In Depth

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. There is a time for the evening under starlight, A time for the evening under lamplight (The evening with the photograph album). …… In my end is my beginning.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Part II: “East Coker” (1943)

Home, an innermost sanctum, a well of longing, or a simple patch where our bodies can lie down, is where we all start from.

When I close my eyes and imagine the place called home, I see dappled light rubbing on the wooden windowsill whose edges are no longer sharp but rounded and smooth, thickened by layers upon layers of paint; the light slips and glides until it gently falls on the tiled floor, whose cracks and wrinkles are its charm. Afloat in the air are the dampened laughter of women next door, bicycle bells ringing outside, sparrows on the electrical lines, and a sweet hint of sesame oil and rice vinegar.

All of a sudden, development steamrolled my sleepy hometown. Its feathery charms stood little chance against the mighty neoliberal engine. Overnight, thousands of old oak and plane trees were cut down to make oversized asphalt streets all over the city, which were then decorated with the confetti of KFCs and McDonald’s. Wooden houses and stone courtyards were replaced with marching orders of concrete housing blocks, which, in turn, were quickly torn down to make way for shiny high-rises. Crusts and dust drowned the streets and pushed an entire generation of youth indoors.

When we sat down to compile our recent projects for the home into a book, it was clear that this was not about housing. We won’t attempt to theorize housing, propose sweeping solutions to its problems, or present the projects as a set of metaphysical ideals. Instead, this book and the projects included in and beyond these pages are our attempts to enchant the house; as rogue architects who stretch codes, inhabit depths, and turn “old stones”; to find a home for things not for sale and which don’t belong to anyone; to question if housing for all (instead of, for example, a home for everyone) should be the yardstick for the shelters of our humanity; to experiment; and to follow other logics, like Alice in Wonderland.

Modernity, which drowned my childhood home, had two vectors. In its rearview, old customs and stifling structures were flushed out; industry was to be integrated with the everyday; and a new consciousness of the common man was promised to emerge. In its abyss ahead, however, the instruments that wrought the modern world—mass production and economic life—bent the vector by extracting enormous energy and resources and directing them toward the collective so that home, the site of nonconforming idiosyncrasies, unresolved mysteries, intangible ancestral ties, unsanctioned futurities, and infinite shapes of togetherness, was emptied and made ancillary to the city. Hannes Meyer, the Bauhaus dean at the height of industrializing Weimer, declared unequivocally: “The surest sign of true community is the satisfaction of the same needs by the same means,” accompanied by a radical portrayal of the new domesticity, the “Co-op Interieur” (Fig. 1). “The upshot of such a collective demand is the standard product. … They are apparatus in the mechanization of our daily life. They are manufactured in quantity as a mass-produced device, as a mass-produced structural element, as a mass-produced house. … The degree of our standardization is an index of our communal productive system.”

Critics throughout the modern ages—Henrik Ibsen, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger alike—have all reflected on the blight of the interieur, often to a melancholic or nihilistic end. The irony is that as distasteful as Meyer’s words might sound to the free people of modernity, most people today live in some version of the Co-op Interieur—their spatial uniformity characterized by tightly packed rectangular rooms linked by highly efficient corridors and hermetically sealed to minimize exchanges with all kinds of “others.” Both the philosophical gaze and our empirical knowledge seem to declare the architecture of the interieur of the commoners doomed. On this topic, Hannah Arendt illuminates a crucial element at risk in the discourse—care and tenderness: “The French have become masters in the art of being happy among ‘small things,’ within the space of their own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and cat and flowerpot, extending to these things a care and tenderness which, in a world where rapid industrialization constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today’s objects, may even appear to be the world’s last, purely humane corner.”

Care and tenderness are not exclusive to the French, nor does it have to be limited to the “small things” within four walls. In fact, there existed many types of domestic architecture that did not only house our bodies and their material extensions but also care and tenderness toward other people, lives, and things. Siheyuan (Chinese courtyard houses) and rumah adat (elaborately evolved longhouses in Indonesia) alike, where generations after generations gathered in harmony as well as in distress, have woven a rich web of rituals, customs, and social relations around the care for our kin under one roof. However, modernity saw them as unsanitary and archaic, treated them as a nuisance and obstacle to urbanization, and demolished them en masse. The Japanese machiya, the French maison, or the English mansion socialized craft, commerce, family traditions, and quotidian life together as interdependent blocks. They have now largely been exiled to business establishments. The Italian villa, where one room flows into another and the world outside flows through the domestic spaces inside in a way that individual parts cannot be secreted from the whole of life, are now sites of museums and hospitality, occasioning the extraordinary rather than the ordinary. The myriad nomadic structures such as pao, teepee, and igloo, enablers of humans’ embedded existence in nature, are popularized as glamping sites during tourist seasons in heavily managed and readily consumable “natures.” The tally goes on.

How did house become the sole survivor in the kaleidoscopic world of domestic architecture?

Etymologically, house traces its origin back to the Germanic haus, which refers to livestock and grain storage structures. People did not live in the haus. In the seventeenth century, Dutch merchants moved into the huis and made a palace for the bourgeoise out of it. Cranes installed on gables hoisted goods up and down the slender canal houses — a compressed hybrid between the Germanic haus and Venetian palazzo, the ground level visible to passersby to promote business, while residents climbed steep, narrow stairways and navigated corridors among their accumulated possessions (Fig. 2). One could argue that the Dutch merchants of the Golden Age fused two otherwise unrelated concepts—one of the safe-keeping of material assets and the other of the expression of subjective personhood—in the huis through ad hoc experimentation.

Today’s housing practice—designing urban domesticity for an ever-increasing population and goods—is anything but ad hoc. It is tightly governed by the holy trinity of efficiency, density, and economy with very little room for experimentation. Once a rich site of crafts, where care and tenderness were extended to animate the material world around us, homes are now impoverished with standardized industrial materials quickly put together, requiring minimal maintenance, and anticipating a short shelf life. Amid rising land costs, the spaces not included in the NFA (Net Floor Area) and therefore not for sale (i.e., code-required exterior for legal light and air, cores for distribution of resources, courts for common leisure, and corridors for circulation) are ever-shrinking because they are unusable and unsellable. But no matter how reduced the spatial experience of urban domesticity has become, the doctrine of perpetual shortage renders any departure from the most efficient and cost-effective practices immoral.

Up against the tyranny of efficiency, one old stone we attempted to turn is the double-loaded corridor. In “Cancel the Corridor” (p. xxx), Nicolas Kemper traces the origin of the corridor back to the fourteenth-century German barrack design as the passage for runners carrying the orders of commanders. Housing doubled down on this militant disposition, loading it with apartments on both sides, slicing the interieurs in half, taking away half of their light and air, and dumping our bodies in long, dreary collectors of anonymous doors with low ceilings, cheap carpets, no daylight, and no escape. We have looked for alternatives in the Japanese engawa (Fig. 3), or the streets in the air (Fig. 4), both allowing us to take a step outside and make a small piece of the exterieur our own. In Pillow Book, court lady Sei Shonagon recorded with much enthusiasm the “pleasant things”—intangible delights in and around the Heian palace where she lived: “In winter, the early mornings. It is beautiful indeed when the snow has fallen during the night, but splendid too when the ground is white with frost; or even when there is no snow or frost, but it is simply very cold and the attendants hurry from room to room stirring up the fires and bringing charcoal.” The attendants hurried in the engawa, the enchanted space between the extended floor and the roof overhang that gently mediated between the warm interieur and frosty exterieur.

In impoverished postwar London, the Smithsons’ joyful collages depicting a spontaneous sociality in the “streets in the air” articulated a utopian vision in dire need. In their Golden Lane competition entry, “the daily grind of working-class life is miraculously swapped for glamor, youth, and health,” featuring a man on all fours playing with a toddler, Marilyn Monroe, and the baseball player Joe DiMaggio. Many of these council estates succumbed to chronic neglect and were cleared away for new developments in recent decades, but documentarians and journalists were able to capture with their cameras the streets in the air teeming with human life and human love until their final days. In the Hyde Park flats in Sheffield, demolished barely twenty years after its construction, paper girls roller-skated down the halls (Fig. 5), a milkman delivered dairy products in steel wagons, cousins exchanged a moment of friendly mockery, and women gossiped about social sundries at the doorways. Even with tough times befalling them and many residents unemployed after the closure of the pits and the steelworks, they were still fond of their homes on these “streets” and didn’t want to move.

Our first project with Tankhouse—450 Warren Street (p. xxx), completed in 2021, did away with double-loaded corridors and 80% efficiency ratio—two golden rules of the New York City housing design and development matrix. The project scrupulously transformed one of its two meanings of egress into a set of covered exterior stairs and corridors, encircling a common courtyard outside the minimum legal light and air requirement. Its voluminous and porous body doubled the NFA and maximized the buildable envelope, so it was possible to make the exterieur livable. It was a continuation of early experiments like Party Wall (p. xxx) and tiNY (p. xxx), where the idea of utilizing single-loaded corridors as egress, maximizing light, view, and cross ventilation, was developed and promised to bring back the “pleasant things” of a winter morning; and a more finely attuned version of Las Americas (p. xxx), where the combination of exterior corridors and courtyards reshaped the architectural body and promised to bring back the dampened laughter of neighbors, the milkman, and roller-skaters (Fig. 6).

If engawa makes a patch of the exterieur our own, and the street in the air socializes our daily encounters, then court mediates our relationship with the unknown and unowned by interiorizing, without defining, the exterieur. It was the earliest architectural form of human communion, dating as far back as the Neolithic age, when people deposited remains of their ancestors, animal kin, and broken pottery in circular megaliths (Fig. 7). Travelers arrived from all directions, took passages framed by the stones, and were brought together by spirits outside the self and beyond here and now. In early settlements and throughout history, courtyard houses were the most common typology for domestic architecture around the world, creating shelters for bonded kin and nurturing their shared futurity. Court is the antithesis of an attic or basement where the dead are kept in captivity for private consumption or otherwise left forgotten to collect dust. It holds the past and the coming in a shared present. Metaphysically, court creates a finiteness in nature and a horizon close to home. The Renaissance pried open these sacred courts, and the Enlightenment set out to conquer the infinite. With the last pockets of court driven out by liberal urbanization, we might lose this physical and spatial form of a shared, enduring unknown entirely.

In “Codes of Living” (p. xxx), Ted Baab traces the history of the formulation and legal enforcement of court in New York City dating from the anti-tenement New Law of 1901 (predecessor of the first complete Zoning Resolution in 1916), in response to photojournalist Jacob Riis’s documentation of “the dark and grim slum conditions of the Lower Manhattan tenements.” (Fig. 8) From this singular and somewhat paternalistic vision initially, the plethora of desires of individuals, companies, or city governments to shape the city’s fabric to their own interests over time has made the Zoning Resolution a “hyperdimensional reality.” These pockets of porosity have become a labyrinth most architects do not dare to venture into. However, if we are willing to leave old logic behind, there is a wonderous world to explore among the diminishing courts in our cities today and in the labyrinth of manifold ideas. Following the success of 450 Warren Street, we continue to develop projects with Tankhouse in which the court acts as the primary agent in determining unit assembly, away from the tyranny of double-loaded corridors and efficiency ratio. At Vanderbilt (p. xxx) and Union (p. xxx), the collection of backyards, side yards, and setbacks are complemented by additional rooftop terraces, shifting structural grids, and drawing intentional relationships with neighboring buildings, so that together they create a series of courts on multiple levels and in multiple directions.

As human habitation continues to weigh down the planet, putting our collective home—Earth—at risk, density is a necessary planning instrument for other species to survive alongside us. However, the logic of density projected in architectural forms like the Hong Kong towers and MIH (Mandatory Inclusionary Housing) developments in New York City hardly produces anything social or human. In Las Americas (p. xxx), a housing prototype initiated by the city of León to reverse the sprawl of migrant settlements (Fig. 9), it was as important to create a nurturing home for the residents and a proud icon for the neighborhood as it was to make high-density housing in the city. In Union (p. xxx), an upzone development that needs to meet the MIH requirement and a tight budget, the principles developed in the courts and corridors from earlier projects still managed to produce airy and sundry social porosity in the vertical village. Ultimately, home is relational, not teleological, and housing is not merely the act of putting objects and bodies in storage. We need to pay extra attention to the relationships engendered inside these dense urban domesticities as they will replace the great “nature” as the predominant environment that shapes our humanity.

Besides zoning codes and building codes, energy codes are another hyperdimensional example of a collection of past desires and current compromises, with many old stones to be turned. Karilyn Johanson’s text on the Envelope (p. xxx) traces the evolution of how the economic, regulatory, and physical thresholds, which used to rift in and out of each other and are permeated by a rich world of social habitation, zones of microclimates, and spatial types, have collapsed into a single line of the envelope today. This creates a sharp division between inside and outside, denotes a two-dimensional representational image, and is increasingly hardened by the environmental performance matrix.

The problem of the envelope stems from the core. In his critique “A Home is Not a House”, Reyner Banham illustrated, “with very little exaggeration, this baroque ensemble of domestic gadgetry epitomizes the intestinal complexity of gracious living. … [I]f mechanical services continue to accumulate at this rate it may be possible to omit the house in fact.” The baroque “gadgetry” core in our modern houses are, akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring-machines,” mechanisms to extract, appropriate, and incorporate energy and resources outside oneself into oneself. They are disguised vestiges of the premodern world: the dichotomy between the served and the serving. Basement servants’ quarters, hidden stairways, and corridors turned into machines in undercrofts and pipes and ducts in chases. As mass production banished the serving further away, out of sight, with infrastructural tentacles delivering energy and resources optically free from histories and consequences, our hidden debts mounted exponentially. Current energy codes, conservative in nature, stipulated by passive strategies, and reliant on a high-performing envelope (more embodied energy), are merely a medical approach to our diagnosis without questioning the moral basis of this unidirectional dependency.

If freedom is an essential tenet of modernity, then we should strive to be free from the serving and debts and establish a symbiotic relationship with the “others.” The architectural core needs to flow both ways—serving and being served by our collective big home. To do so, we need to consider the architectural shell not only as a conservator and weather barrier but also as an atmosphere remediator, energy creator, and water harvester, and consider the entire house a site of localized metabolic processes that are energy- and resource-positive. In the experimental Breathe (p. xxx), a mini house for three, as it inserts itself in a dead-end alley in Milan, it also takes in rainwater, daylight, and views; it needs little furniture, collects pollutants from the atmosphere, and lights up warmly at night like a lantern. Breathe is a new “primitive hut.” It seeks to defy the consumptive habits of modern life, land lightly on the ground, take what’s abundant around it, and offer what’s scarce back. The self-sufficient Petalhouse (p. xxx), a prefabricated ADU designed for the city of Los Angeles, embraces smallness, adds density, and a new income stream in the backyard without requiring heavy logistics and onerous site work. It moves in like a petal. Much work must be done to free our houses from the baroque core, extend care and tenderness toward our collective big home, and learn how to be a chameleon and octopus rather than a hard turtle.

Chameleons and octopi possess extraordinary intelligence in their ability to read the environment, adapt and hack it, become part of it rather than be in opposition, and all this with a sense of humor and humility. With humor, Milanese designer Ugo La Pietra hacked the regime of urbanization and its mechanistic operations with his whimsical ad hoc “living” objects, domesticating the usually impersonal, sanitized city into his home (Fig. 11). When Lithuanian-born American artist Aleksandra Kasuba transformed her townhouse in Manhattan, she complicated the generic box with stretched fabrics and sensorial experiences through materially rich, tactile surfaces and imbuing the rectilinear plan with a delicate tension (Fig. 12). Transversality, a term coined by Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara, whose domestic projects are concerned with the intersectionality of Japanese values and Western technologies, embraces the vitality arising from cutting across, chaos, turbulence, and confrontation as “the world flow(s) ceaselessly through the small spaces” within the walls of the house. When we transformed artist Janaina Tschape’s home and studio (p. xxx) and designers Elizabeth Beer and Brian Janusiak’s family home (p. xxx), we let sunlight and starlight pour in from above, connecting the interieur to the circadian and cosmic. Stairs and exposed structures are intentionally placed on opposite sides of the house, claiming their rightful space and motivating the functional elements to produce transversality. The exchange between inside and outside is no longer limited to planar facade fenestrations but variegated and layered through narrow slits, layered balconies, and protruding terraces. House needs not to be passive nor neutral but the site for highly personal engagement with others and beyond.

The reconceptualization of house from passive to active, from collective to personal, from generic to specific, from singular to multiple, and from consumptive to care is not only moral but also existential. In 1985, a young Kazuyo Sejima enacted the “Tokyo Nomad Woman” in Toyo Ito’s “Pao”—a harbinger of our own obsolescence in the coming world. (Fig. 13) Sitting between a clothing rack, mirror, and makeup table inside a transparent structure, Tokyo Nomad Woman’s image as a consumer rather than a producer or caretaker signaled empowerment and freedom. But as she remains afloat in the hyper-mediatized urban environment like the seeds of a dandelion, she can also be dissolved without a trace. Banham’s Environment-Bubble (Fig. 14) and Tokyo Nomad Woman’s pao render the subjects vulnerable. In houses where praxis is shortchanged with performance, we become subsumed into large systems, our bodies are militarized and social sundries annihilated, and diminishing porosity mirrors the disappearance of our shared unknown; humanity is besieged. Such a crisis is underscored by contemporary thinkers like Emanuele Coccia, who says that “it will be WhatsApp rather than Le Corbusier’s Modulor that’s the model for communal housing.”

Almost a hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf wrote about a room of one’s own, where one can “draw the curtains; to shut out distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the inquiry and to ask the historian.” Without it, “the great problem of the true nature of women and the true nature of fiction [is] unsolved.” If we asked the historian today about the fate of our home, what might she tell us? She might say that while a house can be produced, a home can only emerge from praxis, that the art of designing the most ordinary sites of our quotidian life urgently needs abundant experimentation, that it is necessary to adapt and adjust its architectural and physical languages while holding the spatial, material, economic, and ecological systems in a precarious tension, that we need to rediscover and learn to live in liminal spaces—in-depth, that among fragments of past dreams and heaps of current compromises, there is a new unknown that we can tenderly hold together; and that insofar as our homes inhabit our collective big home, their bodies incorporate other constantly evolving bodies, and their codes encode that of our togetherness and always revising, they promise to bring about the vital materialization of divine desires of life.