Hello from Maryland on the eve of Imbolc, the threshold between winter and spring. Though it’s chilly outside, we are 8 degrees (F) above the average for this time of year.
Today is part two of three slide talks about ideas of dwelling that I recorded for my grad architecture students. They’re designing a small apartment building in a historic neighborhood in Baltimore. We’re all familiar with housing, so I do these talks to broaden their perspective.
You can find Part 1, Intimate Moments at Home, with paintings of interiors depicting domestic life, here. In today’s 10-min. talk, we’ll engage with the mythic aspects of house: from history, imagination, and personal and cultural memory. There’s a transcript at the end, if you prefer to read. (Fair warning: the pictures make it.) Enjoy!
Thanks for joining me. I’d love to hear about your ideas of home in the comments. Next week, we’ll wrap up with further consideration of specific architectural ideas of dwelling in the city.
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We're back with Dwelling in the City, part two. I'm Julie Gabrielli and part two is called House and World.
In part one, we looked at paintings of interiors that depicted the intimacy of urban domestic life and connections to the world outside, whether the city or the garden or the ocean. Here, we're going to engage with the more mythic aspects of house from history, the imagination, and from personal and cultural memory.
You can see here on the upper left, the peaked form of all the houses on this slide. But the upper left is a child's drawing, which is something of a universal form. When people study the kind of psychology of house and of children's drawings of houses, and you often see these kinds of peaked roofs even in places that don't build that way typically.
But this is a classic form found in many cultures throughout the world. For example, in the lower left in northern Japan, these are very traditional houses. And you often find this level of pitch in places that have a heavy snowfall. For instance, you know, like the Swiss Alps is another place where you can imagine the kind of chalet form.
But anyhow, it's a nearly archetypal form. It's somewhat universal. One way to think about it is that the house is your personal kind of axis mundi, to use a phrase from Mircea Eliade. And there's a connection between the earth and the underworld and the sky.
Architectural writer theorist Christian Norberg-Schultz talks about the sense of the word to dwell as a sense of belonging and a place of being settled, cultivating the earth, and also the idea of departure and return. And so the section of the house, the vertical section from cellar to attic is something that Bachelard talks about in The Poetics of Space.
We have the rooms of the house in our dreams, starting with the cellar. Bachelard says, we always go down the stairs to the cellar, and there's this idea of descent into the earth and associations with the underworld, madness, and burial. And so this is a space is literally carved out of the earth.
And the attic is just the opposite. Bachelard, in his book, says, “Up near the roof, all our thoughts are clear.” And you can see the structure is visible, everything is revealed up here. There's a view from presumably from up high, out over the landscape. And the attic can even be understood as a place of privacy and safety and removal from the daily life of the house, as well as a literal storehouse of memories.
And so there are all sorts of associations of house with the human body, with the cosmic order. Starting with the idea of universal wholeness, which this is a diagram of, as kind of pictogram, there's a sense of center where the sort of vertical axis is crossing a horizontal axis. It’s almost a reenactment of the creation of the world. I mentioned the axis mundi before, the vertical axis, and then crossing that is a horizon. And so then there are activities in each of the four quadrants.
And this idea of creating order out of disorder is followed through many cosmologies and many cultural worldviews. For example, this is the Egyptian goddess Nut, and there is an association of house with the feminine nature, the sheltering, nurturing qualities, and that the house we occupy between birth and death must make reference to our earthly condition. In this version, the sky is Nut's body, and it's also the soul's path on its way home. And the image of Nut painted on a coffin made that coffin the mummy's dwelling place.
Another sense of making order out of the wilderness or out of disorder is depicted in this drawing of the Roman tool called the groma, which this centurion is using to survey and mark out the two initial roads in the founding of the town: the cardo and the decumanum (or decumanus). They follow the path of the sun and they make that mark on the land. And if you lay out a town this way, the understanding is that the houses within that town would follow a similar order.
This is Timgad, a Roman city in what is now Algeria. It was founded by the Emperor Trajan, around A.D. 100. And you can see there's quite a rigid rectilinear geometry. The cardo is this central vertical line. And then the decumanum is this one that runs horizontally here. I’ll show a photograph of it next, an aerial photograph. So you can see the bones of the city and what's left of Timgad. And the columns lining the two main streets are the ones that delineate the cardo and the decumanum.
Then the blocks of the houses are this kind of background fabric of the city. And then the institutions are very figural. Like you have the curving theater, the triumphal arch arches at both ends of the main street temples that are off the forum, which is that central square next to the theater where the two axes cross. And so within the rest of the fabric, the houses themselves actually kind of repeat that overall pattern, but at a much smaller and simplified scale.
These are some houses in the Roman city of Pompei. Again, they’re kind of a microcosm of that same order where instead of the forum where everybody gathered for major events and market marketplaces and political rallies and things. In the House, this is simply the central courtyard around which the rooms are arranged as if the rooms were the blocks of the city. But now they're the smallest unit of measure.
This is a street in Pompeii. Again, the columns are defining this as either the cardo or the decumanum.
And this is a house in Pompeii called the House of the Silver Wedding. I just wanted to show what that courtyard looks like, that central courtyard. So it's defined by columns, it's open to the sky. And then the rooms around it benefit from the light and air that's coming in through that courtyard. And these houses would collect water in the center there in what they call the impluvium. So the rainwater would come, the roof would pitch into that space, so all the water would run off the roof and be saved for household use.
This is just a drawing of that house, the same house. So the main courtyard is the one with the columns around it. And this is showing the sort of order and sense of enclosure of these spaces and the different layers of access. So the first layer of access is number one on the lower left, which is like almost like a vestibule. And then the second space labeled number two and three is more of a kind of public forecourt. The more private spaces for the family are deeper in, past number five. So that's when you get into that more private courtyard.
In part three, we'll wrap up with further consideration of the house and the city, building on this idea of the house as a microcosm of the larger order of the city.
Thanks for your message Julie. 😊. I hope you are feeling a little more grounded today.
Will be in touch if I end up purchasing. Should know within a month or so. Have spent this morning talking to land owners who I may lease from about septic tanks and tiny house owners - discussing whether a 6ft 3 son can stand up in an upstairs loft -no, obviously!
The morning is usually my quiet creative writing time so talking about this stuff does not feel aligned and causes my head to burst!
So much to think about. Kind of scary especially as I am doing it on my own. I just have to keep thinking "this is exciting" and "what an adventure"! 😄
I have just discovered you here Julie and love what you do.
"to dwell as a sense of belonging and a place of being settled"
It's so relevant right now as I am feeling like the ground is unsteady beneath me due to being uncertain of where I am going to live soon.
Home is everything.
I am looking at potentially buying a tiny home as the housing market where I live in Wanaka, New Zealand is CRAZY. This is a long essay in itself and one I will probably start writing about.
Thanks for your work here. 🙏