Dwelling, House or Home?

Dwelling, House or Home?

---

Written by Raymond Smith
APRIL 2024

---

What does it mean to dwell, what informs the shape and program of a house and what makes a home as opposed to just a place to seek shelter in? These are some of the questions on the topic of home which have received much contemplation in human history by poets, philosophers, designers, and architects alike.

Let’s have a brief walk through this space, the idea of home, which means different things to us all and have taken on many shapes and forms through history.

We live our lives in time and space and therefore we also express and experience such within and through our environs. The subject relates to our relationship with a sense of place or in the way that Christian Norberg-Schulz wrote about in his Genius Loci ¹: Towards a Phenomenology ² of Architecture,1979).

In Genius Loci, Norberg-Schulz explains that we dwell when we feel orientated and can identify ourselves with an environment which is meaningful to us. “Dwelling” therefore implies something more than “shelter”. It implies that the spaces where life occurs are places, in the true sense of the word. A place is a space which has a distinct character” (Norberg-Schulz, 1979:5). It is this genius loci or “spirit of place” which we have to reconcile ourselves within our everyday lives which makes up our “concrete reality”, and it is the function of the architect to visualise it by making “meaningful places” to help us to dwell thereby providing us with an “existential foothold”. Environmental character is made up of concrete things with substance which has colour, texture and form which gives a specific place an identity with which we connect and associate occurrences with. Our existence therefore takes place in a place, they coexist. The bold emphasis in the first sentence was added by me, as it summarises a core issue necessary to dwell. It is a basic requirement which must be satisfied prior to building a home in a specific place.

Norberg-Schulz in The Concept of Dwelling, also explored the word “dwelling”, which clearly means much more than just a roof over the head and some space to use. “First, it means to meet others for exchange of products, ideas and feelings, that is, to experience life as a multitude of possibilities. Second, it means to come to an agreement with others, that is, to accept a set of common values. Finally, it means to be oneself, in the sense of having a small chosen world of our own.” It of course also referrers to the idea of authenticity, of being true to the authentic self. This idea is the origin of the term authenticity.

Norberg-Schulz continues by referring to “modes, collective, public and private dwelling.” Collective dwelling refers to the urban created spaces and places with its institutional buildings making up the public dwelling with the house being the private individual space. Therefore the “settlement, urban space, institution and house constitute a total environment.” This environment is however acted out on a given, the landscape with its specific qualities and character. Place, in this sense therefore, pre-exists and continues to co-exist in a relationship with the built environment. “To dwell, therefore, also means to become friends with a natural place.” For Norberg-Schulz, Orientation and identification are the two cornerstones for dwelling to occur as it is satisfied through organized place and built form which culminates into “the concrete place.” (Norberg-Schulz, 1984). It must be noted that the dwelling itself also functions with parameters/ zones of public, semi-public and private spaces in mind and serves as a micro-organism within the broader macro eco-system of the built and natural environment. We too often regard ourselves as functioning outside or next to the natural environment, but in reality, we are very much a part of the bigger natural eco-system. Nature is not something separate from our existence to be tamed or controlled, but rather the essence of our existence with which we should harmonise our lives with.

This implies that we would also care about heritage conservation ³ of places and things we regard, as the need for a continuum in the human experience is necessary for emotional happiness. In the introduction of Place and Placelessness, Seamon & Sowers stated: “Geographers have long spoken of the importance of place as the unique focus distinguishing geography from other disciplines. Astronomy has the heavens, History has time, and Geography has place.” I would like to add that Architecture concerns itself with all the above and include phenomenology, the human cultural experience.

In The poetics of space, Gaston Bachelard (1958:3), states that “it is not enough to consider the house as an ‘object’ on which we make our judgments and daydreams react.” Bachelard refers to the geographer who can provide descriptions of the various typologies, but the phenomenologist “seize upon the germ of the essential, sure, immediate well-being it encloses.” To uncover the ‘original shell’, as a way to understand the primary attachment and function of inhabiting is important as our memory of past experiences and images of shelter works in conjunction with our imagination. For Bachelard “an entire past comes to dwell in a new house. This means that our total human experience to date therefore finds expression through our architectural design decisions. In the same way that we have to carefully consider what we think, say, write or act out, we have to especially consider what we build as it has an impact beyond ourselves and our lifetime.

Not unlike most other human endeavours, histories on how humans have sheltered themselves through the ages in various parts of the world are not short in supply, and rightly so, if Wilson is correct by pointing out in The Domestication of the human species, that the most important advance in human social evolution occurred when we started living in houses (Wilson, 1988). When contemplating Wilson’s remark, it makes sense for various reasons as expressed by Norberg-Schulz in The Concept of Dwelling earlier. Building a house forced us to negotiate with others, the community, to agree on where and how we can settle. It brought about technological advances such as agriculture and how to manage water for use where we needed it. Further to this, it introduced the notion of ‘care’ for our surroundings as we became concerned about whatever happens in this place where we built our home.

In Witold Rybczynski’s A Short History of an Idea Home (1986), he provides a brief account of five centuries of human habitation from the ‘hall’ concept in the Middle Ages, in which the owners, their children and workers lived together without privacy. Animals were kept in the basement and the time of day determined the function of the space. It explores developments and ways of living up to contemporary expressions of open plan houses and other modes of dwelling. As in all histories worth reading, it provides an account on how changing social and cultural influences determined their design.

A more critical and current account on the subject would be Living Complex by Niklas Maak (2015), which provides a short history from the Neanderthal man who lived in large groups with temporary shelters as their homes, through to the hunter-gatherers of the various stone ages who lived in caves and later in skin covered huts, among other. An interesting observation referred to is that the single-family home was in fact not an invention of the nineteenth century. According to Maak, houses occupied by single families existed even in ancient Ostia, second century AD, referred to as ‘domus’ which consisted of two levels for one family. The norm seems to have been large homesteads in which extended families lives. He reminds us that the idea of the nuclear family lifestyle was promoted with the emergence of social differentiation which led to the formation of the middle class and that “prior to industrialization the norm was the extended family, the village community, and prior to that, the horde, …” Apparently workers preferred the convenience of living in extended families as it provided for assistance with children, food and care in times of illness. The single- family unit none the less prevailed, at least in Britain, for various ideological, political, and probably economic expediency reasons through the ‘cottage economy’ nuclear-family habitation of the time. In short, since the advent of the industrial revolution, a woman’s place was at home to cook and care for the children while the husband had to leave the house every day to go to work. That was the model which was regarded as the norm for a few generations. Maak takes us further in advocating new creative ways of living such as exploring notions of ‘collective living’, ‘communal living’, ‘shared space’ and more. It provides a good analysis on contemporary urban spatial problems with specific reference to various housing experiments, modalities and typologies.

Perhaps it is time that we stop building houses, but rather create homes. The latter takes more care to realise but, is worth the effort in the long term as it not only satisfies the inhabitants but is also regarded by the community. Such homes are sustainable and contributes to human cohesion, health and happiness as they care as much for it’s inhabitants as the inhabitants care for them over time.

In closing, a list of concepts describing various typologies of dwellings / houses / homes drawn from familiar English dictionaries — Oxford; Cambridge and Collins.

---

BIBLIOGRAPHY

---

1. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, (1958).
2. Binswanger, Ludwig. Heidegger’s analytic of existence and its meaning for psychiatry. In J.Needleman Ed. Being-in-the-world. New York: Basic Books, (1963).
3. Dawkins, Richard. The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1982).
4. Heidegger, Martin. Building Dwelling Thinking from Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon, (1971).
5. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment. Routledge, (2000).
6. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, (1991).
7. Maak, Niklas. The Living Complex: From Zombi City to the New Communal. Munich: Hirmer Verlag GmbH, (2015).
8. Moran, Dermot. Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge, (2000).
9. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, (1979).
10. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. The Concept of Dwelling. New York: Rizzoli, (1984).
11. Pearson, M.P. and C. Richards. Ordering the World: perceptions of architecture, space and time. In Architecture and order: approaches to social space. eds M.P. Pearson and C. Richards. London: Routledge, (1994: 1-37).
12. Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Rion, (1976).
13. Rybczynski, Witold. Home: A Short History of an Idea. New York: Penguin Books, (1987).
14. Seamon, David & Robert Mugerauer. Dwelling, Place and Environment. Netherlands: Springer, (1985).
15. Schittich, Christian (ed.). In Detail. Single Family Houses: Myth and Reality. Berlin: Birkhȁuser. (2005).
16. Wilson, Peter J. The Domestication of the human species. New Haven: Yale University Press, (1988).
17. Glossary of Psychology: Uberwelt
18. Discover Poetry: Poems about Home
19. Drawings by the author Raymond Smith

---

NOTES

---

¹ Genius Loci – the prevailing character or atmosphere of a place.

² Phenomenology – an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.

³ Heritage Conservation – the measures taken to extend the life of cultural heritage while strengthening transmission of its significant heritage messages and values.