When people asked me why I had not become an architect, I would give the same answer [...]: ‘Because I didn’t want to design apartments!’ When I said apartments, I meant a way of life as well as a particular approach to architecture [...]. I became a writer, and I have written a great deal about apartments. What I have learned [...] is this: a building’s homeliness issues from the dreams of those who live in it. These dreams, like all dreams, are nourished by that building’s old, dark, dirty and disintegrating corners.1
If memory is selective, then our perception and meaning of our surroundings is tainted by our preferences in things and by their ordering in space. Our homes, such as the apartment I live in, Fig. 1 are fertile grounds for the study of the relationship between interiors and furniture and the way in which we construct our identities in space.
Dismembering the constituent elements of my home, by focusing on the actions performed within its interior, arose while in a state of drifting.2 In the process, as I was retracing familiar paths, even daily routines became surprisingly unknown objects of curiosity and scrutiny. The patterns of repetitive actions within our homes are subconscious, automatic habits, essentially related as Habit/Habitus/Habitat.3 Though unwritten, Home Rules4 are adhered to, governing domestic behaviour and even our postures and bodily movements–seating, lying down, eating, washing, writing, etc.–when coming into contact with the objects that surround us, which allow us to carry out different tasks and to fulfill our wishes, thus making sense of the place we call Home.
Inhabiting habits
The interior is not just the universe but also the étui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior these are accentuated.5
I live with my wife, an interior decorator and make-up artist, in a 127 square meter third floor three-bedroom apartment Fig. 4 of a typical 1970s modernist six storey building in Phaliron, a dense seaside suburb not far from the centre of Athens.
The interior, full of things accumulated over the years, has been transformed since 1987, creating a continuous succession of open living spaces including furniture we designed, my wife’s keen eye for functionality on all new arrangements. While frequent alterations were necessary due to the expanding and shrinking family requirements (raising our two daughters), old furniture pieces and traces of previous states have remained.6
Domestic interiors, however apparently permanent, are always in a state of flux; they are spatial palimpsests constantly ‘rewritten’ over time, whether in daily rituals such as setting the dinner table or in radical moves such as relocating the kitchen. This ongoing process, which constitutes our way of life, meant constructing new worlds within given bounds, in layers upon layers of furnished spaces as our needs, desires and means changed.
Points of contact
From the moment we wake up, we continuously interact with a variety of objects, going through a succession of domestic spaces, never the same through day and night. Often in the morning first comes the sound of a solitary sparrow; then the louder sound of a blackbird. Birds of all sorts dwell on the big trees in the back yard that separates us from the neighbouring apartment block. Soft light comes through the westfacing shutters a little later. As we get up we are further awakened by the light coming in from the outside and the sounds things make when we come into contact with them. Drawing the curtains makes a hissing sound on the rail, while twisting the balcony door handle makes a heavy thumping sound.
On the eastern side, the living and dining spaces facing the street are protected by a tent and by the white curtains which remain drawn, filtering the morning sunlight which slides under them on the marble floor. Fig. 2 The sound of gurgling water running on the porcelain washbasin in the bathroom, is followed by the smoother sound of water running on the stainless steel kitchen sink, joined by the sounds of cars and pedestrians coming in gradually from the outside.
To perform our tasks we need to operate all sorts of paraphernalia, such as handles, taps and switches. The handles which are necessary to so many of our operations are often unnoticed, just as long as their grip is well fitted to our palm. The coffee maker’s handle though, a classic Braun, never ceases to amaze me, as it is somehow wondrously attached to the glass pot. Formally and materially entirely distinct from it, it brings to mind Georg Simmel’s essay on the “Handle,”7 where function and beauty, the world of art and the world of practical things meet. Plugs and sockets seem even more indifferent, even though despite the peculiar persistence for black cables to be used on white sockets. Fig. 3 Steven Connor’s essay on “Plugs”8 opens up an insightful discourse on these indispensable electrical accoutrements, through an investigation of their form, and function. It is through the use of these points of interface, switches, buttons, handles, locks, that our domestic environments become intelligible and habitable.
I stretch my arm and press the alarm clock button off –press mobile button on–turn bathroom door handle–press light switch on/off–press toilet seat button–turn on/off water tap–pull/push clothes cupboard/drawers handles–turn kitchen door handle–turn on/off water tap–pull/push refrigerator handle–pull/push cupboard/drawer handles–press coffee maker button on… pull front door handle–lock front door keyhole press elevator button–pull elevator door handle–press garage door button to exit...
Over thirty actions–pushing, pulling, turning–at the very least, on a typical morning, involving as many points of contact, permit us to operate apparatus, to gain access to spaces, to water and electricity, to retrieve things inside furniture in just under one hour. An inventory unexpectedly reveals 362 points of contact: 277 handles, 75 switches and plugs, 10 water points, excluding electric and electronic devices. Similar quantities are recorded by my fourth year students, depending on the size of their residences.
Handleless
If in the case of Wittgenstein’s house for his sister9 handles are of great significance because of their precise form, today a different matter arises: are handles really necessary? What about handleless cupboards? The history of the contemporary kitchen for example, which is simultaneously a living room, a dining room and a workshop,10 has radically changed. From the revolutionary Frankfurt kitchen of 1926 designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, with its array of functionalist handles, to the ‘timeless elegance’ (as advertised) of the first handleless SieMatic kitchen of the 1960s, minimalist design aesthetic aims at ever more abstract, pure and clean undecorated surfaces, eliminating any suggestion of dirtiness. Post-modern digressions seem to be but small episodes in the evolution of streamlined profiles, as proposed by Raymond Lowey in his 1934 charts. Technological innovations transform interior landscapes continuously changing our living and working habits, ever since the first wireless Zenith Flashmatic TV remote control of 1955. As the ubiquitous points of contact and their mechanisms become less visible in the handleless built-in furniture, and just as soon as we were acquainted with ‘touch’ surfaces on our kitchen dials, we are already adapting to contactless systems, the photocell operated water taps miraculously sensing without touching our stretched hands, continuously readjusting to a world that is as bodily oriented, as it is immaterial.
The uncanny interior
Television has brought back murder into the home–where it belongs.11
Though our daily routines form habits of normality in inhabiting interiors, they are not neutral or frictionless. Points of contact and access within a house are often contested by the occupants, their claims often being a matter of negotiation. Furthermore, repetition, though reassuring, may also be psychologically burdensome, building up a sense of boredom.
Film and theatre directors have explored the relationship of living habits in their domestic narratives. Dimitris Papaioannou constructs Inside,12 a six-hour performance, during which actors perform the exact same routines in a relentless metronome-like repetition, from the moment they enter their apartment until they go to sleep.
Anthony Vidler has aptly commented on the proximity of homeliness and the unhomely:
The house becomes tomb simply by virtue of a catastrophic event, for which paradoxically it seemed ready. The dividing line between the house of the living and the house of the dead in form and in function, has always been perilously thin.13
Such catastrophic transformation of domesticity has been exploited by Michael Haneke in his film The Seventh Continent.14 The killing monotony of endless repetition leads to the chilling decision of father, mother and daughter to commit suicide, after the destruction of all their possessions within the domestic interior. In order to lay the ground for the meaninglessness of petit bourgeois lives, Haneke first establishes an atmosphere of normality through the reassuring pattern of recurring daily actions, focusing on details such as the opening and closing of door handles, switches, garage door remote controls, etc., all things usual until we reach the end of existence, stressed by the camera’s absence of all previously detailed domesticity, everything consumed into a spiraling introvert self-destructive crescendo.
Tracing lines: living in-between furniture
For Gaston Bachelard who explores the positive attributes of “Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes” in the Poetics of Space, the filing cabinet is “an intelligence”:
Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed, without these ‘objects’ [...] our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy. They are hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us and through us and for us they have a quality of intimacy. [...] Every poet of furniture [...] knows that the inner space of an old wardrobe is deep. A wardrobe’s inner space is also intimate space that is not open to just anybody.15
These are the spaces that our points of contact lead us to. They lead us to interior rooms, to sources of energy, water and electricity, and to the sources of domestic life, to curiosity cabinets, sources of pleasures and secrets. They lead us inside wardrobes, cupboards, cabinets, chests and drawers, where we keep food and drinks, towels and linen, clothes and jewelery, CDs and private letters. They are the keepers of cleanliness and secrets hidden behind surfaces. The inventive two-way linen cupboards in Pierre Chareau’s ‘Maison de Verre’ in Paris (1928), beautifully illustrate the division of two worlds, that of the servants placing the clothes on one side and that of the house owners retrieving them on the other, a functional but also a class division in space.
Furniture takes up space creating a secondary boundary at a distance from the outer walls of the apartment, an interior shell within an interior. The space left free to walk is considerably less than the nominal area of the apartment, 30% of the floor area taken over by cupboards and other furniture Fig. 5 –even up to 50%, in some cases of my students’ residences.
As I walk around the apartment, limited by its interior geography, I make invisible paths in the uncharted in-between. The domestic interior left unoccupied by walls and furniture, does not coincide with the routes I trace. Our physical occupation of the floor area only partially follows the plan of the apartment, never entirely corresponding with it. Though orthogonal walls and furniture define its limits, we rarely walk in straight lines, or scrape our feet along the edge of the walls and furniture.
Our patterns of coming and going, as we traverse through space, form fluid lines similar to the flow studies of the Barcelona pavilion made by Paul Rudolph in 1986.16
Furniture: raising surfaces above the ground
I have traversed our home in order to have access to things. One of the primary functions that furniture provides, other than storage, is a number of surfaces raised above ground for various uses. Surfaces to sit on and lie down, to bathe and wash, soft body receptacles, glorified elevated ‘grounds’ to rest upon: Chairs, Armchairs, Sofas, Beds, Baths and Basins. Also hard horizontal surfaces on which to eat, work and carry out a variety of tasks: Dining tables, Coffee tables, Side tables, Desks and Benches. I am looking at the two beautifully crafted wooden pillars with Corinthian-like capitals at the corners of our old bayou commode, in the hall. Not far from it stands the oak dining table I designed thirty-three years ago. Both sets of wooden legs, plain and decorated, perform faultlessly their functions as supports, carrying heavy surfaces: the commode a 100x40 cm piece of marble at one meter high, the dining table a 200x100 cm oak veneer surface at 78 cm high. This is what is required of them.
But do we actually need the legs in order to use the furniture? Lifting surfaces up requires a support system of legs and traverses, but they could also be cantilevered or suspended. We use the commode’s top surface to leave our keys on, to place our family pictures and decorative objects. We place plates, glass and cutlery on the dining table to eat, but we also read and write on it. We keep these different pieces of furniture, the antique bayou, the dining oak table and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona glass table in the living room, in close proximity to each other, because they are aesthetically pleasing and they are part of the identity of our house, of our identity. It is not just a matter of style or function. We like them. But if we could perform our tasks on other surfaces without visible supports, we probably would, because we could free up space. This is what was in those modern designers’ minds when they had to furnish a modern apartment, to make it appear lighter.
Legless
Furniture, despite its dominant physical presence, is but a translation of our ideas regarding inhabiting space. Having gone through a century of simplicity, we have already witnessed the ‘liberation’ of the interior from the clutter of old furnishings. Early twentieth-century cantilever chairs and glass tables, such as those designed by Marcel Breuer, plain surfaces on slim vertical supports, established the ‘functionalist’ norm of modern furniture, as an object seemingly floating over the floor to furnish the ‘machine-à-habiter’. In the 1960s designers further experimented with composite materials and new ideas of interior living suited to their times. From Eero Aarnio’s Bubble hanging chair, to Bernstein Architects’ suspended spaces and furniture, supports have become almost invisible. As levitating objects are already making their appearance, from plant-pots and speakers to the ‘Shanghai Maglev’ train, so does furniture, such as Yana Christiaens’ table, the height of which can be adjusted by an electromagnetic system.17
Part and parcel of the modernist sensibility to overcome gravity were the tubular cantilevered chairs18 raising the body effortlessly in mid-air. This ongoing futurist-modernist fascination for freedom from our earthly bounds, is also manifested by the elimination of walls inside continuous, column-less interior spaces organized by furniture, from Mies and Johnson’s glass houses to Shigeru Ban’s wall-less houses.
In the post-WWII years which were dominated by modernity, the focus changed from the fireplace-hearth of the house to the TV, leading to new modes of domestic habitation, such as sitting arrangements towards a singular view and TV dinner tables with detachable trays, rather than sitting around a table.
Eventually erasing the boundaries between living and dining areas, the organisation of interior space has been increasingly, if not solely, delegated to furniture. Further transformed by digital wireless technology and hand-held electronic devices, ‘cushions’19 are today’s new worktop surfaces, while the bed and the sofa supplement and often replace tables as the hubs of our domestic activities.
The large communicative capacity of light weight devices, complemented by their small size, allows them to be carried and used anywhere, dissociating our activities from specific interiors. Even though we communicate with each others much more than we did at any other time in human history, we communicate less with the ones we are in closest proximity with. With a screen in our hands, connected to anyone at any time, augmenting the physical world, not only has domestic space become polycentric, but functional distinctions–residential, work, leisure, transport–have mutated, raising questions about the significance of space. Thus, many spatial typologies, if not erased, are being transformed to informal, multifunctional ones, such as Google’s offices, while “nap pods” furnish work places to ameliorate sleep deprivation.
Digital technology, personal and portable, makes work surfaces redundant, establishing its location on the body, on the palm-tops and lap-tops, as their names already suggest. Instead of the home being our castle, our fixed abode, we live in a state where home is where the body is. Fig. 6
On the value of stains
Home, will infect whatever you do20
Tracing domestic space through Points, Lines and Surfaces,21 seems life an exercise in applying Wassily Kandinsky’s fundamental elements of composition to interior spaces, loaded with psychological, social and symbolic meanings.
The identity of an apartment, its character and ambience, derive from a complexity of functions, utilities and atmospheres, comprising this immense micro-universe we call home. The points, lines and surfaces we come into contact with, awake in us multitudes of associations connected to our memories of events and places. Opening a kitchen cupboard to get a fine 1950s aluminum sugar container not only pleases the sense of touch but it also brings to mind the charity shod it was bought in; because of its proximity to the fruit basket, a painting of a wine bottle by a long gone friend comes to mind; the torn leather Barcelona chairs bear witness to the consequences of living with cats. A Home is the spatial imprint of our lives, engraved on the objects and furniture surrounding us. Our interaction with interiors and furniture, inscriptions of time on matter, illuminate our joint history like the missing shelves of Walter Gropius’ famous Bauhaus desk.22
In the morning the apartment opens up with light, at night it closes in like a flower, magnifying the small things–the round patch made by the angle poise lamp on the best, the words in a book, the bluish hue of laptops and cell phones, the miniature collections on the shelves by the bedside. The escalating morning sounds subside at night, making us more aware of the sound of a page turning, of a clock ticking, of a wooden cabinet creaking, of plumbing even, as if the house is breathing, settling for the night.
When Reyner Banham declared provocatively in 1965 that A Home Is Not a House, pointing at the importance of service facilities, he interestingly noted in the caption to Francois Dallegret’s “Anatomy of a Dwelling” that “The house itself has been omitted from this drawing…”,23 suggesting that it might be possible to omit it altogether if mechanical services continued to accumulate. Describing the constituent functional elements of a house however, is not sufficient to illustrate the essence of a home. Today, as Perec notes, space, despite its multisensory omnipresence, remains elusive:
I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin […]. Such places don’t exist, and it’s because they don’t exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it. My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them […]. Space melts like sand running through one’s fingers. Time gears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds.24
Homes which engage our thoughts and feelings, memories and anticipations, are forming our identities as we are forming them, being simultaneously part of the world and apart from it. As I lie in bed I read Jacqueline be Romilly’s “Stains on an old table” from the Greek translation of The Roses of Solitude.25 Romilly recounts an admission of guilt, in her omissions of care for an old valuable desk. Through this homology, she in fact tells of a lifetime’s story, as marks and stains on an old piece of furniture can offer. As I read it I think of the scratches on our old dining table, coinciding with our thirty-three years of living in the apartment… And so at the closing of the day, thoughts are drifting again as lights go out, silence sets in, thoughts fading out, drifting…
Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.26
Bibliographie
Ouvrages
BACHELARD, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Traduit par Maria Jolas. Boston : Beacon Press, 1969.
BANHAM, Reyner. Art in America, vol. 2, 1965.
BENJAMIN, Walter et Rolf TIEDEMANN (dir.). The Arcades Project. Traduit par Howard Eiland et Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass. : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
BITTNER, Regina, Achim REESE et Katja SZYMCZAK. Desk in Exile. A Bauhaus Object Traversing Different Modernities. Bauhaus Taschenbuch 20.
BRUCHÄUSER, Axel. The Cantilever Chair. Cologne : Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1999.
BUSCH, Akiko. Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live. New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.
CONNOR, Steven. Paraphernalia. The Curious Lives of Magical Things. Londres : Profile Books Ltd., 2011.
DEBORD, Guy. Internationale Situationniste, no. 2. Traduit par Ken Knabb. Paris : December 1958.
KANDINSKY, Wassily. Point and Line to Plane. Traduit par Howard Dearstyn et Hilla Rebay. New York : Dover Fine Art, 1979.
PAMOUK, Orhan. Other Colors. Essays and a Story. Traduit par Nazim Dikbas. Londres : Faber & Faber, 2007.
PEREC, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Traduit par John Sturrock (éd.). Londres : Penguin Classics, 1998.
RATCLIFFE, Susan (dir.). Oxford Treasury of Sayings and Quotations. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2011.
ROMILLY, Jacqueline (de). Les Roses de la solitude. Paris : Éditions de la Fallois, 2006.
SOLÀ-MORALES RUBIÓ, Ignasi (de) et Xavier COSTA (dir.). Present and Futures. Architecture in Cities. Barcelone : Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 1996.
WIDLER, Anthony. The architectural Uncanny. Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992.
WOLFF, Kurt H. (dir.). Georg Simmel, 1858-1918: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography. Traduit par Rudolph H. Weingartner. Columbus : Ohio State University Press, 1959.
WOOD, Dennis et Robert J. BECK. Home Rules. Baltimore : The John Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Autres
« Barcelona Pavilion Study Drawings and an Interview by Paul Rudolph » (consulté le 14 décembre 2019).
CHRISTIAENS, Yana. « Who Needs Legs? » (consulté le 10 décembre 2019).
COHEN, Leonard. « Anthem », dans The Future (Columbia, 1992), traduction de Jean Guiloineau sur www.leonardcohensite.com/songs/php.