Habitation – the public and the private

Talking about autonomy and heteronomy definitely takes us to the realm of the social and when it goes to architecture and built environment in particular it is rather impossible to avoid talking about "habitation".

The scope that regards architecture as a social necessity or as a social product is intersecting the topic of habitation and in that sense the link between architecture and the "social" is certainly valid, at least, up to a certain extend. But before characterizing architecture and habitation in particular as the outcome of "a social necessity", maybe we should attempt to regard it as something more fundamental that surpasses and in the same time encompasses the "social" and the "technical". What architecture is in the first place and prior to its form as a notion, is the result of the formalization of something natural, the outcome of the technical approach towards natural conditions. In that sense, we could consider habitation as the epitome of the negotiation between the technical and the natural, as I have already said before, architecture is the technical expression of a fundamentally natural condition, this of habitation.

This is exactly the realm where informality appears, in between the natural and the technical, in between autonomy and heteronomy and in between the subject and the object. All the above "in between" situations are to be found all together in an active dialogue within the praxis of habitation. This is why informality is inherent to it. People tend to occupy space and when there is no planning or legislation that implies or implements an "end" covering particular needs, or when the boundaries of formality are not clear informality emerges.

Certainly, occupation of space, in the sense of "habitation" could be considered as something innate in the human nature, something similar to an animal's territoriality which for the human is transposed to the notion of "ownership", "property" or "possession" and is linked to the idea of autonomy but in order for this autonomy to be controlled and because of the fact that within a social environment several autonomies meet and overlap there is the need to negotiate and set connections and boundaries with each other. There is when heteronomies appear, established by an authority or the society itself (consciously or not) they regulate among other things also the negotiation for matters of space or matters that form space. Therefore, because of this interaction of autonomy and heteronomy one could say that habitation itself is both a natural practice and a social phenomenon and each of these two prevails in a different scale. Autonomy prevails in the small scale is connected to the notion of property and identity and is being expressed naturally while heteronomy, or if you prefer a social contract, is to be found in the large scale as a regulating and also formative factor for space but also for non material things that constitute space. To make it more clear, one could say wide and large that the autonomy (and the natural) is contained in the notion of oikos - house while heteronomy (and the technical) is to be found in the notion of polis - city. Certainly these two concepts are not exclusively spatial but they are the spatial expressions of broader concepts.

The ancient Greek term polis (πόλις), translated as "city" has embedded in its meaning, apart from the spatial organization and the materiality of the city, also the social and political structure, the governing and the civil law and more or less anything that constitutes the city as a community of actively coexisting and interacting people, and also as a notion. Polis is the outcome of the, active dialogue of several autonomies, which could result to overlapping, regulation, canonization, in all the levels of the constitution of the city, (political, economical, social etc.) and is not something instantaneous, it has an origin which is inscribed in the notion of the city itself, as a "collective memory".

"One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory."[1]

Polis as a permanence is built upon the formalities this memory has constituted through persistence in time establishing them as conditions. These formalities are of any kind (economical, social, cultural) and are to be found in all levels and scales of the city, both in the material reality and the immaterial structures and notions of it.

The word oikos (οίκος), normally translated as "house", signifies much more than the materiality of a built house. Similarly to the term polis it refers to a lot more than the construction's elements such as the bricks, the walls, the windows or the roof. The term refers to the idea of a family, everything that surrounds it, all material and immaterial things that family possesses. Oikos is usually also historically charged by the origin of this family which of course signifies and is being signified by the materiality of the house itself. In that sense the word oikos touches the grounds of both the material space and the social space in the way the idea of "habitation" in general does.

Oikos is an autonomy inside the heteronomy of the city but one could also regard it as a heteronomy that regulates and defines the autonomies of its members (family). Concerning this in particular, Xenophon in Oeconomicus discusses on the relationship of the husband and the wife within the oikos and how a man could succeed in household management. Oeconomicus is one of the first works in economics and a significant source about the everyday life in classical Athens. Michel Foucault quoting Xenophon writes,

"...the main value of the art of "economics" is that it teaches the practice of "archein" (άρχειν = ruling, governing) from which is un-detachable. Governing the oikos means to rule (άρχω); and governing the house is not different from the exercising of power in the city."[2]

As it becomes obvious from Xenophon's words, the ancient Athenian oikos was a field for the exercising of power in a similar way that the city. What we can understand from that is that there are relations of autonomy and heteronomy in between the members of the oikos similar to those in between the oikos and the polis and certainly the polis is in turn heteronomous because of a higher structure etc. Additionaly also in between the individual members of the family and the polis there are relations of autonomy and heteronomy. Taking into account the above, and understanding that spatial singularities (oikos, polis) are connected to the social, it is normal for one to assume that the social is something that is being inscribed in space in many different ways, material and immaterial.

Space is constituted by the relation of the individual to the society and the how this relation is formed according to general and situation specific heteronomies defines also the spatial arrangement of both the house and the city. The way how the oikos and the polis are related is to be found in the notion of public and private and the how they are being interrelated within the social context and finally how they are being inscribed in space. The spatial relation of the public and the private often signifies the relation of the subject to other subjects and the perception, not only for the notion of the city as a material artifact, but also as the body of the social. It is on this borderline of the public and the private where are also to be found the traces of the notions of the objective and the subjective, of the personal and the social, of the autonomous and the heteronomous, of the freedom and power. The strongest and more crisp these borderlines are the more detached are the poles of these dipoles. When polarization comes informality is to be found in all these "in betweens" offering continuity in fields where formality creates merely borderlines and linear connections. Thus, the fields where informality is emerging in various ways is in between the oikos and the polis (spatial - economical), in between the public and the private (spatial - performing), in between the society and the individual (political) etc.

These are the fields that the architect has been given the power to practice and influence, consciously or unconsciously and concerning the complexity of all these relations architecture is rather reductive. In the architectural practice, similar to all technical practices, what prevails is this general condition over the particular, the heteronomy over the autonomy the attempt to objectify the subjective. This formalization that has as vehicle the architecture and the architect creates discontinuities and borderlines in all relations and scales; it is not by accident that informality grows faster when formality is greater and suppresses autonomy, no need to wonder why modern buildings have been the best canvases for informality to grow. Taking into account what Heidegger means when he says that "the house has dwelling as its goal" we can claim that dwelling is the end of the house. But when we design we don't design the dwelling, we design the house.

But the house is much more than its form, it is a lot more than the formative materiality. It is an entire field of relations of any kind and with almost anything one could imagine. Apart from the obvious and dominant relation of the oikos and the polis (the house and the city) there is another relation that is equally, if not more important, this of the house and the subject. The house is more than a cell in the body of a city, the house is the memory of it, the expectation for it before it is built, it is the coziness in English, or what is called oikiotita (οικειότητα) in greek which means familiarity and derives from the word oikos (οίκος) which is described above (means house). Therefore the house and what dwelling is, are up to the user and there is nothing like a method or a knowledge that could be deployed and applied as a general rule for how the house is to be designed. Therefore, every time we design a house it is necessary to start from scratch and design according to the context, the inhabitant, the city, and no matter this still we will possibly fail because the house is more about the experience of the dwelling, the memory of dwelling, the dream for dwelling and this is something total and subjective, therefore impossible to grasp and design it. It is easy for an architect to learn how to design the ideal angle for the seats in an amphitheatre an amphitheatre so as to have the best sound quality and good visibility to the scene, it is easy to learn what material to use for better insulation and corrosion resistance, but it is really difficult for somebody to approach the extreme complexity that synthesize the house and the city and will certainly never find rules for it.

Architects can build houses as forms, but the idea of dwelling, as a practice, as a function, as even more than that, is something indefinable because the form becomes a function, a feeling, a perception once an agent is implemented and this happens only after the completion of the building. More precisely, the house is being dwelled by an individual that has a subjective idea of how he dwells but when we design we do it for a specific need or sets of needs, having archetypes of habitation in our minds and it is doubtful if the individual user has the same needs or complies with our archetypes. Certainly the user may modify the building but on the other hand may also modify his own life and develop the feeling he has these needs and he has the particular, imposed, idea for what habitation is. There is the danger that users of space will learn to live and experience space as if they were mere executors of a prefabricated (formal) idea for what space is and how they should behave and occupy it. The main problem in this case remains that we reduce the inhabitant to the level of the mere executor of a prefabricated idea of what habitation is instead of stimulating him to find what habitation means for himself and build or design accordingly, or better negotiate over a design and a final form.

Together with this through built space and by imposing our ideas for what oikos and polis are we create an image for what the society is. We impose spatial relations that form social relations and create social conditions and in that sense architecture is not an easy task but rather a sensitive one. Experience has shown that especially when habitation is concerned plans tend to fail because the subjectivity of the individuals prevails over the general conditions and objectifications set by the designer which means that no matter how formative a formality is, informality still finds the way to emerge and no matter that the established "archetypes" of habitation are not entirely questioned by the inhabitants there is still an extend of self consciousness and a notion of autonomy that leads to some kind of autopoesis (modification).

Of course, the question that still needs to be answered is what extend of the space we produce is the result of heteronomy (heteropoesis), what is the outcome of sets of autonomies (autopoesis) and how these two different productions relate.

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[1] Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (page 130)

[2] Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 2. L'usage des plaisirs, Gallimard, Paris 1984. (p. 179 in the Greek edition, translation mine)