domestic tales of space and time
marina pushkar
Interconnectedness of time and space cannot in any way be considered a new concept, humankind has been confined to this system of coordinates for centuries and sometimes it seems there is not much left to be explored. These kind of assumptions might prevail till you find yourself in an unprecedented situation, where the familiar and to a certain extent rigid concepts of space and time all of a sudden become fluid and unpredictable, as it happened to us in Estonia on March 15, 2020 with the declaration of the state of emergency and self-quarantine due to the global outbreak of COVID-19. Being confined to my own home and exploratory practices encouraged by our “Urban Models” course’s tutors inspired me to rethink the relationship between time and space in domestic context and how they affect our perception of home.
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the essence of dwelling
The physicality of home goes back to the roots, when “the sheltered being [gave] perceptible limits to his shelter”, and thus inhabiting a space created “the essence of home” "(Bachelard 2014:5) . The evolution of home-making can be approached as an evolution of human consciousness, growing and evolving of which is continuously shaping space around human beings as a shell of a snail is being formed by the growth of its inhabitant. According to King, domestic space “comes into full significance through its full inhabitation” (King 2004:42) transcending its physicality and turning into “space that is supposed to condone and defend intimacy” (Bachelard 2014:48). Our dwelling practices are what constructs our dwelling, and it is “the activity of dwelling that gives meaning to our relations with physical space and allows us to reach out and grasp it for what it is” (King 2004:42). Thus, such common actors as how much and in which way we are spending time at home are shaping our perception and relation to home, sometimes resulting in changes of spatial practices, structures and uses. Pandemics served as a catalyst to these processes revealing the dynamics of changes usually too subtle to be observed in just a couple of months.
privacy with another
Home as we know it and traditionally think of – a place you return to from your studies or work – goes back to the ancient times, where “the identification of the house with the family corresponded to the spatial separation between public and private space.” (Aureli, Ma, Michelotto, Tattara and Toivonen 2019). A home is becoming the institution of privacy, but as Bachelard rightfully points out, not a solitary, but privacy with another, together, forming a so called circle of trust the household depended on for maintaining its existence. Home was most oftenly also one’s work, whether you were a servant or a master, but in rural areas it was even more – a self-sufficient entity, a little universe giving no time to rest for its inhabitants. In the course of time, this circle of trust, a household, kept narrowing down, at first, to a nuclear family and further on even to single individuals, which is quite a commonplace nowadays. With the diminishing household the working activities, such as workshops or stables, were also being expelled from the house. “With the rise of capitalism and industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, this public/private separation was resurrected within the nuclear family to clearly distinguish work performed by the male breadwinner from the domestic labor performed by the housewife” (Mies 2014:74-75). “While work was remunerated, domestic labor was unwaged and considered a “labor of love,” expected from the housewife for the sake of the family”(Aureli, Ma, Michelotto, Tattara and Toivonen 2019). Kinder, Küche, Kirche typology was rooted, and the dichotomy of work/labor was successful at filling up the working class’s day, leaving place, at best, for some rest, but “leisure at home” was still out of reach, yet to be imagined.
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spatial typologies
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This identification of home to the continuously changing concept of family found its reflection in spatial practices as well. “Specific housing typologies such as the terraced or detached single-family house have historically been used as a way to spatially organize the idea of private property as individual right. For example, in the terraced house, the spatialization of property is realized by the principle of the party wall, a load-bearing wall that cannot be perforated.” (Aureli, Ma, Michelotto, Tattara and Toivonen 2019). Later on, already in the apartment buildings, the same load-bearing walls were used as an instrument of policy, an attempt to dictate the dwellers how to live, making it impossible without a special permit to change the plan of the apartment and adjust the layout to one’s needs. “ Typology, which is tightly linked to the development of modern housing, has sought to make the house a frictionless space in which each subject—mother, father, and child—is clearly individuated.” (Aureli, Tattara 2015). The concept of privacy has been taken to the new, intrafamilial level.
As to the internal composition of the apartments, one of the main goals and incentives for organizing domestic space, esp. kitchen was to reduce and optimize TIME spent in it” (Worsley) – seems quite paradoxical – to make space better so that one could spend less time in it. The root of this paradox lies in the inextricable ties between labor and kitchen, latter being the backyards of a household, domain of hard and dirty work that was to remain invisible. “It took (...) two vital developments – a new pleasure to be taken from good smells, and bad ones to be removed with the extractor fan – for the kitchen to become not just a room for cooking, but a room for living ” (ibid.). Once cooking at home entered the domain of leisure, not only it ceased to be exclusively women’s duty, but also resulted in spatial reorganizations inside the apartment. Into fashion came joint kitchen/living rooms positioning a cook in a center of attention behind a kitchen isle.
new times, same homes, new spaces
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This retrospective of typologies have now led us to the range of patterns and peculiarities the state of quarantine highlighted in people’s domestic practices and I would like to approach them through three different paradigms: temporalities, spatial practices and sense of privacy.
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As earlier the extractor fan managed to revolutionize the kitchen, in the early 21st century internet made a strong entrance and the notion of privacy at home was never the same. The privacy of one’s home, what once was natural and taken for granted now became a conscious choice. Hosting your board meeting in your bedroom via zoom – not a problem. “Digital infrastructure might be the sanitation of our time.”(Klaus 2020) and quarantine embraced digitization to the maximum. Work and outside world have once again invaded home arena turning it not only merely into a place of work, but in some cases a product (renting out on e.g. airBnB) or a marketing article (showcasing it on different social media channels, e.g. Instagram).
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This fluidity of privacy triggered the enforcement of specific spatial practices and I would like to point some tendencies in particular. Compartmentalization inside homes became more and more important in an attempt to assign every member of a family his own space – with home overnight turning into an office, school, cantine and kindergarten, zoning is being seen as a key to survival. Home arranging practices were naturally to gain popularity, as a logical strive to improve a space you are permanently confined, which included not only refurbishment and repairs, but also widely spread cooking and baking – this old trick loved by real estate agents meant to create the feeling of home and atmosphere of cosiness. But also this situation urged people outside in a search of “a home outside of home” to take a break from a school- or office-home: picnics, gardening and building shelter in the woods.
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Temporalities: for the predominant amount of time most of the developments in the domestic sphere were meant to reduce time spent on home labor, and now technologies can almost allow one to avoid house chores freezing the time just by pushing the power button and starting the run of the changing digits on the screens of home appliances. But human nature longs for change, and as the “space” constant is to remain the same, you can observe how the longing for observing the change of time grows. Time consuming practices as bread making, plant growing and crafting make their comeback in a new guise: as leisure. Once a rapidly growing multifunctionality of space slowly is stripping the essence of home of its physicality, time is becoming the new space to dwell in.
References
Bachelard G. The Poetics of Space. 2014.
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Burman Karl. A Plan of A Studio. 1945
King, P.. (2004). Private Dwelling: Contemplating the use of housing. 1-194. 10.4324/9780203421406.
Klaus I. Pandemics Are Also an Urban Planning Problem. Accessed on March 15, 2020.
Mies Maria, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor (London: Zed Books, 2014), 74–75.
Worsley, Lucy. If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home. Bloomsbury, 2013.