Picture an architecture represented solely by the things which furnish the home. An architecture formed of a collection of things that uniquely reflect our personality.
At times the practice of architecture involves the crafting of spaces that has been aptly described as ‘pet-architecture’. The city in this sense forms a collection of exquisitely crafted playthings. There can be no doubt that the most common task of the average architect involves some kind of residential improvement. The architect is commissioned with creating much needed space for the client. Much of this additional space usually provides storage for things or giving a family member a space of their own; a space for their own things. As personal and meaningful as these spaces might be for clients, such tasks might hardly differ from an exercise in ergonomics or a deftly game of Tetris.
Most of us in our society work in order to earn a wage, so we can maintain or achieve a desired standard of living. The desired standard of living for many of us is invariably manifested in the quality, quantity and range of things we own and experience. The nature of our living is to earn a money (a proxy for choice) in order to support our desired level of consumption. Most of us would quickly shun such overt consumerism, yet we would no less be consumers. The split in our private and public lives is manifest in the split in our places of work and our homes. We work in our offices in order to get a wage and our homes are transformed, though our consumption, into temples displaying the trappings of our incomes. This ‘earning and spending’ lifestyle is at bottom a fragile basis for dwelling and life in general, as the things we horde eventually bore us, our friends or decay. Perhaps this benign architecture of our things and for our things underlies a much deadlier problem.
The medieval guilds provide us with a model of a holistic approach to living, with a focus on production, as opposed to our modern preoccupation with consumption. The focus on production brought out the dignity of workman over the merchant. The end goal of this kind of work was a product benefiting community and not simply a wage. In our modern world, with its radical distinction between public and private, we have become less the workman and more the target of the merchant. In many ways the consumer was the product of the many assembly lines pioneered in the Industrial Revolution. Mass production has been perfectly balanced by an equally irrepressible mass consumption.
Many have traced the roots of architecture not simply to the need of shelter but to the dance; that primal and visceral act of communal interaction, where we gain our identity within the bounds of relationship to the community. The architect Gottfried Semper identified the hearth as the point around which the community gathered; where the ancients came together to give themselves over to the intimacies of community. The ancients withdrew from the community in order to work (produce). We moderns have inverted this most basic of natural processes entirely. We gather to work and withdraw from the group in order to become more ourselves. The home has become a refuge of our private longings, beliefs and desire for intimacy. The new architecture of the home has moved away from the gathering of the community to the gathering of our things. Things which symbolise our individuality but do little to bring us together in community.
The public sphere on the other hand has become distant and removed from the intimacies of community. For most of us, civic spaces are no longer places where community reaffirms its bonds through rites, rituals and festivities. These spaces now represent the faceless nature of our governing, economic and administrative bodies. The public sphere, which formerly affirmed our religious, intellectual and family life, has now been subordinated almost exclusively to economic activity. And the home has become the place in which we primarily affirm our humanity, though not through rituals that bring people together. Therefore, the task of rethinking the place of our things (consumerism) is really rethinking how we will live.
Rethinking how we live is no less than rethinking what it means to be human. If we think ourselves no different to machines or animals, then our destiny may be the production line or the storehouse. If, however, we think ourselves “a little lower than the angles” then our homes cannot merely be an exercise in ergonomics. If we find fulfilment in relationships, we would seek to build for ourselves homes that allow us to more fully express our humanity in relationship with others.