In My House That’s the Way We Are

Still from Luis Buñuel’s film “Le fantôme de la liberté” (1974). Source: 20th Century Fox

A few months ago Manuel Vicent wrote that “a well brought up family knows that every room [sic] in the house has its own rules of behaviour”¹. Ever since I read it, I haven’t stopped turning that affirmation over in my mind and wondering whether I myself am a domestically well brought up person.

I’ve been living alone² for several years. That’s got its advantages, like knowing the food I left in the house will still be there when I get home, hours or months later. But it’s also facilitated certain habits that have led to changes in a home that was originally just another 1970s design intended for anodyne, conventional, patriarchal, catholic, hetero-normative families.

The first thing I did when I moved in was replace the crucifix above the bed with a Mazinger Z picture. Then I set up a dark room in the bathroom, where it became normal to find rolls of film hanging from the shower head. Logically, a DDC129³ shelf unit with part of my library took pride of place between the toilet and the toilet roll holder. The other DDCs are scattered around the house, organized like those in any old bookshop.

I use one room as my ministudy. There, papers, books and computers share space with countless Playmobil and Mr. Potato figures. Unlike the bookshelves, the toys are kept in perfect order. Another room is a mixture of guest room, storage room, airing closet and breeding ground for dust mites. About ten years ago, some friends spent the night there. None of them have ever gone within 600 km of the room’s rug again. It’s such a terrifying space that I’m thinking of turning it into a dungeon, even though I don’t cut the figure of a handsome millionaire.

The problem is that my gym is in a room where I also sleep, read, keep my collection of videos and do many other things that I don’t have space to go into now. I’ll leave that to your imagination. I don’t know what Vicent might have against those round beds, the ones referred to as being “immodest”, but I must admit I too prefer a large, rectangular, versatile Playboy-style⁴ bed, if only for the ease of finding sheets. For me, a two-by-two metre job, like the one in the Sheats Goldstein Residence⁵ would be a minimum requirement. What I don’t consider at all practical is a hairy bedroom⁶, or one with a pillar stuck in the middle of it⁷.

These are all convention breakers, things that we all manifest to a certain extent, and which turn any simple, monotonous dwelling into a unique, personal home. But they’re things that also define other forms of inhabiting, perhaps just as reasonable and correct as those which, here and now, we consider socially and culturally “normal”: and just as normal as it once used to be to live in a house without a bathroom⁸ or a kitchen⁹, or to have an orgone accumulator¹⁰.

As architects, we should be capable not only of providing solutions for any of these personal peculiarities, however much they may shock us or differ from our own idea of inhabiting spaces, but also of exploiting such experiments to reflect on the notion of domesticity itself. Because we should all be free to live as we wish.  The sad thing would be to have to live only as we’re allowed to.

Text translated by Andrew V. Taylor