DOMESTICA ELASTICA
A conversation with Professor Chhaya on the “Living and Working Realities of Domesticity.”
Transcribed from a Lecture and Conversation at the Avani Institute of Design, moderated by Dr. Soumini Raja ( Associate professor and HOD , Avani institute of Design )
Professor Neelkanth Chhaya
Professor Chhaya has been an academic and practising architect for the last 40 years. He taught for 26 years at CEPT university Ahmedabad from where he retired as Dean from the Faculty of Architecture 2013, subsequently he has been an adjunct faculty at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology Bangalore. Over the last few years, he has coordinated the Gandhi heritage sites documentation project and his architectural practice is focused on culturally and environmentally appropriate design. It has always emphasised innovative application of local skills and materials.
What Domestic?
The public and the private have constantly been in a state of flux often negotiating with the self and the city. Urban environmental fragilities have expanded and contracted with the elastic nature of space. The collapse of the public sphere, contraction of domestic space and the altered nature of work powered by technology and the World Wide Web have all generated intrusions in that which we term “Domestic”.
During this Pandemic we experienced workspace windows open into our bedrooms. We conducted Board meetings and taught classrooms on our kitchen counters. We loitered into our balconies and ate with our neighbours, watching as it transformed into a public space. We saw too much of ourselves on screens. Way more than a mirror has ever reflected and we are doing so at this very moment.
What is now normal in the Domestic world? What forces exist within the human body and its elastic perimeters? What are the realities of domesticity we face in a fickle environment? How do we negotiate our way through these newly occupied spaces?
Professor Chhaya : “ The title realities of ‘domesticity’ set me thinking and Soumini’s description of the Home as a kind of Prison in the last few minutes reinforced certain senses of the home that were bothering me when we talk about domesticity.
Most of the time Domestic is opposed to the public and the division of the self - into a private ‘self’ and the public ‘mask’ is complete in most cases. In the last two years we have kept the mask only for the screen. In real life the mask could be dropped and that has led to some horrible situations at times within the home.
So what is this Domestic ?
Look at the word Domus in Latin. The Domus was the house of the well-to-do person, probably a Patrician. He had a farm outside the city. Slaves were working on the farm and all he had to do ( It is always He ) was hold the family together in the city and continue the line. So the words associated with the Domus are Familia and Paterfamilias. Now Paterfamilias becomes important because it's the lineage of family, in that period and culture was only through the Male line and the other members who lived in the Domus were somehow subservient to this Patriarch.
This continues in many ways to define the Domus and also to define the Res Publica. The Public space is framed as the counter image of the Patriarchal home, and the Patriarchal state as this brings the politics of space into the arena of Power. That is very very disturbing about the Domus.
Lineage means property and ‘private property’ is the basis of the Domus. This means Customary behaviour, this means Rules according to gender, age, generational roles and this means Identity. All these are today in contestation, the question of unjust distribution of property, the question of unjust customary behaviours and the question of identity as a force for confrontation. These three all originate in the Domus /Res publica subdivision. The division of the self into the private ‘self’ and the external ‘mask’.
It is important to remember that the Domus was the house of the Patrician. The Helot or the worker or the artisan in Rome had his work and house both together. The Patrician never did any work, there were people working for him. The house was the place of no-work and if you don’t work, you gain the agency to participate in the politics of the city. You could go to the forum if you’re not a worker. You cannot if you’re a worker. But the artisan was a worker and had no rights to be in the forum. This is a very interesting division.
This is not a division which is not reflected in other cultures since Rome used the word Domus. The word came from there but there are shades of difference. In Africa for example, with the smaller scale of organisation of society, each individual had what we today call a hut and when the person died, the house was allowed to return back to the soil with the death of the individual. So the family was a loose grouping. Similarly in the nomadic tribes of Kutch.
Take the Indian ‘Mohalla’. A Mohalla is named for the kind of work for which it is famous and every family in the Mohalla or at least the head of every family in the mohalla has political agency through the guild. It’s different from the Roman model where only the Patrician had agency. The division of work and domesticity is a very very important marker of two different kinds of politics, two different kinds of sense of power, that could be held and in turn affects the form of the house as an ‘interiorised’ domain.
They say, “Every Englishman’s home is his Castle”. This connotes a certain kind of behaviour within this “Castle”. We have seen during the Pandemic, an increase in Domestic violence, an increase in misbehaviour. The idea of the home as the secure domain of the lineage is something which itself is being called into question by today’s experiences. In that sense I guess the introduction of the ‘screen’ is a very good thing. That it is allowing all of us ‘Faces’ to be. And I wish all of us to take off the mask and be whatever we are on screen which is possible to do very differently in the Domus since you’re in somebody’s house. Politeness requires us to follow the norms of that house. This is a very interesting new kind of space that is evolving, and I think we should make use of it as much as possible.
If Architecturally we are aware that the home is not a container anymore, we must question - What is the Home? If it does not contain the tensions inside, what is its’ role?
When the Maal Gaadi’s ( Bullock carts ) of Kutch are on the move the animals lead the way. When evening falls they come to a place where there might be some water, a tree or two, maybe a little bit of a forage for the animals and they rest there for the night. In Gujarati such a place is called “Padaav”, which means a place where you ‘Fall’ for rest. In Urdu it might be the “Muqaam”- the Camp.
This sense of a pause in the journey is something which is extremely interesting.
Is the Home a final or complete Enclosure or is it the act of Pausing? If we define the home as an act of pausing then you get a different parameter altogether. I suggest there is much to learn from musicians. If Architecturally we are aware that the home is not a container anymore, we must question - What is the Home then? If it does not contain the tensions inside, what is its’ role?
In North Indian classical music they call a “Jagah” (place) when you reach a point where you see potential for a new work. When I looked for Urdu meanings of the word “Jagah”, it was fascinating, it means a situation. Similar words are “Surat” that means Face and “Haalat” that is a state of existence. It could also mean bearings, direction, footing, latitude, locality, location, locus, longitude, position, coast, site, spot, stage, where and whereabouts. Wonderful. This is what the Urdu language has seen a pause to be.
A pause is the beginning point of the way of finding a new life.
It is the Muqaam from where you start new things.
But you always have to have a Muqaam.
The Pause is an essential idea.
And life is not as an enclosure with lines which is what a plan is, and we architects tend to talk like that but is a bundle of lines, an entanglement of lines, many lines passing through that become a Home. And it is about moving as much as it is about pausing, it is not about fixing identities which the enclosure is, it is not about ownership, or fixity.
Tim Ingold in Being alive, says “My contention is that lives are led, not inside places but through, around, to and from them, from and to places elsewhere. I use the term wayfare to describe the embodied experience of this perambulatory movement. It is as wayfarers then that human beings inhabit the Earth. A house for example is a place where the lines of its residents are tightly knotted together but these lines are no more contained within the house then are threads contained within a knot rather they trail beyond it only to become caught up with other lines, other ‘places’ as our threads in other knots.”
This is a new conception, that allows us to put away the word Domus and the anxiety of domesticity. The wayfarer mind, the wayfarer heart gives us hope even if we are confined to a locus or location. Remember it is a Muqaam, or a Padhaav, not a container in which you are imprisoned. With that these pandemic years loose their edge of deadening us and making us lose hope.
With that we can move to new territories of finding rest, finding a pause.”
Domestic Elastic
Zameer Basrai Co-Founder The Busride Design Studio + The BusrideLab
Thank you Professor Chhaya for providing such lucid thoughts on domesticity. It is so exciting to present my drawings now.
I have been working on the idea of ‘Live' and ‘Work’ so I have pulled out some of those drawings. The presentation is called Domestica Elastica. It’s broadly responsive to the theme we are discussing, and when I read the brief I began thinking about the ‘Normal’.
This “Normal” is not something that you can be satisfied with. This so-called Normal that we had before the Pandemic is definitely not something we must return to. Hopefully the pandemic has created an ‘Abnormal’ that is now a permanent contestation. We can continue on from here and not look back that would have normally created the most sub-standard situations. Sub-human housing for example, some of the most standardised and rigid housing even for the affluent. I don’t think its a desirable normal to return to.
I was here trying to draw the Foam that Peter Sloterdjik, the German philosopher talks about. With the breakdowns of the Grand narratives of the world, we are now looking at a Poly Cosmology with many worlds that we now inhabit.
The very interesting one was the Inter-ignorant systems, so they are actual worlds that once you occupy, you feel that they are complete in their own kind of formation and it’s a very interesting idea but the Foam metaphor is very difficult to draw, it’s something that you have to model or use some form of multi-sensorial media. Even when Peter Sloterdjik writes about this idea and draws it, it becomes kind of limiting. Each of these creates a view point and each of these worlds create a centre. Why did I draw a tunnel? I think we are on a Third level tunnel looking at the Second level tunnel and housing a Final tunnel which is really the tunnel that is going to suck us all in.
We can see it in New York today, we can see it with the state of the environment and what is happening to it, with people still completely rejecting the worldview of precisely that which is happening to them.
This world view has now collapsed, since the world changing occurrence of the last one and a half years. These mini worlds now have to press against each other and yield together a little bit more committedly. Eventually you’ll look into another sphere of this foam. The tunnel in the drawing is a very vicious tunnel, it shows you the end and some of the darker spots in this tunnel are your homes which you kind of want to anchor, trying to keep stoic, and you want to hold onto things while you’re getting sucked in. It is this formation that causes us to think that Home is a place for intimacy, escape, reflection only. Our imagination of ‘Home’ starts becoming extremely narrow when you start thinking of it as something stoic and an inward-held moment in this tunnel.
This is a medium sized home, mine, a home which is pre-equipped with mobility. We have a little mobile cabinet that unfolds and a person can occupy that cabinet and there is just that much.
There are also some folding units, like the dining table, the storage units, a composition of chairs so you can store chairs inside that little unit. We have actually seen that space grow immensely in the house. Every family member has been using it for various purposes. It’s a place which can be partially acoustically isolated and can be physically isolated as well. People venture to this place to get some respite from each other. I think it’s the smallest, most compact space to connect to the world. Its so strange to connect to things we’ve never imagined by walking into a cabinet. We have left this some times with 45 degrees, with 90 degrees and created various situations in the house that have basically allowed us to deal with the pandemic. How to deal with storage, with kids, and also with school. It’s already a house enabled with mobility and it’s proven quite useful in that way.
This is the drawing where we formalised Half-time in the studio where everyone discovered they could live and work.
Literally live-work 50-50, so you don’t have to waste your waking hours at work or rather at a ‘location' called work. The location has now completely been compromised. We are looking at work happening throughout the day. On the right hand side there is an impression of studio was. The only commitment we’ve ever made is to have a good time. The idea of intimacy was so core to the studio that we need to spend that much time together. Half time has opened up a new avenue to the people at the studio, they have actually been able to come in and out of work by actually being at home. The sphere on the left, is the creation of the studio but it’s really home and also you’re pulled towards the physical space of the studio for some amount of work but there are also times in the day, within half an hour that you can go very far from the idea of work and you are literally back home.
This kind of drawing is usually seen when we are discussing domains within the home.
This home is a medium sized home, and it has seen a very drastic change in domain ( in terms of ‘Gender Domain’ to be very clear ). There is a certain Exit from work for the man and it is almost a kind of a compensation at home for his work-exit. Due to the overlapping domains, it has actually created very interesting vacuums in the house which have actually allowed pigeons to occupy large parts of the house. So nature has actually kind of eaten into this household because of some spaces not being used adequately and also due to these overlapping domains of people in the house.
This is an extremely small house. It barely took care of the requirements of the occupants and it has completely been turned inside out.
The house was primarily occupied by a male who wasn’t working. This house was turned inside out initially to start an embroidery business and eventually to start a Dabba-system (lunch-box system) to compensate for the income of the house; which got messed up during the early pandemic period. The house now completely opens up to become a store room. The beds were made vertical and the entire space was used for storage. Along with this there was a preparation space which barely left any room to sleep. So the sleeping function, which is normally an association of the home, was also compromised. Part of the family actually slept in another house. Two or three families created this expansion of space together. A lot of outdoor space was connected into the interior to accommodate so much production in the space.
This is an extremely large set of houses and during this period have created internal buffers within it.
The core family holds themselves in a very confined space. The layers are created around it to buffer the family from the outside. So whoever is entering the premises has to go through many layers of checkpoints or filters along with a lot of modulations going outward as well. As you leave the household, there are so many protocols. All five modules are networked and each of them are really grand houses/ homes. The family has actually given away large parts of their house to create Buffer spaces. These create extremely promiscuous spaces within. At that level of the core house, they are extremely connected to the other four and at that level there is no buffer.
This is the space of the second home.
A place which is slightly cut away from the city, a space of respite and a safe space. It’s quite telling in what you take away from your city home, what are some of the things which you literally travel with. Then there are also the things that you gain from the home, the new lifestyle, connect to nature, connect to a rural context and that takes you back to inform your city home. That portrays little duality; the darker portion shows the home that fragments out to the second home and extra fragments get added together to form the arrangement.
This is an unfortunate home.
This home is temporary and it is created on construction sites. So for a long time, in Mumbai, construction labourers were basically living on the site just to be able to continue with the work. There used to be quarters set up even for the smallest of sites. There would be a room that would be handed over last. These were people who lived comfortably in the villages with a lovely connection to nature but, looking for better prospects have moved to the city, they started living in the city home which is a site of construction. It felt like a transgression when you go to these sites.
This is a city home that was abandoned.
There was a person who had been put on a half-time salary for one and a half years because the local train could not adhere to the site hence it’s a fractured connection. The local train still does not connect him to his work. It is absurd, as someone who has not worked for one and half years on a half salary but still connected to the place of employment.
This is the thickening of the threshold of the home.
This is something that is maybe obvious, that the home has to accommodate extra boundaries. You’re using the home to create some extra boundaries to deal with things, people from outside. This particular diagram was drawn for a park which was closed for the longest time, and the road outside was used as a park. There was also a temple which was providing services at the threshold. There was a huge line that used to form on the road, where the temple edge has become a new edge for transactions, in a thickening of threshold.
This is a drawing of a new region.
This represents being locked up in a cupboard, being connected so far with the things that you would think that are supposed to be physical connections. These three things showcase the house opening up and connecting to things as rigid as you, while sometimes it’s connecting to things that are extremely fluid and networked. You might be connected in a small way but you see connections are possible way beyond, in other networks. This is also a drawing about being networked and finding a new region. The more we closed in, the Further it went out.
This is the psychedelic end of our presentation. Domestica Elastica. If Architecturally we are aware that the home is not a container anymore, we must question - What is the Home then? If it does not contain the tensions inside, what is its’ role?
It is not new to observe that the Home has permanently stretched and it’s immense capacities to accommodate live and work has been experienced. The home need not be a barricade against the outside world but a place receptive to external stimuli, a location within a larger, fluid, continuous field.
End Thoughts
“An Architecture student once said he’d be very happy to carry his home in his pocket on his travels and put it up anywhere. This is an idea you began the lecture with Professor Chhaya, this idea of a community on their feet, moving. However within Architecture we see this idea of Home as a physical property, something to Own. Are there windows opening up in this idea, and are these walls being perforated?”
I think perforations depend on enclosures. It is so deeply rooted even in our census, you name them ‘Pakka’ and ‘Kaccha’. You innumerate these to categorise people. It’s very deep rooted. The House is a now a Product. This fact makes the design field beholden to the market which needs products to sell. Lets put this Notion aside completely. The lines that move across are movements of living creatures.
The cupboard that Zameer spoke of reminded me of my childhood spaces where I could become small and disappear from the house and at least I though nobody knew I existed. I could be in another dreamworld. This disappearance, becoming ‘intangible’ was a way of becoming completely connected to the world.
There are threads, and between these threads there are spaces. I can move through these spaces in order that I can be Alive. The moment I accept the enclosure then I become a Thing myself. I have become a dead phenomenon. I don’t want my house to do that to me.
We have to move away from the literal applications of words like wall or window because they can be very deceptive. For example when you say ‘Window of opportunity’ it’s a very very Greedy device. I think being alive means being unconfined, being on the move, but always needing a degree of connectedness. And I think this is something which makes us think about Architecture in a different way.
In the Viharas, the monks sleep in a rock-like cell. It’s completely enclosed. You can’t get a sound in. Nothing happens.
Yet they are the freest souls IF they succeed.
That hard, completely ungiving space. It has to be small. They have to disappear in it somehow. This is something which is more metaphorical than real.
That is what makes the home, so importantly free of the market. The market has tried its best to make the home into a product. As Architects we have mostly helped in this, but now we have this different notion of home, the market will try to take this as well. Zameer’s sketches will become useful for the market and we got to be damn careful about it.
"I find the idea of threshold and liminality in the spaces that you were creating through your sketches very interesting. How do you see the understanding you’ve gained of these houses you have diagrammed to arrive at a different understanding of Domesticity? How has this changed your practice looking at architecture post-pandemic?
Zameer :
As a studio we have definite built a distrust in aesthetic and composition. We are probably exiting the purely ‘visual' aspect of Architecture. It is a very narrow space, being confined only to Aesthetic and Compositional solutions. We do see this in practice and we do get pulled in as well. I do feel with conviction that mobility within a home is important and it doesn’t have to be just mobile cabinets. If domains have to be more fluid and physical space enables enough change within a home, even that is an achievement. In Interior design practice we are presented with MIVANconstructed buildings which are actually load bearing walls, and you are literally confined to immovable ‘Rooms’, which are pre-defined for you. There is very limited room to create. And this is just Apartments, there is so much to unpack from other definitions of Home.
Professor Chhaya :
The lockable cupboard will have to disappear from our imagination. In the old Ahmedabad houses there used to be a room called Ordo. Ordo was made of thick walls, and every valuable of the house, every Heirloom was kept there. It could be locked with thick doors. That will now go. I think now we will have little bags and our homes will disperse and come back repeatedly. These will be multilocational because we do things in all kind of locations. We open up our laptops in restaurants. We do this kind of thing all the time. The home will no longer be something which is a container but it will be your life intersecting with another life, or lives.
Professor Chhaya :
These lives come together. After a while they do other things and go somewhere else. This kind of coming and going WAS the home because the memories of making the home remain in the construction of that home so it was never a finished thing. Ever. It always involved bringing things and taking them out, and everyday you washed it, cleaned it, and made an alpana on the floor. Everyday the home was being MADE. We want a home which is maintenance free, which is forever. That is something that only the Patrician should want and we don’t want patricians anymore.
“Some homes in antiquity all the way back from pre-historic caves seen to be able to harness deep memory. Current home seems to create collective amnesia. How can we start to create fun/ engaging relationship with our own memories to populate new homes?”
Professor Chhaya :
The division of labour between one who ‘builds’ the home and one who ‘makes’ a home is a division which is very unfortunate. Also the division in time between what was the beginning of the home and what is the mature face of the home, is also a problem. If you look at the act of putting brick upon brick, or inserting wood upon wood and constantly making, making and making, there is a whole set of memories that come with that. Then this ‘container’ is not just a container, it would be richly provided with human activity. It was a place where humans have put things together very skill-fully or clumsily. It had lots of memories ingrained into it.
Professor Chhaya :
Nowadays, we simply ‘get’ a house. It’s not going to be fun occupying that. The whole process of inhabiting the house means that I have to fight with my wife about what to put where, or telling the children you can’t keep the things there. Out of all these conversations emerges the new shape of the house. This is the fun part as you are re-arranging the things with someone else without breaking anything. Or breaking things very slightly. In apartments all over the country, people find ways of inhabiting, and families which have happy relationships do it well. In flats where they try to stay away from the home, ( because home-life is so stressful) nothing will happen, it will never be inhabited. The fun goes out of inhabitation.
Zameer :
May I provide a counterpoint? I am technologically challenged, and when I change my phone I purge everything. I start saving numbers from scratch and I don’t understand this anxiety with memories. We have the cloud now and a large part of memories are digital and why ask for Brick and Mortar memories?
Professor Chhaya :
Thats not completely true. We still have bodies, we have not yet become completely intangible. There are shape-remembering alloys as well, even metals have memory. The same way, our bodies have memory, our tongues or hands or ears. And so many other places too :) I think it is something which requires a physical mirror. The world is the mirror to your body and your body is the mirror to the world. If we say that then you got to have both kinds. Both tangible and intangible ones. And Memories are not Intangible
Professor Chhaya :
Aren’t these things constantly happening and dispersing? Memories are not like Rocks, memories are more like Leaves. They sprout, and then they fall when they are no longer able to produce Chlorophyll. So a new memory can always grow and that’s the beauty of this thing which is both physically present but capable of transformation. I think this is something which is very subtle.
Zameer : I think there could be some conversation on the context of Home. Professor Chhaya spoke about networked lives, where one person’s life joins another person’s life and that intersects another set of lives. I think this also intersects a set of actions. You have actions together, actions alone, if you don’t think that the home need be the location for everything. Even for memories, the location might be the place around your lane, because that is where a certain action took place.
It finally is all home. It is just not our understanding of a space confined within walls. Similarly, in practice we have narrowed down the scope of Interior, or how to respond to context. We cannot use our walls to isolate ourselves. We tend to consider ‘home’ only from main door inward.
“The ideas of ‘Thehraav’ or ‘Haal’ in Music along with being a site for pausing, both are opportunities to expand, contract and play with time. Could you speak about these possibilities of Time and Temporality with respect to the domestic?”
Professor Chhaya : ‘Sunday’ maybe a easy entry into this. We have a week, and the family is doing whatever each person does. The line have shot out and come back. Sunday is a day when there is a Thehraav and Sunday is the day when you make very good food and spend lot of time together talking about things. And I think the Thehraav happens in our home through events, n0t so much with things, through what happens with time. The rhythm of the week, the rhythm of the month, of the seasons, of the years, even in places which are now completely urban, rhythms are still operational. This is where the Thehraav comes in.
Professor Chhaya : The rhythmicity of the home in time, is what each family develops in their own way. Though society gives us holidays on a Sunday, yet every family has traditions and rhythms of their own through birthdays, anniversaries etc. This is the kind of Thehraav that the house as a physical entity has. This is where my mother always used to sit, and that chair or that location still radiates the sense of peace that she created. These connections are built into structures, and are related to both making the house and inhabiting the house.
Zameer :
Prof Chhaya, I remember a talk where you spoke about how you find Bombay too fast for you. You had said It’s not fast or slow, it’s rhythmic or arhythmic. I think that’s a very useful way of engaging, and we’ve been thinking about speed a lot at the studio. What does the jugal-bandi offer, what do mashups offer, in terms of speed. We have been thinking about our rhythmicity ever since with the city.
“Whose memory do we populate the home with? Who is ‘our’ or ‘us’? What could the role of the Architect be in participating in this process?”
Professor Chhaya : Everything that has come into existence has a history, has a formative process. My body is formed in a certain way, I inherited some genetics, I developed habits which are mine and I grew up in different places that became me. Any kind of line that is moving, ( I consider each individual a line ) is carrying with it an entire history of Formation, which is always trying to find its expression. When it meets another line, both try to sense their histories of formation. As more lines meet, these history of formation becomes more complicated and sometimes result in fights, sometimes in wonderful expressions of love.
The house is where these lines, or histories of formations intersect. The designer is one more such line. I think the designer should consider herself as someone who was found by the other lines, who found in her something interesting. That itself is indicative of a possible relationship.
In our old languages we called this ‘Runanubandha’. In previous births, previous experiences even in this life, you have become indebted to other lines and through that you are tied to them. Constantly, these lines are trying to pay off this debt. Some can even be paid off by a smile, or the happiness of a chance encounter.
The relationships or these histories or memories are not chosen. Nobody declares that THESE are the memories that will populate the house. It is something that happens as the house is inhabited. It may even take several years, from the design, to the building, to the occupation. You start living there, you start inhabiting it, but everybody will be involved. You may try to keep some memories out, but they just barge in because they are connected. I cannot keep these memories out, because they are connected.
“If Home is a choreography of bodies occupying space, the idea of ability, gender, age, space-Is it a more inclusive solution to classify houses in different types and what role does an architect play here?”
Zameer : If we don't look at the Home as a biography, or even as a set of spaces then we get a resultant set of actions or activities. The mapping of these actions is actually a very interesting starting point. We dissolve most of the ‘personality’ in the space, and we prioritise what people do, and this is a nice starting point. It creates a few synergies, when you can see certain actions have certain affinity, they get clumped together. Some are shared, and some become solo activities. The Herman Hertzberger way to enable this is a kind of a polyvalence, where you create things which are open ended. Small things are used in multiple ways. We don’t only consider 60’s mobility as flexibility, 60’s Polyvalence is useful to accommodate more. So the more you create open-ended activities in mind, the more utility is created. So it could be something rigid and un-moving but is shaped in a way that could actually accommodate for more or it could be something transformative or flexible, so as the day passes, or months pass it could accommodate another set of lives in it.
Professor Chhaya : I had an image of fungi growing in vast mycelial networks in the forest, growing between each of the strong immovable trees. Maybe the Home consists of various rates of change, and various forms of movements. The grandmother doesn’t move at all, while the kids run in and out, and are inhabiting several houses, eating whatever they find interesting. For these different phenomena the House needs a kind of Armature which has to provide a certain Resistance. Instead of cleaning up everything and creating a space which is completely neutral, it’s good to have spaces which provide a certain degree of Resistance. These spaces require humans to DO things in order to inhabit them in the manner they feel right.
This is why Old Houses are very interesting to live in, with someone having created some idiotically small space, and now you have to really push yourself to inhabit that space. You feel ingenious when you manage something in Homes like this. I find the idea of flexibility very mechanical. It maybe better to call it ‘The ease’ of inhabiting a home. The sense of ease comes from both the users actions and the object which is being used.
“We have been talking about creating memories, creating behaviour inside home, but what if there is no Room at all? What if the idea of a home is not even a room?”
Professor Chhaya :
It’s a terribly unjust situation. But humans are quite capable of unimaginable resilience. I once told a student to study those who are living in very tiny spaces and one of the houses they went to of a women who had this husband who was a drunkard, took away all the money so finally she found the courage to throw him out. Though the women had this daughter and only one room to cater to her. The students asked this women is there anything that makes you feel happy? And she took out a potted plant which she had kept in one corner of the room. She says-this thing, I water it everyday and see it grow. This makes me happy.
I personally grew up in a one room house, five people sleeping in one room, and have also lived in a Bombay chawl. These are terrible places from one point of view but there are certain ways you find to making your own space. But there are those who have no Opportunity to do even this. These are people who are oppressed in such a way that whatever they do, even if they have a ‘house’, they have no opportunity of making themselves Inhabitants.
They cannot become inhabitants. In our society, we do this so often. They can only become tolerated users. We do this to people we displace, for work, for various projects. And we say, “We will give you a House”.
In this statement we create the first step in not becoming an ‘inhabitant’, but becoming some sort of user of a Government service. This is where we have been so unjust, in summarily taking away a dwelling, we have misunderstood the sense of Domestic.
THE END IS HERE.