ARCHITECTURE, DWELLING AND THE GLOBAL MARKET.

In a world increasingly homogenized by forces beyond control of individuals, and even nations, it becomes more and more important to understand and continuously reinterpret the nature of placedness, dwelling and home.

The concept of home has always been central to architecture. Writing in the first half of the sixteenth century, one of the first modern writers on the subject Sebastiano Serlio harked back to Vitruvian notions of the origins of architecture 'Men's first coverings to protect themselves from the moisture of the rain and the blazing heat of the sun were made of tree branches supported on forked poles or rods and bound with willow branches ... Some men used to hollow out the ground, then put a pyramidal covering of tree branches above, and live in shelter below, while others lived more securely in caves and caverns. Yet others used to make their shelters with a warp of tree trunks and poles interwoven with branches. These they daubed with earth and clay mixed with fine straw ... being inside, protected from the cold, they passed their lives happily'. [1]

Home represents safety and protection, private territory and the particular. Thirty or forty years ago, it was considered vulgar in architectural circles to talk about 'homes': that was left to the commercial providers of tacky repro semi-detached villas. Architects were on the whole concerned with the stern stuff of providing 'dwellings' often at very high densities. Looking back with today's perspective, it seems that most of the commercial estates are still loved and remain in decent condition, whereas many of the social housing schemes are in poor condition, and some have been demolished, though they were usually erected with the highest motives and the expenditure of much architectural skill.

Local foundation

Of course, reasons for failures of social housing are far more numerous than those that can be attributed to architects alone; the worst problems were generated as much or more by social policies and bad contractors. But whatever the cause, the places without clear notion of home add to what is generally perceived to be a sense of anomie and alienation which is sweeping over the world, generated partly by radical changes in communications and the flow of capital. In Archilab, a new book on contemporary radical experiments in architecture, Frederic Migayrou argues that 'Quests for a local foundation, for a more human relationship with architecture, will assume the multifaceted forms that seem to be making an echo-like comeback today. Architecture which is at the forefront must have negotiated all forms of regression, in trying to renew the idea of the particular or proper versus a dispossession undertaken by the mercantile society'. [2] Fighting through the would-be avant-garde prose, this becomes a plea for placedness and the particular, but Migayrou would perhaps be reluctant to admit that a re-examination of anything as long established as the notion of home could help cope with an uncertain future.

Another contributor to the compendium, Aaron Betsky is more specific: 'Any architecture today must answer the question: how can we be at home in, make sense of and find our way through a landscape that changes in computer and communications technologies and the massive redevelopment of physical, social and cultural spaces they occasion continually [and] make unrecognizable to us'. [3] Admittedly, later in the short essay, Betsky, keen to keep up his credibility as a member of the vanguard argues that 'it is when ... tactics lead to a sense of the unhomely (unheimlich) that architecture becomes more effective. The "come-back" effect of the familiar, which is somehow now strange because of changes in use, scale or form can deepen a sense of the unreality of the world we make for ourselves. Such work has the effect of being enigmatic. It continually awakens our wonder awe and fear ... Making the strange part of our everyday lives, such work reminds us of the strangeness of that existence' [4] -- a curious conca tenation of emotions for making people feel at home.

Elsewhere, Betsky argues that 'In order to make forms that all those who are not architects do not see as merely alien, we must make out of the culture around us, rather than against it. The rich stew of images that rises every day around the globe waits for us to mine it for our constructions'. [5] Betsky shares the preoccupation with image that always seems to afflict the architectural avant-garde: surely he cannot mean collaging up the most prevalent images of our age: brand identifiers; nor, I imagine, can he mean to evoke the 'familiar' by introducing roses round the door, or ornamental shutters on the windows.

Deeper than image

Notions of placedness and particularity are surely generated by far more than image: they are engendered by things deeper and more profound which engage all our senses, perhaps myth, usually memory. Charles Moore articulated something of this depth when he said that 'we require a measure of possession and surrounding to feel the impact and the beauty of the building. The feeling of buildings and our sense of dwelling within them are more fundamental to our architectural experience than the information they give us'. [6] This remark was made before the clear emergence of the global market and modern electronic communications, but it remains as true today as it was in 1977.

Though several contributors to Archilab have deep reservations about the effects of international capitalism and its associated electronics and its potentially disorientating effects on our perceptions of place and space, others welcome it (some seem to hold both positions at once). Many of those on the welcoming side write fervently about the transformatory powers of virtual reality, but in this they are surely wrong on at least two counts. First, at the moment, all the machines can offer is some semblance of reality to two senses, sight and hearing; touch is being experimented with, but even when that becomes more sophisticated, the machines will deliver a version of experience as close to the real world as confetti is to caviar. A second difficulty with virtual reality is that it is far from likely to deliver the freedoms hoped for by its protagonists. The machines and their software will undoubtedly be dominated by the sort of companies who rule the global communications and entertainment industries -- e xperience shows that this is not a recipe for intellectual and creative liberty, nor for the kind of psychological possession Moore talked about.

So it seems most unlikely that virtual reality will offer us a sense of particularity and place in the foreseeable future, if ever. We are thrown back on the traditional resources architecture has to offer: light, space, texture, materiality, aroma, enclosure and articulated expression of our relationship to awesome and implacable nature. From our beginnings, we have each needed still places in the storm of existence. For most of us, no matter how nomadic, these are home, and in a rapidly changing world, architects should intensively re-examine the idea. Doubtless, results will often be very different from traditional dwellings, but some will have roses round the door.

(1.) Hart, Vaughan and Peter Hicks and trans, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture Volume Two, Yale, London, 2001, p3.

(2.) Migayrou, Frederic, 'Generic Architectures in Archilab', Radical Experiments in Global Architecture, ed. Migayrou and Marie-Ange Brayer, Thames & Hudson, London, 2001, p007. The book is compiled from the Archilab conferences and exhibitions held at Orleans in France in 1999 and 2000, p007.

(3.) Betsky, Aaron, 'Architecture in Limbo', in Archilab, p032.

(4.) Idem.

(5.) Idem.

(6.) Bloomer, Kent C. and Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory and Architecture, Yale, New Haven and London, 1977, p36.