or: Home as the journey, the travel itself.

And, ultimately, a Home may not be a place at all, as its image does not necessarily need to refer to a geographic location. Agnes Heller11 makes therefore the distinction between two types of people: the ones who are geographically monogamous (Home as spatial continuity) and those who are geographically promiscuous (Home as spatially fragmented/ deconstructed). While the first category relates the feeling of Home with sensual experiences (shapes, sounds, colours etc.), the second one refers to it in cognitive terms and embraces contingency as the opening up of infinite possibilities. In this regard, one can live in space (geographically monogamous) or in time, in a concept like democracy or in absolute spirit (geographically promiscuous). In both of these cases, the mental image of Home seeks to give meaning and unite both past and future in the present time through shared lived experiences.

8_ http://www.amesgallery.com/ FolkArtPages/Memory.html [Accessed 10 December 2015] 9_ Antonas, A., 2016. ‘Back to the garden: Athens and oportunities for new urben strategies’, Uncube Magazine [Internet], issue 43, p. 23- 32.

Available from: http://www. uncubemagazine.com/ magazine-43-16565819.html#!/ page1 [Accessed 8 June 2016].

10_ http://www.etymonline. com/index.php?term=nostalgia [Accessed 8 June 2016] 11_ Heller, A., 1995. Where are we at home?. Thesis Eleven, 41(1), pp.1-18.

“These two people seemingly lived worlds apart. For the first, the Earth had a centre, it was called Campo dei Fiori, the place where he was born and expected to die. He was deeply committed to the geographic monogamy that wedded him to his tradition.

His commitment stretched from the remote past, the past of the Campo, up to a future beyond his own, the future of the Campo.

For the second, the Earth had no centre; she was geographically promiscuous, without pathos.

Her whereabouts made no difference to her. (...) But what kind of cultural baggage does she carry with her? The answer is simple: none. She does not need to carry any. The kind of culture she participates in is not a culture of a certain place; it is the culture of a time. It is a culture of the absolute present.”

“It’s a piece of memory art.

And these pieces were made throughout the United States, typically made on ceramic jugs.

The theory behind them is that when a relative passes away and drawers are cleaned out and little pieces of memories are found, they use those pieces to construct a piece of artwork as a memory of that person. And what I find intriguing about this is the fact that she made it of herself. And typically it was always thought they were made after the fact, when the person passed away.”

Allan Katz commenting on a Memory Tower, Appraisal transcript of Antiques Roadshow, episode #1507, 14/02/2011

Room #2

Archaeology of a Home The idea of the primitive hut, as illustrated by Marc-Antoine Logier, reminds us that the house, in all its simplicity, is the most primordial space in Architecture. Everything starts from there.

And yet, when does a house, a shelter, become a Home? How can we define it? What does it mean?

In order to trace the mechanisms of this transcendence I decided to investigate in this chapter the processes of ‘homing’ in my own history of travels and re-installments and the associations of the spatial situations evoked in my current place of habitation. Why do I call a place my home? To begin with, there are the reasons of a simplified practicality, e.g.. when somebody says ‘I just left work and I am going back home’.

Home is where somebody lives, where all their possessions are located. But there is actually more to that. Home is where I feel that I belong to.

I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 19. I moved to a new country, and after some years to another one. Since that age, I move into a new apartment approximately every two years, carrying only some of my possessions along with me. My house is moving, and my home is following it, not without a phase difference.

I take the airplane to visit my parents ‘back’ in Greece, and then I take it again to fly ‘back’ to the place where I currently live. This ‘back’ becomes the most elusive word in my Home-vacabulary, it is equivocal. When I sit in the airplane I cannot define if I fly ‘from’ or ‘to’ my Home. My Home is doubled, tripled, multiplied n-times, my Home is exploded and scattered.

Coming back from the Home to the House and its architectural materiality. Here is a register of the apartments I have lived in: three with my parents, one by myself, one with a partner and three with flatmates. They were all different to each other; in the degree of privacy, of authorship over their organization, of responsibilities and rights regarding common spaces and resources, in terms of allocations of functions and uses, of dimensions and proportions, light conditions, availability and use of open-air spaces and,

obviously, in terms of layout. They were built in different periods, with different materials, wooden doors, windows with a view to the neighbouring roofs or the empty wall five meters ahead. They had high ceilings and low ceilings and sometimes a disastrous plumbing system or a cold breeze coming in through the old wooden windows. But criteria for moving into a house don’t necessarily coincide with criteria for calling a house one’s Home, and in this sense some of the most heterogeneous features could equally become the backdrop of images of Home-ness.

I don’t always carry the same possessions along.

Some objects which follow me are smaller, like books (actually there is a lot of planing for the books traveling between countries; some of them are important parts of my ‘Home’ and therefore always accompany me, but others can be sent to my parents and leave room for new ones), while some are bigger (like a wardrobe which has moved between two countries and four apartments). I rearrange them in the new environment every time, they also have to ‘feel at home’. I like moving houses, because I re-discover forgotten pieces, gadgets, notebooks. While you go through your things, putting them in the carton box - is your Home the things in the box or the space that you leave behind? I like when the room stands empty (the room you move out of or the room you are moving in): it is such a powerful image, so extraordinary, soulless and external to our experience of Home-ness, and yet so promising at the same time. In my latest house I hanged my posters even before I had furniture to put inside the room. They are a statement of my identity and therefore immediately made me feel ‘at home’, even if I still slept on a guest mattress on the floor and my clothes were in the suitcase.

Occasionally I visit friends and stay at their houses. They have a pair of spare keys for me. It makes me think that sometimes it just takes a pair of keys to feel at home. They give you the feeling of independence, of authorship, of responsibility.

They give you a certain right. This place belongs

to you as well. But the posters and the keys, they are not enough. I noticed it the last time I moved. I was sitting on my bed and looking at my things around me, exactly as I had perfectly and proudly arranged them. But they didn’t feel mine. This place was new. The walls were new.

This specific light at this specific hour was new.

The neighbours’ voices coming in through the window were new. A place needs memories to be called a Home. And even more: it needs shared memories. As if you need a third person, an external perspective, a witness to testify you have been living here. And you need to experience the space through them, in novel ways that you cannot accomplish on your own. A Home needs a community, even if you live alone.

A Home is a mental construct and insofar it cannot disappear in the way the physical space does. You carry it along on your voyages across the globe: it might get modified, enriched and expanded through them, as you grow older, visit cities, meet people, share experiences. It takes its place in the registry of your dreams and memories, in a subconscious order.

Sometimes, though, a Home does fall apart.

As it is always conditioned upon positive and nurturing feelings, a particularly unpleasant and disturbing experience within it can break the link between the physical space and the mental image of it. A Home doesn’t disappear when you move, but when it gets violated. It is mostly its safety which is violated.

When asking about the mechanisms which make a House into a Home, could we then think of ‘Home’ as an adjective, a quality we can attribute to a place, just as the words ‘wide’, ‘bright’, ‘noisy’, ‘comfortable’ or ‘fragrant’? We could say then ‘I live in a Home house’ or ‘His house was very Home’. This proposal is not necessarily so radical, as it will function similarly to the word ‘homely’. But even like that it is so elusive, so subjective: what is ‘homely’?

For the moment let us agree: A House is not a Home and a Home is not a House.

In the following pages I have tried to map my current apartment both in architectural and in personal/anthropological terms. I analyse the rooms and the spatial practises of their appropriation, the objects found within them and the associations they evoke. I measure the balance of privacy and community of a shared house, as well as the bricolage character of its inventory. I trace which are the representations of Home within it and what is their format: an object, a room, a practice, an image? What are the traces of the inhabitants revealing about them? The arrangement of furniture, the posters on the walls, the cracks on the floor? The process resembles a careful excavation at the site of an ancient ruin, the speculations of a forensic group of investigators. I call this ‘The Archaeology of a Home’.

The photographs are juxtaposed with images of marble: Although in other countries marble is used to mainly represent luxury and social status, the material is widely used in Greek apartments for floors, kitchen surfaces and bathroom sinks.

You know when it is too hot, when on a silent summer night even the marble you step on barefoot is burning.

the corridor

29 Steps The corridor is very long. Almost too long.

I counted my steps this morning. From the point it is connected with the entrance hall: I come out of the living room and turn right, and then after approximately two meters, I turn right again.

This morning I counted 29 steps, until I reach the end and turn once more to the right to enter my room. The corridor is so long that sometimes I get bored and run. When I run with my socks it gets dangerous, because it is slippery. Also the floor is broken or lifted at some points.

I wonder how did this happen. When I walk the first meters, I imagine the furniture of the living room behind the wall, the people sitting on the couch. When I cross the bathroom, I like to look through the distorting glass, the light that shines through, vague blue figures. I always curse if I have forgotten something in a room at the other end of the corridor and have to go and bring it.

I didn’t know it when I first moved here, but the building I live in has only shared flats and around 50 young residents, so that it has acquired an almost legendary status in Brussels. When I tell to people my address, the response comes almost automatically: ‘You live in this house with the corridor!’

the corridor

Witnesses and Reminiscents At the half of its length, the corridor becomes slightly wider. There is a wall recess of no more than 10 centimetres. In this part of the corridor, three spare mattresses for guests lean against the wall: a foldable one for travels, a single and a double one. I never had guest mattresses, my friends always slept either in my bed or on the couch. But after some days I understand that in this flat there are so often guests, that the spare mattress becomes necessary. I like living among people, and I enjoy welcoming guests. The mattresses remind me of that, they bear witness of friends coming to visit from all over the world.

When they are not used, they rest in the corridor.

They are like lazy animals. A little bit they scare me, especially in the darkness. They are so bulky.

I try to estimate the distances by experience I am still new here.

In the beginning of the corridor hangs a colourful garland. It is strange that it is so short, around 1,5 meters. I guess it is from a previous party, but I never asked what was the reason of celebration. When you live in an apartment with many people, where even more people have passed, you learn not to ask many questions.

Sometimes nobody really knows the story anymore, so you just take things as they appear to you, fantasizing about their biographies.

the bathroom

Hiding behind Bed Sheets When I first saw the apartment in the advertisement, it was the bathroom that I immediately fell in love with already from the photos. And when I visited the flat for the first time, my soonto-become flatmates apologised for the bedsheets hanging to dry from the rails of the bathtub curtain. But for me, this was the most magical thing I could imagine. There was this smell of soap freshness in the air, and the bedsheets dimmed the light of the window. They reminded me of Greece or Italy, where we hang clothes in the garden, on the balcony, on the roof terrace.

In Venice I was amazed: they hang a rail from window to window of opposite buildings, and can turn it around to reach their clothes. It is not used just in the movies, then.

I remember my childhood summers with my grandmother in the village, she always hanged the bed sheets in the garden, and we annoyed her with our naughty games, hiding and dancing through their whiteness. Last summer I rented a room on the mountain of Pelion in Greece, it belonged to a woman as old as my grandmother.

She also had her bedsheets drying in the garden.

Behind them a dog was sleeping, checking on the guests coming back from the tavern late at night.

the living room

Tactics to Invade a Couch Our living room is so big that we don’t know how to fully take advantage of it. When A. moved out, the girl whose room I took in the house, she took one of the two sofas and a sewing table with her.

This was apparently a big shock for my flatmates, who didn’t know what to put in the empty space. It took us some time to make it again into a Home, to appropriate it. In the beginning the remaining sofa stood in an awkward position facing the armchairs and there was a large underused space behind them.

I now have a worktable in front of one wall, and the sitting area opens up to the rest of the room. Since we also have a projector, this layout is also much more comfortable for watching movies.

There is always a balance between the role of a common living room and the one of the private bedroom. In my current flat I have a small bedroom, so I spend more time in the common spaces. We have a friendly relationship among my flatmates, which makes it more pleasant to spend time there.

Our shared time usually starts around the dining table, with any meal of the day, and slowly shifts to the couch. Sometimes people sitting at the table keep on discussing with somebody who is in the kitchen, even without maintaining an eye-contact. This naturalness of the conversation, beyond politicalcorectness of body language, creates a very familiar feeling of being at home.

Lately we are working with V. on our Master Thesis projects every day at my house. We occupy the living room, sitting opposite of each other at the dining table, smoking with the window open. In the morning my flatmates find us in the same position as they left us last night. Somehow uncanny, this is definitely called a Home.

1_ eating/ hanging out (dining table) 3_ hanging out in group (couch area) 5_ movie projection (for 2 people) 2_ connectedness dining/kitchen 4_ hanging out alone (couch area) 6_ movie projection (for 3 people)

7_ working alone (dining table) 8_ working in group (dining table)

Initial layout

1_ eating/ hanging out (dining table) 3_ hanging out in group (couch area) 5_ hanging out alone (couch area) 2_ connectedness dining/kitchen 4_ movie projection 6_ hanging out alone (armchair)

Rearranged layout

7_ working alone (dining table) 8_ working in group (dining table)

thumbtacks

Pinning Walls I always found it brutal to make holes into the wall. Sometimes I have to drill in order to fix a shelf or to hang a mirror. I regret hurting the wall this way, it is an irreversible event, you see the dust pouring out, the grinded brick, or what used to be a brick. At the same time a curiosity possesses me: what is behind the plaster? Old houses are usually a pain to drill against their walls, you never know what is behind there and how deep you may go. Century-old walls in Berlin and Brussels almost made me depressive.

When hanging posters I never use thumbtacks, it symbolises for me the same brutality and irreversibility of the drilled hole. I mostly use sticky tack, and rarely tape. Because then I want to see it, the tape has something aesthetic. In my new apartment all the posters of my flatmates are pinned with thumbtacks. And there are many, so many of them. They have different shapes and colours. There is a whole package of them on a shelf in the living room, thumbtacks have something natural and spontaneous here. I brought a poster with me, from the movie Blow Up by Antonioni, in bold red colour. I have it since years, since my very first house in Berlin.

I hung it in the living room, but safe from pins.

Living room #L1-8 #L9-14 #L15 #L16 #L17 #L18 #L19-20 #L19 #L21-24 #L25-28 #L29-32 #L33-38 #L39-40 #L41 #L42-43 #L44-45

ce cochon de Paolo map of Germany 3d postcard from Greece body with trees cow calendar wine map of Italy married/pregnant poster kalinihta/ Professeur Dansokho Sterni advertisement transfert vers l’invisible two guys photo la scoumoune (Belmondo/Cardinale) Salomon et la reine de Saba darts target Hitchcock with stork Christmas chocolate calendar

Kitchen #K1 #K2 #K3 #K4 #K5 #K6 #K7 #K8 #K9 #K10

garbage sorting memo birthday party invitation b/w cow postcard Mickey + Donald postcard Den Haag postcard, trains Den Haag postcard, garden guitar player seasonal fruits and vegetables cleaning schedule geometric poster

Corridor #C1 #C2-5 #C6-7 #C8-9 #C10-13 #C14-19 #C20-23

garbage calender transport map of Brussels map of Saint-Gilles black poster (movie Bird) girlande poster Le flingueur Usage humain d’etres humains (Castellucci)

Toilet #T1-7 #T8 #T9-11 #T12-13

comic stripes OFF SCREEN film festival free map of Brussels Sonnet, Le bonheur de ce monde

# L19

# K5

# K7

# L24, #L26

# L29

# L8

# K8

# T2

# L40

# C9

# K2

# L44

# L5

# K6

# K4

# K3

# K9

# L33

# C12

# T12

# C3

# L16, #L12

Room #3

The Interviews “Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be a sign of a new world which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness”1.

Our common analytical tools as architects have always been on-site observation, the reading of maps, the measuring of areas, heights, green spaces, of the amount and location of amenities, long lists of statistical data regarding density, age groups, unemployment rates.

Nevertheless the exercise of mapping the Home, a dematerialized spatial concept, demanded a shift from quantitative to qualitative methods. I was convinced that, to approach Home, I had to approach its protagonists. I decided to look for people of diverse ethnic/cultural backgrounds and lifestyles and listen to their stories, to let them teach me. In the following chapter, there is a short account of the people I have met during this process.

The respondents came from open calls I published in social media or through common acquaintances which brought us into contact.

Some interviews were conducted within the houses/apartments of the interviewees, while others in a café chosen by them. Due to the particularity of the topic, I avoided any formal medium as a questionnaire. Instead of this I paid close attention to establish a degree of comfort and trust between the person and myself, in order for them to feel encouraged to talk about themselves, their everyday habits, rituals, their histories, memories and dreams, future plans, small or bigger incidents, embarrassments and even secrets, like the everyday tensions within couples arising from personal or cultural discrepancies. Not only my sensibility and awareness towards the information was required, but also their ability to reflect on the banalities and certainties of their everyday practises shaped by the materiality of their house.

The discussion usually started with the biography of the person, such as occupation, marital status, years living in Belgium, language skills and territories/reasons for variations etc. and shifted

to the neighbourhood of residence, in order to understand the position of the individual within the broader socio-spatial context and the relations nurtured with neighbours of other cultures. The second part concerned the domesticity aspect of the very house. We discussed about their current and previous residence, different layouts they have had, renovations, changes resulting from the evolution of family formations etc. They talked about the rooms they spend most of their time in, what they are doing there and with whom.

What is exactly the function of the living room: to watch television, play with the children, eat dinner, receive guests. If and where does the delineation of privacy lie in the case of partners, or of parental relationships. How do they use their outdoor spaces or if they miss them, in case they do not have any. We talked about kitchen layouts, practical built-in furniture and dangerous staircases. Who is cooking and who is cleaning the household. But most importantly, we discussed what does Home mean for them and how does it relate to the spatial/architectural context and the cultural references they might have brought along and installed into their new house.

The conversation about the cultural references was the most elusive part of the interview, as one does not necessarily associate a practice or object with a broader national culture, but rather with a familial one. This distinction is important in the elaboration of the term of origin, as origin may equally be defined as one’s family, or one’s nation, or anything in between or even beyond (e.g. a neighbourhood, city, region or continent can equally be indicators of origin). In the volume of essays The concept of the foreign2, Rebecca Saunders points at the complexity of the definition of one’s origin and the possible loci of belonging, such as ‘home, family and nation’, whereas the latter may equally refer to a geographical site as well as the locus of kinship relations one is bound with (a real or imaginary community). It was indeed in the case of many interviewees that they brought up references of

1_ Bachelard, G., 1994. The poetics of space. Boston: Beacon Press.

2_ Saunders, R. (Ed.), 2003.

The concept of the foreign: An interdisciplinary dialogue.

Lanham: Lexington Books.

3_ Hurdley, R., 2013. Home, materiality, memory and belonging: keeping culture.

Vancouver: Palgrave Macmillan.

4_ Bourdieu, P., 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5_ Williams, R., 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

6_ Ibid., 3

spatial situations rooted in childhood memories and identified as family moments, rather than cultural characteristics of their nationality. In this sense, the boundaries of personal and collective culture had gradually faded, and a more personal ‘reading’, an interpretation of this collective culture has taken place.

It was important for me to have an in-depth discussion and understanding of the notion of domesticity and Home-ness of the respondents, which was the reason why the interviews were thorough and narrative, instead of short and compact. It was important to discuss about the use of the rooms, the furniture, the objects on display and the associations they evoke. To approach Home, I had to understand how the construction of memory, identity and belonging was bound with the material world containing the everyday life of these people. How could the physicality of a table be both ‘the fabric and the fabricator of memory’3, both the infrastructure supporting current expressions of Home-ness, such as formal and informal dinners, and the path connecting this moment of the present time and space with another reference of ‘being at Home’. Considering the capacity of objects and material practices to be regarded as Bourdieu’s ‘nostalgic structures’4 or Williams’ ‘structures of feeling’5, what was exactly the ‘memory work’ which was connected with them and through which people actively constructed identity? The deployment of memory as a way to perceive and define one’s self is a primary strategy for the construction of identity and, in this sense, the daily materialization and accomplishment of memory through the displayed objects and domestic practises are crucial for the definition of my respondents’ (domestic) identity. As their narrations indicate, it is actually the way of how people accounted for the objects and practices which was more important than the practices and the objects themselves6.

As an experimental tool which should summarise and display the interviewees’ idea of domesticity I deployed the hand-sketch. During the interviews

I always asked the person to draw for me the house they currently live in by themselves, even if our meeting was taking place in this very space.

Although many of them were initially reluctant and shy about their drawing skills, it is actually sometimes the ‘naive’ and spontaneous line of the unskilled that reveals more than the disciplined and ‘educated’ one, a fact which also makes me wonder how we can overcome our knowledge beyond its confines and limitations of imagination and experimentation by unlearning the given.

Not all of the interviewees’ drawings may be as impressive, but I am confident about the fact that they reveal their individual understanding of their culture of domesticity. Nikos, for example, who is currently renovating by himself the house he has bought with his wife and who is practically living within a construction site, is the only one who directly drew an elevation of the facade.

Fatemeh designed an impressively detailed drawing in ‘reverse perspective’ of her two houses, both of which she defined as Home: the current apartment in Brussels and the grandmother’s house in Iran. Nina revealed the gap that her father left after his passing away by not filling in her childhood room, of which she had constructed the furniture together with him: her younger sister had substituted them with new ones when she took over the room, thereby removing the material trace of the father and repeating his loss.

By juxtaposing their hand-sketches, narratives and ideas of domesticity I finally developed my own hand-sketches for each of the interviewees.

They explore the idea of Home from an imaginary, almost impossible and sometimes even ironic viewpoint, trying to expand the fictional capacities and relate the material with the immaterial. Hereby I do not claim to be an illustrator or designer, but I try, as my respondents when asked by me, to put myself in the position of exploring and understanding space through sketching. In this sense, drawing becomes a practice both analytical and synthetic, a means of experimenting, of searching, of reflecting on the poetry of the mundane and its hidden greatness.

Dries

The collective Home male 28 years old student Belgian origin shared flat with one person

Dries defines himself as an urban activist and he is affectionately participating in many Brussels’ initiatives which struggle for a more inclusive approach to the public space as well as for the integration of marginal societal groups to the spatial-poltical agenda. When it comes to his home, his conception of the notion is fluid, as it freely varies in scales. Dries envisions a “common” life, where (almost) everything is shared, presupposing that there is trust and the will for collectivity (this also requires the definition of a ‘community’). His home is already the city, with its everyday social interactions and its bustling human activity, like a symphony composed collectively by its inhabitants. The city is a home, as long as its social dimension is concerned, a dimension which both roots in the past and looks into the future, but is being realised always and most importantly in the present time. On the other hand, the materiality of a house only

offers a refuge when it comes to sleeping. This represents the other end of the threefold of scales, as opposed to the city scale. The house becomes a place only during sleep, this means only when the social aspects of life are temporarily paused.

But even during the night, when Dries withdraws from his social self, he belongs to the city and not to his apartment. The home is still the city. A transitional scale in this dipole is defined by the cooking and eating area, inasmuch as these are regarded as collective activities. Currently, and as a result of our social understanding, practices and conventions, cooking and eating take place within the domestic realm. But for Dries they define an intermediate territory between the public and the private and therefore belong to the ‘commons’. As he enthusiastically explains to me, Dries ideally envisions a ‘nomad kitchen’, as a place which belongs to and moves around the city and where everybody is welcome.

three scales collective city life sleeping place nomad kitchen books kitchen herbs

Clémence

The Maison de Maître female 48 years old interpreter at the European Commission French origin lives with husband + 2 kids (8 y and 12 y)

Clémence lives with her husband and their two children in a typical Brussels’ Maison de Maître, very close to Gare du Nord, in a street perpendicular to the ‘red light district’ (Rue d’ Aerschot). The house has three floors, a basement and a small, dark garden on the rear side. They bought it from an Italian family some years ago and had to slightly renovate it. The ground floor houses all common activities and the ones which are most public, when it comes to receiving guests. From the entrance hall one enters the dining area, on the street side there is the kitchen, on the backside the living-room and the garden. The basement is used as laundry and storage space. In the first floor it is the children’s kingdom, where there is one bathroom and a separate bedroom for each child. The parents can be isolated in the upper, second floor with their bedroom, bathroom and a roof terrace. Although the family has good relations to their neighbours, also partly because the children visit the same school, Clémence tells me that they were allowed, according to the law, to pave only one part of the

roof terrace and not use the rest of it, as it would enable a straight gaze into the neighbouring houses and gardens.

The life of the house mainly takes place in the ground floor for all inhabitants, even kids bring often their toys downstairs. The main area to spend time is the one with the big dining table, where one enters directly into from the entrance hall. Architecturally, it is a distributor-space, as it is centrally located and works as a passage.

Functionally, it is the core of the house, a place which unites the family, receives guests in formal and informal situations and offers multiple layers of activities and signification. A large bookshelf on the back wall represents the identity of the family not only through the books, but also through the objects, decorations, photos and memorabilia on display. This is a highly informal space, where people read, eat, chat, do homework or work for their job. As the living room is rarely and only used to watch TV, the multifunctional dining table becomes the archetypical hearth of the house.

focal table work leisure children activities roof terrace flowers neighbours

Hajar

The family thread female 32 years old employee at a web marketing company Belgian, Morrocan origin of 3rd generation lives with husband + 3 kids (5 y, 7 y and 9 y)

Hajar lives with her husband and their 3 children in a rented flat, explaining that she refuses to buy one out of religious reasons (interest for a bank loan). The flat where they are currently living has two entrances, one to the living room and one to the parents’ bedroom, but no corridor, which makes its organisation and distribution of functions quite particular and complex.

Everything is intertwined as one moves through the house. Hajar tells me that before their third child arrived, apart from the current living room, they used to have also a Moroccan one in the current place of their bedroom. Nevertheless, it was the Moroccan living room which was ‘sacrificed’ with the third child and generally, apart from some drawers and small decoration, she doesn’t have anything Moroccan in the apartment. When I ask her about the beautiful Moroccan carpets, she tells me that especially carpets have to be avoided when raising children, as they get easily dirty.

Although they initially had two separate

bedrooms, the kids wanted to sleep all together, so now they have one common sleeping room and one playroom. Most of the time when they are at home they prefer to be in the dining room and work or play at the table while the parents cook in the kitchen. The living room is for Hajar a place to ‘just sit and do nothing’, indicating it as the area to relax after a hard day of work and childcare. At the same time, the television becomes a central device. It is immediately turned on when she arrives home, to just have the company of its sound, but she also watches a lot of films, either in the living room or in the bedroom. Hajar cannot pick up a particular place of the house as of special importance, since all the rooms have their place inside the family life.

Nevertheless, when she is asked what she wishes she could have more, it is immediately that she answers a big garden full of toys for the children.

And a barbecue for her husband. But a garden not particularly green, she doesn’t like herbs!

continuous layout dining table children spaces television ‘European’ living room garden for children cooking time

Merve

The gendered television female 56 years old owner of Turkish restaurant in Sint-Joost-ten-Noode Turkish origin lives with husband + youngest son (23 y)

We met Merve one day while conducting onsite research in Sint-Joost-ten-Noode. She is the owner of one of the Turkish restaurants in the area and she was willing to discuss with us.

The interview I conducted with her was much shorter than the other ones and did not reach the same depth or detail, nevertheless Merve agreed to draw the layout of her house and briefly talk about it. She lives in a two storey apartment with the common areas in the lower floor and the bedrooms in the upper floor. She tells us that

when they return back home at night form their work, both she and her husband like to watch television in order to relax. As he wants to watch a different program than hers, Merve is usually watching television in the kitchen, ironically coming from her work which also takes place inside of a kitchen. Despite this gendered spatial separation, Merve was very proud of their living room. It is drawn as a very big space and she gladly enumerates all the five coffee tables they have inside, as well as the bar.

kitchen representative living room relaxation television common/separate time coffee table bar

Yoshiko

The pianists’ Home female 44 years old piano teacher Japanese origin lives with husband + 2 kids (7 y and 9 y)

Yoshiko and her husband bought their current house, a spacious Maison de Maître in Schaarbeek, in 2009. The general organization of the house comprises the ground floor with the living room, piano rooms, kitchen/dining area and garden, office and guest room in the first floor and the family bedrooms in the upper floor, whereas the two children share the same room. In each half floor of the staircase there is a bathroom.

As the couple are both musicians, and specifically piano teachers, this becomes a central motif in the house: apart from the two instruments in the ground floor, which respectively occupy one of the continuous rooms in front of the living room, they have a third piano in their bedroom, to ‘read’ pieces as Yoshiko tells me. To live in a house with two pianists can be quite frustrating, she says, adding that her husband sometimes uses headphones just to be able to mute the sound and work in silence.

The ground floor living room is often used for family moments but also for small concerts by her students. The open kitchen is equipped with very particular built-in furniture and devices, as the house used to be the workplace for a bakery in the past. On the opposite site of the room is the dining table, which functions as a meeting place for the family, particularly since the kids prefer it for their homework. The house opens

up into a garden with some plants and toys, like a swing and a sand box, which used to be a small pond but was covered due to safety concerns.

The guest room is used quite frequently, as her husband hosts colleagues from abroad every couple of weeks, but Yoshiko tells me that they are now considering converting it into a tatami room, a multifunctional space in the Japanese tradition whose layout is based on the tatami mat. Tatamis are made in standardised dimensions and their core consists of rice straw with a covering of woven soft rush. Yoshiko tells me that she ‘has grown up in tatamis’ and for this reason it is an important aspect of her definition of Home, while tatamis have a very pleasant smell and haptic to walk barefoot on. Moreover, she could also use a kotatsu table, a typical Japanese low table with a heating source underneath and a blanket to keep one’s legs warm.

Another cultural reference that she mentions is the Japanese bathroom that she would like to have in the future. This is thought as a cabin with a shower and a deep bathtub with all sorts of buttons to modify the water. Apart from being a convenient space to help the children washing, bathing in the bathroom becomes a ritual of relaxation, spirituality and self-centering for the end of the day, before going to sleep.

piano room tatami room Japanese bathroom kotatsu table garden bakery’s kitchen house slippers

Room #4

The borders-trespassing, ever-evolving, all-encompassing Common Home When thinking about Home, we usually think of a space very private, a space which draws a line between the inside and the outside, who is included and who not, whom we want to share it with, whom we have to share it with. The Home is a refuge, a retreat, almost a womb, with a thin membrane keeping the outside world in safe distance.

Interpretations of Home might be diverse between individuals, but as the interviews conducted and presented in the previous chapter suggest, they often do coincide and overlap. They find each other in an imaginary space, without even realizing it. We come from different cultures and therefore we tend to think of our societies as fragmented, divided among groups. But are we really so much different to each other? And on which level? On the one hand, there are some very characteristic and particular cultural references. Hiroko’s Japanese bathroom functions as a ritual, the personal experience is magnified through the lens of tradition. But other references of domesticity might vary only on an aesthetic level: I like minimal living rooms, you want an exuberant Moroccan couch. But then we both sit on our couches and do the same things: We read a book, we chat with our friends, we drop the sauce of our dinner, we fall asleep while watching a movie. We share the same experiences. Not always, but more often than we think. And we share similar memories, traced within the biographical trajectory of the image of the ideal couch, the concept of the couch. My couch in Turkey: we received guests, kids were not allowed to sit on, my couch in Japan: we bought it in the eighties, we used to sit traditionally on the floor before that, my couch in Romania: used as support for our backs, when we sat on the floor, eating pizza, a very special family occasion. My couch in Greece: where friends were sleeping over, my couch in Uruguay: we were jumping on it with my cousin, until we broke the left side, my mother was furious. This prototype of the couch which trespasses any household, any latitude, any time, loaded with such a multitude of memories,

of semantic meanings, symbols, experiences.

Common to everybody, and yet, so diverse.

If the symbols of Home, as objects, practices and spatial situations, are so universal, could it then be possible to imagine them as shared references? Can we think of a story, a narration of Home, which receives them and expresses them in a way which more than one individual could identify with? How does this story look like? In the common narration of Home, the architecture is universal, but not generic. It does not erase the individuals, nor does it generalize, homogenize.

We are not categorizeable numbers. Each person keeps their valuable story, their very own dream image. And all these metaphors, the doubles of Home, acquire spatial articulation, in a way that the materialized construct becomes a hybrid, entailing all these narrations, textures, shapes, colours, smells, biographies, desires, rituals and habits in their full expression and force. Yes, the couch is both exuberant and minimal, the table is both high and low, the light is both dim and bright, the room is both silent and bustling. This is our Common Home.

The Common Home is material but not materialized. It is an architectural construct, an object, a space. It has volume, proportions, grain.

It is conceptual, but not a concept. The Common Home is a palimpsest, an inventory of stories and associations. It contains all our precious objects, all our precious places. Our bed and our table, our herbs and our toys. We can do there all the activities we do in our Home. We can meet friends or we can isolate ourselves, we can climb on a tree or sleep in a hammock. The Common Home is fluid, always transforming, giving shape to our desires and our needs. Providing the supporting infrastructure for our concept of domesticity. It is not confined behind private walls, lost in the archipelago of individual apartments and houses, but it expands beyond them. It is reified in the space between us, and it bridges the gap, between me, and you, and all the others who happened to be here right now. We accidentally find ourselves together and we create this shared space, the

1_ Fifteen words by Tine van Aerschot, via Kaaitheater 2_ Dezeen (2015) Refugee camps are the “cities of tomorrow”, says humanitarian-aid expert.

Available at: http://www.dezeen. com/2015/11/23/refugeecamps-cities-of-tomorrowkillian-kleinschmidt-interviewhumanitarian-aid-expert/ (Accessed 4 June 2016) “‘Beyond Survival’ deals with the psyche of people, to recognise that they need to regain everything they have lost, and this is not material, this is about their dignity. I mean the Syrians, for their wellbeing, they need a fountain and a birdcage and a plant and they need to sit next to the fountain to drink tea.

That’s their expression of home.

So everybody at Zaatari was building fountains. (...) You had all sorts of models of fountains.

Fountains even built in the middle of tents. Huge fountains built with little pebbles and stuff.

They were investing all the little they had into having a water pump with water coming out.

There were even fountains with in-built televisions, light shows, you name it! The owner of my favourite restaurant had installed a pink fountain with pinkcoloured water coming out.”

Common Home, in order to define a place to meet, to interact, to exchange. It is a matrix, a structure, a syntax, it is the cloth whose fibres are stitched carefully, affectionately and ecstatically by the people living here, their yarns and tales, their innermost fears and longings. It brings together the most diverse persons, of all possible backgrounds, of intertwined journeys through continents and seas. And “no soft, smart, fragile, tender human tissue should ever be ripped apart because we differ”1.

The Common Home can exist only in a shared space, and on the other way around, any shared space can be a place to imagine the Common Home. The following chapter suggests different expressions of this Home, like snapshots of its eternally transforming nature. It is thought both as experimental design and as storytelling. The neighbourhood of Sint-Joostten-Noode in Brussels is used as the backdrop of this imagination, whereas the diverse dream constructs, as mental images, of the Common Home are projected onto the public space. As the ‘public space’ itself is not a homogeneous mathematical surface, but a polarized and poly-signified space, the Common Home uses each one of the selected spatial and social situations as its starting point for its current shape. In this sense, the projections are defined by and conditioned upon their very locality, which enriches them with layers of contextual signification and architectural quality. And vice-versa: the imaginary constructs of Home, completely dematerialized, softly touching upon the ground and the walls of the urban space, they offer to it a certain depth and density, they reveal its potential, and allow it to flourish by means of the power of the imaginary. Details become visible revealing the history of the bricks, the playground swings set a wind breeze into motion, the leaves of the trees sough, the place is speaking with a voice audible only to the careful listener.

To build a house you need cement and steel, bricks and mortar, a kitchen stove and a bathroom sink. To build a Home you need the

materials of dreams. Sometimes banal, other times imaginative. You need to allow unexpected combinations and irony to happen. In the refugee camp of Zaatari in Jordan, the Syrian inhabitants build all sorts of fountains next to their provisional houses: huge fountains made of pebbles, fountains with built-in televisions and even some with light shows2. They overpass the functionality of the mere survival which is associated with the camp, the roof over one’s head, the materiality of the house, and reproduce their concept of Home through the necessity of the superfluous. The Common Home collects all things redundant but essential to our idea of Home-ness, domesticity and familiarity and intertwines them in shared stories and architectural moments. It is a dérive through historiographies of Home, it offers parallel readings of its narrative material, protocols for its materialization. While wandering in the streets of Brussels, the Common Home is there, projected on squares, sidewalks, rare streets, backyards and empty plots. It suggests visions for the public space as a shared space. It gives shape to our desire to inhabit and to belong.

In the following chapter I approach the theme of the Common Home through experimental architectural projects which shift the border between the private and the public, the interior and the exterior, Architecture and Urban Design. Three different variations are suggested and projected as site-specific installations/ interventions in the area of Sint Joost: a sleeping cabin, a table and a playground. They all contain pieces of the idea of Home as mapped through the interviews conducted and presented in the third chapter. They work in different scales and on different sites, but they all recreate and combine fragments of Home-ness while starting from their very context, its shape, light, sound, rhythms and scars. You find yourself on a street junction, waiting for the traffic light to turn green. Can you imagine your Home projected here?

Sint-Joost-ten-Noode

Brussels Center Sint-Joost-ten-Noode

Brussels Capital Region

Aerial map

Population density (residents/ hectar)

< 2,5 50 - 110 111 - 260 261 - 320

One-person-households (per 100 households) non registered 40 - 44 45 - 57 58 - 66

Age Average (years) / 2015 Sint-Joost-ten-Noode

33,6

Brussels Region

37,4

Birth Rate (Births per 1000 residents) / 2007 Sint-Joost-ten-Noode Brussels Region

2,1 1,5

Unemployment Rate (per 100 residents) / 2013 Sint-Joost-ten-Noode Brussels Region

28,3 19,0

Rate of youngsters in families without income from work (per 100 residents under 18 years) / 2006 Sint-Joost-ten-Noode

45,0

Brussels Region

34,0

Median income of declarations (€) / 2012 Sint-Joost-ten-Noode

14,579

Brussels Region

18,526

Average rent for 2-bedroom accommodation (€) / 2013 Sint-Joost-ten-Noode

699

Brussels Region

732

Average selling price for a flat (€) / 2013 Sint-Joost-ten-Noode

161.933

Brussels Region

225.878

Rate of non-Belgian residents (per 100 residents) Sint-Joost-ten-Noode Brussels Region

33,1 28,1

With 1,1 km2 and 27.000 inhabitants, Sint-Joostten-Noode is the smallest of the Brusselsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; communes while maintaining the highest population density in whole Belgium (13th in the World Rank).

Situated in the immediate proximity to the Center of Brussels, Sint-Joost has the typical characteristics of a multicultural working-class neighbourhood. One third of its population has a foreign nationality, but there are also many Belgian citizens with an immigration background who have acquired the citizenship either through their long-term residency or because they have been born in Belgium. The most represented diaspora groups are the ones of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants (who came in the 50s) as well as Bulgarians (who come since the 00s).

The population of Sint-Joost is younger then the average of Brussels, which reflects mainly the higher birth rate among immigrant families.

Nevertheless, the neighbourhood is characterised by its vulnerable socioeconomic profile. The rate of residents receiving social subsidies is much higher than in other parts of the Region, while a large part of the population works for low-skilled and therefore less-paid jobs. Older generations of immigrants rarely have a higher and sometimes even secondary education degree, but also only a small percentage of the younger residents follow university studies. As the statistics indicate, most of them usually work for low-paid technical jobs or might be unemployed. The fragile socioeconomic status of the area is expected to be sustained, as the disadvantaged reality of limited opportunities is delivered from generation to generation.

The percentage of single households in Sint Joost is near the regional average. It mainly concerns single men (construction workers), which is atypical, and they are predominantly concentrated around the North Station and the square of Sint Joost.

Within this complex and fragile sociocultural context, the presented interventions, as dream projections of the Common Home, aim at expressing the diversity of domesticities and cultures, as well as their common ground, as ground of negotiation, as the binding material of its population.

The Sleeping Cabin

The Table

The Playground

In Leuvensesteenweg number 89, in front of the square of Sint-Joost, lies an empty plot. The building which once stood here has been demolished since years but nothing has been built in its place, which is quite extraordinary for such a central location, with a lot of commercial activities and social interactions. The plot has a very narrow but deep layout, with 5,4 m. width and 37 m. depth, which allows it to maintain a degree of privacy and tranquillity, despite the hustle and bustle of its surroundings. The entrance and view are blocked through a 4 m. high panel.

The particular qualities of this site allow me to use it for the first of the projections, the Sleeping Cabin. This prototype derives mainly from Dries’ narration of the Home as a place to sleep, and therefore to withdraw from social life. But there were also other interviewees who identified their Home as a place to rest and relax at the end of the day. The Sleeping Cabin is a wooden-frame

On the square of Sint-Joost and the surrounding streets a long sculptural element is unrolling: the Table. This is a projection of maybe the most prominent space which defines Home for the interviewees, crossing all cultures, backgrounds, lifestyles, family formations and age groups. The table has emerged as a very important locus within the domestic realm of the respondents. It might be inside of the kitchen or in a room adjacent to it.

People spend time there alone, or with family members and friends. It is used not only for eating, but also for chatting, working, playing, putting on groceries from the supermarket. And most importantly, these activities take place simultaneously.

One can sit on the chair next to the table and discuss with somebody who is a little bit further, cooking in the kitchen, without constantly maintaining eye-contact. The table remains the reference point.

It is the table of Clémence and Hajar which unites all family members much more than the living room. But it is also a memory object, such as the Kotatsu table from Yoshiko’s narrations, an object she seeks to reproduce, partly for its practical advantages, partly because of the layers of intimacy, identity and belonging attached to it. Moreover, it is a table with different heights and uses, such as a lower coffee table for Merve, who was so proud to tell us that she has five of them in the living room, treating her guests with Turkish tea and coffee, a ritual deeply rooted in her culture of domesticity.

The second installation seeks to embrace and express all those associations evoked by the prototype of the Table. It unfolds over streets and sidewalks, climbs over buildings,

Between the streets of Sint-Jooststraat and de Liedekerkestraat spans the Liedekerkepark with the playground of Sint-Joost. Although it has entrances on both sides, the one to the

capsule hanging from the existing trusses which keep the walls of the neighbouring buildings apart. Its high position evokes the feeling of lifting from the earthly life and its tensions.

Deeper in the plot there is a big dining table and a kitchen. Positioned in this central location but protected through their depth, cooking and eating get their space in the intermediate territory of the semi-public, semi-private, or otherwise the common. In this sense, this intervention explores and formulates Dries’ three levels of the definition of Home: The City-level (through its location), the Commons (through the kitchen) and the Private (through the Sleeping Cabin).

and during that it varies in heights, from a dining table to a Kotatsu, from a bar to have a lunch break to a low coffee table.

Liedekerkestraat is considered the rear one and is permanently closed. The walls of the entrances are built in brick with wide symmetrical openings in the form of arcades. The park has a lot of old trees, two wooden pavilions and some toys, nevertheless the children’s structures are quite repetitive, the pavilions are rarely appropriated and the site is not used in its full potential, so as to reveal its qualities.

The third intervention refers to the importance of outdoors recreation areas when the Home also includes children of young age and concerns the reconversion of the playground into a space which explores the elements of adventure, of dream, of the conquest. Diverse structures are employed for the games: Lifted tubes to crawl inside whirl like snakes between the trees, varying in width and height, closed or open material.

A climbing mountain with an oblique side to slide back down. A climbing tower to conquest and put a flag on top, while reaching over the surrounding wall and taking a look to the buildings and hidden backyards around. A hammock to daydream, frames and wires to hang from.

In the central part of the Playground a barbecue area is introduced, deriving from the will of parents to also appropriate the space of the playground in a way that offers more common time between generations, but also among neighbours. Finally, a new structure is proposed for the entrance area. The shape of the arcaded wall is reproduced in wooden replicas and arranged in a symmetrical way which defines a semi-public space, between a labyrinth and a place of meditation. The wooden walls are made as shelves, where people can bring and position objects they identify with, games or memorabilia, turning them into a living museum of the cultures of Sint-Joost.

intervention area

The Playground The Table

The Sleeping Cabin

epilogue

Reaching the end of this logbook, a typical conclusion becomes irrelevant. The question remains open. What is Home? What are the spatial tactics to (re)construct and appropriate it? The present booklet functions as initiator of an ongoing research question, it does not intend to exhaust the answers, nor the ways to approach it. Rather than that, it proposes possible methods of exploration by testing diverse methodological tools. It does not seek a final conclusion, but aspires to draft a dynamic frame for a continuous dialogue.

The dissertation project Home is where you are (not) is perceived as a broader research project that aims at establishing an inclusive and receptive architectural practice, a learning-by-doing, and learning-from-the-others. Theoretical readings, narrative interviews, personal mappings and researchby-design: these are only some of the traditional and experimental methods to approach the research question, to relate to a greater narration. It is not only the boundaries of the notion of Home which have been explored through this process, but also the ones of the architectural discipline. It was both the subject and the method of the Master Thesis which sought to define a critical and relevant practice within the traditional architectural field. It was the desire to challenge the rigid architectural boundaries and welcome interdisciplinary cross-fertilizations. It was the belief that Architecture expands beyond the mere materiality and functionality of our surroundings, that it stimulates our imagination, that it is perceived differently by each one of us, that it can both solace and shake us.

That its inescapability lies in the fact that it always becomes the backdrop of our most intimate experiences and therefore evokes memories and associations. And ultimately, that Architecture is deeply connected with our human experience, and to this experience, this human-ness and fragility, it also has to pay tribute.

At the end of this project, it is equally impossible to define both Home and Architecture. But this has never been my intention whatsoever.

appendix #1

Additional Interviewees Sketches

Fatemeh female 28 years old psychology student Iranian origin (in Belgium since 2001) lives with her mother and sister

Jonas male 26 years old employee Belgian origin lives with his partner (Ruta: opposite side)

Ruta female 26 years old student at the conservatory Lithuanian origin (in Belgium since 2012) lives with her partner (Jonas: opposite side)

Nikos male 34 years old sound engineer Greek origin (in Belgium since 2005) lives with his wife

Nina female 25 years old works at a human-rights NGO Bulgarian origin lives with her partner and sister

The presentation of the Master Thesis was held in June 2016.

It consisted of the prints of the three interventions, their scale models, as well as the accompanying publications (the current booklet, a flyer and a call for contributions).

The panels were made of two parts: the city context printed on hard paper and the intervention superimposed on tracing paper which was textured with marble. This superimposition dimmed the detailed and reality-bound image of the city and gave an imaginary dimension to the installations, which almost seemed to float in space and to be vaguely projected into their location, as if emerging out of a dream.

For the models I used wax in pale grey-blue colour for the city context (streets and buildings) and different materials for each intervention (brass for the sleeping cabin, wood for the arcaded library structure of the playground and cardboard for the continuously varying table).

The texture which resulted from the wax mold, in combination with its colour and transparency,

gave it a sense of vagueness, abstraction and softness, a fleeing image like the one we have in dreams. The prototypes on the contrary had a detailed shape and precise materiality, so that in the end each model looked like a suggestion of a possible materialisation for the dream constructs of the Common Home.

Displayed next to each other, the presentation materials almost resembled a comic illustration for the city of Brussels. On the one hand the designs were highly detailed, drawing attention to street lines, brick textures, ventilation shafts and balcony railings. On the other hand, the interventions had an almost impossible and provocative character and, at the same time, their provocation remained gentle and playful.

They constructed narratives for the city in order to inspire and to invite. Both the interventions as such as well as the presentation technique suggested architectural constructs in the format of relational aesthetics, establishing a link between the artefact and the viewer and being activated through their interaction, use and imagination.

appendix #2

Presentation Materials

bibliography/ image credits

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