IDENTITY INTIMACY AND DOMICILE Notes on the phenomenology of home

JUHANI PALLASMAA: <strong>IDENTITY</strong>, <strong>INTIMACY</strong> <strong>AND</strong> <strong>DOMICILE</strong> - <strong>Notes</strong> on the phenomenology of homeThe architect and the concept of homeWe architects are concerned with designing dwellings as architecturalmanifestations of space, structure and order, but we seem unable tOtouch upon the more subtle, emotional and diffuse aspects of home. Inthe schools of architecture we are taught to design houses and dwellings,not homes. Yet it is the capacity of the dwelling to provide domicile in theworld that matters to the individual dweller. The dwelling has its psycheand soul in addition to its formal and quantifiable qualities.The titles of architeCtural books invariably use the notion of 'house'- 'TheModern House', 'GA-Houses', 'California Houses", ete. - whereas booksand magazines that deal with interior decoration and celebrities prefer thenotion of 'home' - 'Celebrity Homes', 'Artist Homes', etc.. Needless to saythat the publications of the latter type are considered sentimentalentertainment and kitsch by the professional architect.Our concept of architecture is based on the idea of the perfectlyarticulated architectural object. The famous court case between Mies vander Rohe and his client, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, concerning the FarnsworthHouse, is an example of the contradiction between architecture and home.As we all know, Mies had designed one of the most important andaesthetically appealing houses of our century, but his client did not find itsatisfactory as a home. The court, incidentally, decided in Mies's favour. Iam not underrating Mies's architecture; I am simply pointing out thedistancing from life and a deliberate reduction of the spectrum of life.When we compare designs of Modernity with those of today's avant-garde,we immediately observe a loss of empathy for the dweller. Instead ofbeing motivated by the architect's social vision, or view of life,architecture has become self-referential and autistic.Many of us architects seem to have developed a kind of split personality:as designers and as dwellers we apply different sets of values to theenvironment. In our role as architects we aspire for a meticulouslyarticulated and temporally onedimensional environment, whereas asdwellers ourselves, we prefer a more layered, ambiguous and aestheticallyless coherent environment; the instinctual dwellcr emerges through therole values of the professional.http://www2.uiah.fi/esittely/historia/e_ident.htm (2 of 23)22/10/2550 16:34:02