The Archipelago of Houses

'My things were no longer there, I used to use part of the living room as my office sometimes, so as not to spend too many hours in the same room when the work piled up, I kept the scripts in my study and my commissioned speeches in one corner of the living room, which was quite spacious, the table I had installed there was gone, as, of course, were my typewriter, my papers, my pen, my ashtray and my reference books, none of which were necessary there now. In the semidarkness, everything else looked identical, Celia hadn’t made any changes, perhaps she didn’t have enough money to make the changes she would like to make. When we go back to a very familiar place, the intervening time becomes compressed or is even erased and cancelled out for a moment as if we had never left, it is that unchanging space that allows us to travel in time.' – Javier Marías, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

'In contemporary art this ghostly persistence is especially strong in the work of Rachel Whiteread. In the late 1980s she began to cast everyday objects like bathtubs and mattresses, closets and rooms, in materials like rubber and resin, plaster and concrete. As the objects are used as molds, the castings are the negative spaces of these things; as a result they are at once obvious in production and ambiguous in reference. For though her sculptures are based on utilitarian objects and everyday sites, they negate function and harden space into mass, and though they appear whole and solid, they also seem fragmentary and spectral. More ambiguously still, these literal traces suggest symbolic traces, memories of childhood, family, and community: they conjure up ‘the cultural space of the home’ as a place of beginnings overwhelmed by endings, as a place haunted by absence.' – Hal Foster, Design & Crime

'Every year we read or hear about rampaging rivers that have swept away many houses with their inhabitants. But Hoeller had so constructed his house, Roithamer said, that it could not be swept away, it is so situated that under no circumstances can it even be affected by the Aurach, he, Hoeller, had constructed his house at the Aurach gorge so that it was immune to all the violence of nature, the very idea of building a house at the most dangerous place on the Aurach, at the Aurach gorge, where no one would ever have built a house for himself, that idea had given Hoeller no peace, he kept thinking that’s where. I must build my house, where no one else would build himself a house, right there, in the Aurach gorge, which everyone fears, that’s where I’ll build my house, I’ll build it right in there, and he naturally opened himself up to the greatest opposition, his persistence and intransigence in pursuing his plan, setting his house in the Aurach gorge just where the roar of the torrent is at its loudest and where the danger of being swept away and totally wiped out one day, lock, stock, and barrel, by the floods, is the greatest, Roithamer said, made. Hoeller a laughingstock everywhere he went, but he didn’t give up his plan and he went on with his building and finished it.' – Thomas Bernhard, Correction

The home – be it skin, a carpet, a shadow, a hut, a shelter or a fortress – is the place where the idea of the world manifests itself: the idea of belonging to the world or claiming possession of a part of it. Homes, like islands or lifeboats in a seething sea, form the archipelago of the city and of society. In 1948, in the magazine “Volontà”, Giancarlo De Carlo addressed the issue of the home: ‘In the home, people are reduced to the level of beasts. They live without light, without air, without sun, without greenery. They lose touch with nature and with their fellow human beings; they forget the value of their inclination towards association and symbiotic living; they are transformed into passive instruments ready for discipline, obedience and war’. Again in 1948, Egle Renata Trincanato published her book Venezia minore, in which she finally overturned the image of the lagoon city by speaking of its humble dwellings which, together with the noble palaces and monumental landmarks, define its very fabric. The home is the place where the interplay of roles has been and continues to be played out, it is the place where gender roles and the form of the community are defined; and indeed, more precisely, it is often the kitchen – through its absence or expansion – that determines the unfolding of life’s theatre. 
A house always has an exterior face. A residential building designed by Álvaro Siza in Kreuzberg for IBA84 takes its form from its location at the intersection of two streets; it is bent and curved at the junction, thus becoming part of Berlin’s urban fabric and rhythm, whilst at the same time displaying, on its most ‘outward-facing’ façade, the anonymously signed inscription ‘Bonjour tristesse’.
Federico Fellini captures a small cube, still standing alone on the outskirts of Rome, which is about to be developed. Chosen as the home and symbol of redemption for the prostitute protagonist of Le notti di Cabiria (1957), this little house, bearing the inscription ‘house of dreams’, is the image Guido Guidi presents to us to speak of reality as well as of trajectories – no matter how impossible they may be. ‘Yes indeed, which of these is the more real: the house where we are sleeping or the house where, when we sleep, we regularly go and dream?’, asks Gaston Bachelard, contemplating dreams and reality through the prism of the oneiric house.
Like an endless succession of biotechnical and metaphysical caverns, Frederick Kiesler spent his whole life thinking about the Endless House, whilst attempting to complete his history of architecture entitled Magic Architecture – a book which, not by chance, ends with the atomic bomb: technology, with all its power, had by then fully emerged. Carlo Scarpa creates lagoons on ceilings and imagines water gardens inside flats; he conceives the interior of the house as a genuine environment to be inhabited with both body and mind. Meanwhile, Carlo Mollino staged the final journey within a flat in Turin, creating spaces loaded with symbols – not to be experienced during one’s earthly journey but to be occupied afterwards. He thus defined the ‘Warrior’s Retirement Home’, filling it with objects yet leaving it empty – a legacy, an intérieur.
In 1972, at the exhibition Italy. The New Domestic Landscape, held at MoMA in New York and curated by Emilio Ambasz, marked the separation between architecture and design: space-liberating devices were on display, conceived to orchestrate other areas of the interior. The objects that make up the domestic landscape are unrelated to the walls of the house: in Ettore Sottsass’ proposal, they are connected to one another by installations and float in hypothetical configurations, whilst in Gae Aulenti’s work they emerge from the floor like aged flakes of monuments.
Concrete Island, written by James G. Ballard in 1974, is a novel centred on a traffic island on which the protagonist finds himself trapped following a road accident. The atoll is a tiny area, the result of a planning process, a useless and uninhabitable remnant, and yet many adventures unfold therein. The reader anxiously awaits the unfortunate protagonist’s escape from this trap, but as they continue reading, they gradually become attached to this strange non-place, getting used to a place without a horizon or a way out, and begin to think that the world ends right there and that this imposed boundary is perhaps the only certainty. The concrete island – a space that is by definition uninhabitable, or perhaps, more accurately, not intended to be inhabited – transforms, as the pages turn, from a prison into a place where it is possible to get away from one’s former life.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the territory of the house became particularly unsettled and disrupted, as evidenced by the eight issues of the magazine “Ottagono”, edited by Marco De Michelis from 1989 to 1991; issue 96 from 1990, entitled Protesi, features Diller & Scofidio’s Slow House, illustrating how a multitude of screens had entered our homes, thereby destabilising the role of the window. In 1986, Rem Koolhaas reimagined Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, transforming it into a house-gym distorted by the tensions of a body that had become the sole, hedonistic and narcissistic protagonist on the stage. Peter Eisenman multiplies his ideas and designs for Houses, in which the grid – which previously covered large areas – is presented not as a systematic order but as a network of multiple three-dimensional labyrinths.
The Elba cabins recalled by Aldo Rossi are quite different from the watchtowers and the house of the man who chose not to participate in John Hejduk’s vision for Cannaregio Ovest (1980). In this work conceived for Venice, architecture and life do not intertwine metaphorically or at different times; instead, they blend together, forming a tapestry of islands and a script that leaves everyone adrift on the open sea. In 1995, Shigeru Ban designed the Curtain Wall House: the house returns to being a tent, whilst it actually is a concrete and steel frame that allows the building to rise over three storeys. The ‘interior’ space is withdrawn from the perimeter of the volume; the first level can therefore be enclosed by glass panels, whilst the second is defined by a sliding fabric screen. If Walter Benjamin characterised the nineteenth-century bourgeois intérieur by the protective lining meant to buffer the intrusion of the metropolis, today there is no longer an exterior to be removed or evoked, but an interior to be revealed, breaking down the boundaries of intimacy, privacy, and security.
The dawn of the new millennium reveals a liberation from the tightly woven confines of the house intended as an island, or from the isolated house that seems more virtual than real, and which awaits new theoretical paths. In 2000, David Cronenberg’s film Existenz emphasises the exaggeration of the notion of the ‘interior’ to the point where it coincides with that of the ‘intérieur’ and, going even further: in the story, the centre of the home is no longer the rooms and walls but the bed in which the protagonists can lie down and connect – via a bio-port inserted into the navel – to virtual realities.
In Cronenberg’s cinematic narrative, the private sanctuary serves as a means of isolating oneself, detaching from reality and immersing oneself in an ‘elsewhere’ that requires no architectural terminals. In 2003, Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Dreamers, set in May 1968, depicts a possible takeover of the home: three young people dismantle the conventional correspondence between rooms and their designated uses in a middle-class Parisian flat, traversing it as a place in which to settle, in which to temporarily establish an archipelago of situations. In the film Koolhaas Houselife (2008), Bêka and Lemoine recount the difficulties faced by Guadalupe Acedo in carrying out routine cleaning tasks in the house designed by OMA in Bordeaux. Although this house is an example of a ‘house-world’ comprising floors with disparate layouts and designed for a client with limited mobility, it thus becomes a symbol of a reality that is difficult to manage.
Lacaton & Vassal tackled the challenging French banlieues with PLUS (2004), a government plan to make more room for apartments in the large architectural ‘ships’ floating far from city centres, or by finally altering the building typology and transforming greenhouses into homes. However, in the new millennium, large collective housing projects are only partially being built on a smaller scale and with a toned-down Brutalist aesthetic, pursuing the prefix ‘co-’ juxtaposed with ‘housing’ often resulting in thematic, generational, or economic enclaves. Meanwhile, the monumental collective houses built in the late 20th century are being erased like a bad memory. They are being demolished in multiple stages; for example, the Robin Hood Gardens complex, built in 1972 in London by Alison and Peter Smithson, was largely dismantled by 2025; and six of the seven Vele di Scampia, built by Francesco Di Salvo between 1972 and 1980 on the northern outskirts of Naples, disappeared in 2026 – but previously, they were portrayed in 7,000 photographs by Tobias Zielony in 2007.
While Philippe Rahm, following Nicholas Schöffer’s 1955 Maison à cloisons invisibles, returns – both historically and contemporarily – to the concept of climatic house, predicting that, in contrast to the well-known 1959 dispute between Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Reyner Banham, the refrigerator would soon have won every battle and dispelled all doubts about its importance, the exhibition Machine à penser, held at the Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2018, romantically presented reproductions of the huts of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein (the latter built to actual scale). 
The hut is once again confined within an old noble palace, far from forest-covered mountain peaks. However, when observing it on display, what comes to mind is – far from the exhibition’s themes – the idea of compartmentalising a large architectural structure and inhabiting just one of its rooms, in order to establish a connection between the theme of the house and the puzzle of expanding historical heritage, as well as the issue of individual and planetary resources. In 2023, the TAKK studio proposed a partial renovation of an apartment in Barcelona (for just €10,000) by inserting a structure – a smaller, more manageable entity; only this part is new and is air-conditioned: the home loses ground to a new, uncertain territory that remains entirely within its walls.
There is a growing trend of projects that turn apartments from private or representational spaces into places where additional guests – intruders, strangers – are accommodated: people who should never have entered the home but whose presence is necessary to bear the financial burden. A vast store of built unused and forgotten structures awaits to be reinhabited: Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo transforms an old stable into a house, preserving its original volume and replicating it after demolishing it, or she transforms a vacant nursery into a villa, but nothing changes in terms of its spatial dynamics because the family is quite large. Memories of expanded authorship forms arise: Gilles Clément claims to have built a gardener’s house; it is the story of a collective project carried out over time with the guests and the various forms of life that inhabited the French countryside in the 1970s. Here, the community is extended to that rural world – erased or denied – which has continued and continues to exist far from the cities and their imaginaries.
Perhaps the home consists of the objects that accumulate and are taken on journeys – some more permanent than others –, or perhaps it is a sublime empty space; certainly, it is an island (real, destroyed, virtual or even merely imagined) from which we seek to grasp the relative and absolute coordinates of a sea that is often stormy.

Sara Marini

Image: Ph. Marina Ballo Charmet, Rumore di fondo, Senza titolo #20, 1997

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