phil I haus / house

research

questions

• is there a space or room in this world that you personally can relate to the most?
• where is home / where is the outside world?
• do you have your own room?
• did you ever paint your wall?
• where is the border between a private and a public space?
• who of us grew up in a house that has an attic and a cellar?
• what are our emotions and connotations towards the attic and the cellar; how much are they shaped by media?

quotes

For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. Bachelard

Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; Bachelard

[…] the maternal features of the house. Bachelard

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our mem­ories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psy­choanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this sim­ plelocalization of our memories. Bachelard

The German word for house walls, Mauern, like the French murs, comes from munire: to protect oneself. They are munitions. They are made up of two walls: The outside wall turns to face dangerous aliens (lurking on the outside), would-be immigrants; the inside wall turns inwards to the inmates of the house like a jailer responsible for their security. In the case of walls without roofs (e.g. the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China), this function becomes clear: The outside is political, the inside wall secretive, and the wall has to protect the secret place of the heart from being visited by evil spirits. Flusser

Doors are holes in walls for going in and out. One goes out to experience the world, and there one loses oneself, and one returns home in order to find oneself again. Flusser

Roofs, walls, windows and doors do not fulfil their function anymore, and this explains why we are beginning to feel homeless. As we can’t really go back to tents and caves (even if some people try to), for better or worse we have to design a new type of house. In fact, we have already started to. Home-as-one’s-castle with its roof, walls, windows and doors now only exists in fairy tales. Material and immaterial cables have knocked as many holes in it as in a Swiss cheese: On the roof there is the aerial, telephone wire comes through the wall, the television takes the place of the window, and the door is replaced by the garage with the car. Flusser

experiment

literature

Bachelard Gaston: „the House. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hut“, in: Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space (La Poétique de l’éspace), 1958.

Flusser Vilém: „With As Many Holes As a Swiss Cheese“, in: Vilém Flusser. Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design (Vom Stand der Dinge), 1999, Pg. 81-84.

Cave Nick, „ISSUE #192 / April 2022“, in: The Red Hand Files (Newsletter), 2022