Shells and doorknobs,
closets and attics, old towers and peasant huts are pleasant memories of our
childhood…..or are they memories of “the home”. As per Bachelard (in his book Poetics of Space) admits that every house is first a geometrical
object of planes and right angles, but ask his reader to ponder how such
rectilinearity so welcomes human complexity, idiosyncrasy and how the house
adapts to its inhabitants.
How does the
body, not merely the mind remember the feel of the latch in a long-forsaken
childhood home? If the house is the first universe for its young children, the
first cosmos, how does its space shape all subsequent knowledge of other space,
of any larger cosmos? Is a house “a group of organic habits” or even something
deeper, the shelter of the imagination itself?
As we listen to
the geometry of built spaces, the echoes dignifying and distinguishing every
old house, every experienced house, the probe is the impact of human habitation
on geometrical forms, and the impact of the form upon human inhabitants.
So how do we sum
it; a house is a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining or is always a
container, sometimes contained, the house serves as the portal to metaphors and
imagination. From time immemorial hoses have had a mystifying curious appeal,
each into his own, especially when architects try to define a house, an abode a
shelter
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“A
house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends
geometrical space.”
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All
architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that
contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the person in that space.
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"The
house is a machine for living in." (Vers une architecture, 1923)
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Houses are built to live in, not to look on;
therefore, let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be
had. Francis Bacon, Essays of Buildings
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"The
physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients
to plant vines." Frank Lloyd Wight New York Times Magazine (4 Oct.
1953).
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I
believe that architects should design gardens to be used, as much as the houses
they build, to develop a sense of beauty and the taste and inclination toward
the fine arts and other spiritual values.
Luis Barragan
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These cities of 20 million and 30
million people, with densities of thousands of families per acre, they require
new inventions to humanize that mega-scale, to find a way in which, though we
live densely and though we live one on top of each other, we still want nature,
and we still want sunlight and we still want the garden, and we still want all
the qualities that make a place humane. And that's our responsibility.
Moshie Safdie
