Dwelling: From the Inside

This book is a demonstration on how the idea of dwelling is transformed into the materiality of architecture through the design process that highlights the inhabitation as the key aspect of the dwelling. Heidegger in his essay Building Dwelling Thinking proposed the idea of the relationship between man and space as the fundamental understanding of dwelling. “Man’s relation to locales, and through locales to space, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, thought essentially” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 359). An attempt to understand dwelling is essentially the understanding of the relationship between the dwelling environment and its inhabitant.

Heidegger posed two main questions on what it is to dwell and how building belongs to the dwelling. These questions represent a fundamental inquiry on the transformation of the abstract concept of inhabitation into the physical manifestation of building to accommodate such inhabitation. To think about the dwelling and its architectural manifestation thus requires an understanding of how man relates to the place. “For him, it was significant that places of daily occupation are intertwined with the lives of those who use them” (Sharr & Unwin, 2001, p. 60). The idea of dwelling is manifested in the trace that represents the human engagement with the place.

The question on what is dwelling and how it is physically materialised also reflects the theme of dialectic between the idea of house and home--between the material and immaterial idea of domestic environment. “A house is not always a home because one is an object and the other is a perception. It is unusual to immediately feel at home. As the term ‘homemaker’ indicates, the home is made” (Hill, 2006, p. 26). In the making of a home, or in the materialisation of the dwelling idea, the process of marking becomes the effort to organise and define the territory of the inhabitants; this could be performed through the establishment of boundaries, the placing of objects and the arrangement of stuff (Wise, 2006). The process of marking, however, is not a simple one, particularly because idea of home contains various internal dimensions: nostalgia, intimacy and privacy, domesticity, commodity and delight, ease, light and air, efficiency, style and substance, austerity, and comfort and wellbeing (Rybczynski, 1987); these raise a further question on how the process of materialising the dwelling (or home) may be performed to maintain its fundamental meaning as the setting for inhabitation.

Discussion on the dwelling and the process of its materialisation from the interior perspective becomes particularly critical since the idea of dwelling massively contains the subjective dimension and experience in the occupants’ everyday life. Understanding the dwelling from the perspective of interior means seeing the dwelling from the inside (Franck & Lepori, 2000), locating the occupants as subjects rather than objects and relating the subjects with the dwelling space in a reciprocal transaction. As an attempt to systematically reveal the process of materialising the dwelling from the interior perspective, the following discussion presents two complementary ideas: dwelling as a lived interior, and dwelling as an interior system.

Image by Adika Ramaghazy