As the saying goes, “there’s no place like home”. Neither is there a space like home, in the sense of the privacy it offers and how it can be moulded and personalised into reflecting our inner selves. The distinctly Western notion of home is prominent here. To a large extent it is defined by the notion of privacy. It is a common, even if a very recent, trend for each member of a family to have a room of his or her own. By this and other subtle spatial solutions in Western contemporary homes it is made clear that everyone is expected and allowed to have a distinct amount of space just for him or herself.
This is not the right context for an extensive spatial analysis of domestic buildings, but for briefly pointing out how home offers the basic and most intimate experience of an everyday space. Enlarging this notion to cover a wider area deemed an everyday environment is thus motivated as it relates to an extent to similar experiences that take place when at home. Home is also the central space in the everyday, so in order to take into consideration the everyday
environment as a whole, home is the obvious epicentre and from the experiences it entails, other experiential strands in the everyday start to unfold as the sphere of the everyday expands outwards.
On a smaller scale, the recent versions of the nomadic way of life have made it possible to focus on objects in the sense that they are given the capacity of “building a home” around them. This is based on the fact that smaller rep- resentations of home can be taken along with us even to distant places. They do not need a specific place or always the same environment in order to create a sense of permanence and an aura of stability somehow attached to them.
Wanderlust as the urge to travel is not a recent phenomenon as such, but the
globalisation of cultures and the relative ease of travel have increased the sense of “living at large” in the world. This fluid spatiality on a grand scale necessarily has consequences that can be understood as a less attached relation to everyday spaces in the traditional sense.
As an occasional extension, hotel rooms, tents, or camper vans, for example, can serve as replacements for home.414 Intruders in these space, such as the hotel cleaner who comes into the room unexpectedly, can be felt as a greater disturbance than if, for example, it would happen in an office cubicle or other space that does not have the acquired status of being representational of home. As an enclosure, a room is usually a smaller and more easily definable entity than a home in its entirety. The built space of a room has as its concrete, physical boundaries walls, a ceiling, and a floor. In many ways, it repeats the structures and directions found outside the room, in unbound rural or urban space.415
Analysing and even describing one’s own habitat can be difficult, partly because it is a product of ingrained habits that one is not aware of having in the first place, as aptly described by Andrew Ballantyne:
My habits are more-or-less invisible to me. They sink beneath the threshold of consciousness, and are enacted without being the focus of thought, though others might notice them – especially when their habits are different from mine.416
414 For the spatiality of the hotel as “unhomely home”, see Vidler 1992 & Paterson 2004. 415 Norberg-Schulz 1980, 13.
Or as Arto Haapala describes it:
Home is a place where everything is familiar. Home is some- thing where most of the matters are under control. If not anywhere else, at least at home we have a say as to what it should be like, how it should be organized, etc. We create our homes and know them thoroughly.417
Ingrained habits are related to inhabiting. Behaviour leads to habitat for- mation, thus directing the form and contents that habits take. One way to characterise a habit is through its enduring quality; this emphasises stability, continuity, and even rigidity. Aron Vinegar writing on habit reminds us that it refers also to the past to the extent that it is present “as an active immanence” or “sedimentation of history” in the body. That is to say, as it affects present actions.418 Habits are also in direct relation to manners, as they direct the more concrete ways of doing things and responding to social as well as other situations and external stimuli in a cultured way. By any definition, it is of central relevance to consider in what way habits evoke the past in the present. Depending on this, habit can be either restricting or liberating. It can be a way of reinforcing the old, or of providing assistance for the new to emerge.
The stability of habits is ascertained by continuous adjustment. Habit thus requires a certain level of attentiveness in keeping up with its “maintenance”.419 Conscious habit building with the purpose of making one’s life better is one way of seeing habits as both purposeful and malleable. This is an intrinsically positive way of assessing habits as consciously maintained tools in directing life. It is worth asking how these habits relate to the home as a spatially experiential entity. In a sense, by relying on habits, the register of experiences is being cut from its extreme ends. The familiar becomes the average also regarding the aesthetic factors in the everyday. One gets accustomed to the specific and differentiating qualities of one’s own home. The spatial qualities of one’s home, the dimensions of different rooms, the impenetrability of the walls, every nook and corner that
417 Haapala 2005, 46. 418 Vinegar 2014, 260. 419 Ibid.
is present but never spent time in, become fixed and incorporated into the normality of the experience. One does not recognise anymore even if something is wrong within the parameters of one’s own familiarity.
But do we actually know our home thoroughly? Homes are filled with objects that we have not chosen, that were given to us as gifts or inheritance. Everything is not under control. Water can start flooding from the kitchen sink, or the neighbour can bang on the wall without us having any say in the matter. Home is the most shelter-like place we have, but it is not synonymous with safety or even total privacy. Eventually, it cannot give any guarantees of this, and so expecting it to be fully familiar and in our control belongs to the sphere of the functionally necessary deceptions of the everyday.
Home can be a place where we feel a certain placid contentment, where our own rituals are repeated in privacy, and where we can recharge our minds and bodies in relative peace. However, there are always also cracks in the everyday that keep us on our toes. Home becomes an important place to us, but it is nonetheless also always a space, with unknown borders and limits that reveal themselves only through some of the actions which take place within it. This uncanny double nature of home is related to the fact that it is also the most likely place to get injured or assaulted.
One can compare a sense of feeling at home to occupying a fitting room in a shop, which to a certain degree emulates the feeling of home-like privacy and safety even though it represents a very temporary visiting space. In a home or in an office space small personal things can often make them feel familiar and special. The privacy of the home environment, of that which takes place intra
muros, becomes contrasted in decreasing phases with the space outside the walls.
The felt and experienced quality of an apartment space is very different than what can be interpreted from the aestheticised photographs taken for selling purposes, for example. This is partly because photographs do not convey many of the sensory aspects such as smells as the residual mementos of the inhabitants, or the haptic feel of different surfaces.420 But also only when concretely present
420 Nor do the photographic reproductions with their various optical, mechanical, and electrical distortions and limitations particularly faithfully match the image conveyed by human eyes.
in a given space one can fully see the possibilities it offers for organising a life, the ways for bodies and objects to inhabit and fill it. The prospect of different points of views, of being able to turn around, the complementing glimpses of peripheral vision and casually glancing through objects alternating with more precise attention to things of interest are possible when getting to know a home. The aestheticised versions of a life lived in a space does not get in the way or at least does not totally hinder the indispensable aspects of living.
Spatially, the interiority and special character of home is perceived by default as a mixture of different sensory inputs. As Isis Brook describes this experience:
[T]he tangibility of space and the sense that particular interior spaces have a character of which their interiorness is a crucial aspect is brought into focus by placing attention on the sounds, smells, tastes and kinaesthetic responses that arise from expe- riencing them. This has a striking impact on the experience of space since it becomes thickened and as potentially meaningful as the objects it was previously seen as separating.421
Home as a meaningful and aesthetically potent space becomes experienced in its totality, through its “interiorness” as well as in conjunction with the objects it houses. Lives leave their marks by the choice of objects and on their surfaces and the places in which they are kept. The paths of lives are shown in patterns of organisation and the rhythm of placing objects in relation to each other. The experience is altogether different again when a home is properly appropriated “in use”, when one gets to glimpse it inhabited by its inhabitants, on the rare occasions when they act as they normally would by themselves in the environment where they feel most secure.
Access to apartments or homes is provided by spaces worthy of attention as such. Gateways, stairways, corridors, hallways, closets, and other imaginable spaces with minor roles that serve the actual purposes of the building, are to be found in close proximity to the most intimate spaces of a home. Functional or auxiliary spaces like these in buildings are not that well mapped and the phases of their formation have not been thoroughly archived. Within architectural practice
these are called “support spaces”, “subsidiary spaces”, or “service spaces”, each term pointing to the fact and requirement of them being flexible and supporting the primary functions of the building.422 For example, a pantry supports the kitchen, and dressing rooms, walk-in-closets, and home spas are adjacent to bedrooms in the most abundantly spacious contemporary homes. In warmer climates some of the support spaces are placed outside and are thus not air-conditioned. In these cases the experiential difference between the actual living spaces is marked by a stark and energy-saving contrast of the microclimate.
When moving on from the secure space of home the environment opens up in time as well as space. The different set of possibilities offered by a familiar environment is often surprisingly unclear to the inhabitants, who have their own accustomed ways of inhabiting not only their homes, but also their streets, quarters, neighbourhoods, and cities.