WikiConceptsDwelling

Dwelling

Definition

Dwelling names the fundamental mode of human being as being-in-the-world, of which building is the concrete accomplishment. In Heidegger's foundational account, "we build and have built because we dwell"; building is "letting-dwell," and dwelling is the mode of existence of mortals on the earth (the fourfold: earth, sky, divinities, mortals) whose basic character is "sparing and preserving." Architecturally, dwelling is developed by Norberg-Schulz (existential space, genius loci), Heynen (modernism's dialectic of dwelling/home) and the phenomenology of place. Dwelling is opposed here to mere shelter or to the commodified, objectified "space" of the plan.

Key Thinkers

  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the lived body as the "vehicle of being in the world"; being-at-home/being-in-the-world as an embodied condition (the philosophical ground beneath Heidegger's dwelling).
  • Martin Heidegger — "Building Dwelling Thinking": building as letting-dwell; the fourfold; space from locations.
  • Christian Norberg-Schulz — genius loci, existential space, and the concretization of dwelling.
  • Anthony Vidler — the uncanny as the unhomely double of dwelling; homelessness and estrangement as the modern condition.
  • Gaston Bachelard — the poetic register of dwelling: the house as the "oneiric house" of reverie; the poet's cell "inhabited thanks to the image," guarded "more by the whiteness of the lime-wash than by the strong walls" — "stronger than all geometry"; inner space "where everything is commensurate with inner being" (Intimus pp. 22–23).
  • Walter Benjamin — the dwelling-trace dictum: "to dwell means to leave traces" (The Arcades Project, p. 9, via Downey) — dwelling defined by the residue it deposits, the trace as the interior's memory-medium (via Downey 2018).
  • Anne Troutman — the fear-side register: "The primal shelter is also the site of primal fears"; dwelling as "a defense against the primal fear of loss of protection" and as the mirror-relationship — "we dwell in the home and the home dwells in us" (editors' headnote) — the house that daily recreates "the intimate internal landscape of our fantasies, the spaces of our primal needs and fears" (1997/2006). See fear, hidden-spaces.
  • J Macgregor Wise — the territorialist register: home "a place we are" not "a place we come from" (p. 391); Illich's universal formula ("all living is dwelling… To dwell means to live the traces that past living has left," quoted p. 392); home as becoming vs the home/house/domus as proper ("home is a becoming within an always already territorialized space," p. 395) — the fourfold's located ground dissolved into territorialization (2000/2006). See home, milieu.
  • (Related: Hilde Heynen on modernity & dwelling; Lars Spuybroek on inhabitation as appropriation and the thickening of space into poché; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the "symbolic ecology" of household objects as the concrete symbols that make dwelling meaningful.)
  • Atmosphere — the felt, existential quality of dwelling-places.
  • Embodiment — dwelling as an embodied, existential condition; the body as the locus of memory, reference and habitation.
  • Everyday Architecture — the ordinary built environment and its inhabitants.
  • Consumerism — the commodified dwelling-as-asset against which dwelling-in-Heidegger's-sense is posed.
  • Uncanny — the unhomely double of being-at-home; the slippage between the homely and the unhomely.
  • Appropriation — the active process of dwelling; inhabitation as the thickening of space through habitual rhythms and detours.
  • Poché — the architectural name for the thickened, hollow wall-space that appropriation produces.
  • Interiority — the innerness of interior design: the conscious, reflexive self-awareness folded into the interior environment; the psychic counterpart of dwelling's being-at-home.
  • Fear — dwelling's dark half: the primal shelter as the site of primal fears; the house as both defense against anxiety and the place where "the identity and security of domestic life is symbolically tested" (Troutman).

Source Support

  • Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the Deleuzian recasting of dwelling as refrain: the three-step becoming-at-home — "draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space… Finally one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in… or else goes out oneself" (D&G quoted, p. 17) — dwelling as a stabilized-becoming rather than a rooted being; the critique of both poles — Rajchman's ungroundedness as "wishful thinking that suggests architecture can become something other than shelter for human bodies," and "The task is not to decide between an architecture of roots or wings but to understand that it is always both" (p. 24); the Bordeaux House as the dwelling-machine ("A machine was its heart") whose void "is created and erased in a gender-specific manner" (pp. 116–118). See becoming, home, place-identity. Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
  • Being and Time (Heidegger 1927) — the ontological foundation of dwelling as Being-in-the-world; "Being-in" derives from "innan" (to reside, dwell); dwelling as the mode of Dasein's Being on the earth.
  • Everyday Life (Heller 1970) — the sociological anatomy of 'home': "'Home' is not simply house, roof, family. There are people who have houses and families but no 'homes'" — familiarity is necessary but insufficient; home additionally requires "the feeling of confidence: 'home' protects us," and "the intensity and density of human relationships — the 'warmth' of the home" (p. 239); everyday space as anthropocentric (up/down, near/far, the everyday's frontier of effective action) (pp. 236–239).
  • Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945)
  • The Thinking Hand (Pallasmaa 2009) — dwelling as embodied, existential habitation; "I am my body."
  • Building Dwelling Thinking
  • Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture
  • The Everyday, Building, and Architecture (Haapala)
  • Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Heynen)
  • Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment (Lefebvre 2014)habitation as lived everyday experience.
  • Existence, Space & Architecture (Norberg-Schulz 1971)
  • The Ethical Function of Architecture (Harries 1997) — building tied to the essence of dwelling; dwelling cannot be divorced from community.
  • Everyday Life: Philosophical Roots and Proposals for an Interdisciplinary Debate
  • The Invention of Everyday Life
  • Aesthetic Boredom in Everyday Architecture
  • Sociology of Everyday Life
  • Everyday Life in the Modern World
  • Buildings Without Architects: A Global Guide to Everyday Architecture
  • A Discourse on Method: The Segal System
  • Critical Regionalism: A Not So Critical Theory
  • Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror
  • Territory and inhabitation (Campos 2018) — the nomadic counter-case to dwelling's rootedness: "interior as defined inhabitation," with the Migrant Interior's inhabitable elements "defin[ing] a much more permanent sense of place than the architecture or location – very much like the example of the tapestry"; home carried as "a set of usable environmental guides" and "a designed timeline for use and change from location to location," so that "Fixed location is seen here as a changing scaffold for a durable but nomadic interior condition" — dwelling decoupled from Heidegger's located fourfold and reattached to transported objects and planned change. See liberated-interior.
  • Embodied Spaces in Digital Times: Exploring the Role of Instagram in Shaping Temporal Dimensions and Perceptions of Architecture
  • The Architectural Uncanny (Vidler 1992) — the unhomely as the dark double of dwelling; homelessness and estrangement.
  • Warped Space (Vidler 2000) — the anxious, phobic subject against the affirmation of being-at-home.
  • Deleuze and Space (Buchanan & Lambert eds. 2005) — the postmodern city's "intractability to habitation, or better yet dwelling (in Heidegger's sense)."
  • Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash (Spuybroek 2025) — inhabitation as appropriation; the thickening of space into poché; Lefebvre's porous space and Bachelard's pocketed space as dialectically linked forms of spatial appropriation.
  • The Nature of Ordinary Objects (Bucchioni 2022) — the ontological status of ordinary objects (including architectural works) as doubly dependent on physical matter and intentional acts.
  • Design and Order in Everyday Life (Csikszentmihalyi 1991) — household objects as "concrete symbols" that make life worth living; "the meaning of our private lives is built with these household objects."
  • Architecture for Everyday Life (Swedish Association of Architects 2010) — the home as "nucleus of the welfare society"; the "all-in-one room" dissolving the kitchen/living boundary; Swedish consensus-based dwelling.
  • Benjamin for Architects (Elliott 2011) — Benjamin traces the shift from bourgeois dwelling to modernist housing; affirms the progressive social potential of architectural modernism against Heidegger's valorization of pre-industrial dwelling.
  • Kant for Architects (Morgan 2020) — Kant's "dwelling house" metaphor for philosophy: building a modest home on secure ground rather than speculative "castles in the sky."
  • Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — interior-design theory sought through "the specifics of inhabitation and bodily presence" (p. 6); the hidden dressing-table niche as an inhabited pocket of poché where "body is central… and space is temporal, perhaps even subjective" (p. 8).
  • The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (Bachelard 1958/2006) — dwelling at its most intimate: the cell "inhabited thanks to the image," whose whiteness "is stronger than all geometry"; inner space "where everything is commensurate with inner being"; and the frightening, silent house re-peopled by memory ("the mother comes back to watch over her child, as she once did") — dwelling as the osmosis of intimate and undetermined space (pp. 22–24).
  • A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — dwelling's eschatological doubling: the house planned "for the training of God's children for their eternal home" (p. 43) — the earthly house as the school of the eternal one, and "The wise woman buildeth her house" as the building-act's scriptural warrant; dwelling as a moral discipline exercised through plan (health, industry, economy) rather than through poetic image. See christian-house.
  • To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the dwelling-trace dictum given its museal consequence: Walter Benjamin's "to dwell means to leave traces" (The Arcades Project, p. 9) supplies the chapter's title and thesis — dwelling's remainder (the prayer books, the narrow bed, the prie dieu; the pillow twelve inches from the toilet) as the evidence through which conserved homes "provide a tenuous journey of memory and interpretation," and through which later readings "shock, overturn, or subvert the main discourse being presented." Dwelling here is defined by what it deposits: the house museum is the institution built to exhibit dwelling's traces. See trace, house-museum, site-of-memory.
  • Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — dwelling's sociological register: the house doubly attributed as "a haven for withdrawal from society and as a credential for esteem and the respect of others" (p. 185) — dwelling as both refuge and social position; and the dwelling's double temporal order — "ordered by long-standing habits in building and living patterns" yet "responsive to social influences in ways that have the potential to remake and reform them outside of a static framework of living standards" (p. 184) — being-at-home as a persistence that social change can still reform. Where this page's other sources dwell phenomenologically, Lawrence's is the research register: the dwelling known through its social variables (see habit, housing, consumerism).
  • Living in Glass Houses (Melchionne 1998/2006) — the dwelling-association register, stated as the test the Glass House fails: "The Glass House contradicts the long-standing Western association of dwelling with enclosure, privacy, and relaxation. As these tendencies are deeply entrenched, one can never get used to the Glass House and so can never truly inhabit it" (p. 229) — dwelling here defined by a cultural association (enclosure, privacy, relaxation) so entrenched that its contradiction blocks habituation itself; the environment that never "recedes into the background" is never inhabited. The chapter also states dwelling's practical content via interior design's "basic precept": "the organization of the environments in which we must do particular things, like cooking, entertaining, sleeping, bathing, and lounging" (p. 229) — dwelling as the practices an interior must host. And its positive completion: the ordinary "process of inhabiting our homes is an artistic practice, a kind of environmental art" (p. 229) — dwelling as the daily art (art of domesticity). See glass-house, privacy, environmental-aesthetics.
  • Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — the displacement register: dwelling when the body that dwells is partly absent — "Reframing interiors from within the absence paradigm recognizes spaces as transbodied, and the body that dwells is partly informed by other bodies and experiences, some of which are at the same location (physically present) and others are apart (physically absent)" (transbodied-space); the supportive home environment as the dwelling condition's baseline ("the constraints faced by many in creating a supportive home environment, one where individuals and families can practice cherished traditions, from cooking favorite foods to hosting friends and relatives and passing down to the next generation long-standing religious rituals"); and its foreclosure — "people may find themselves without the choice to appropriate their homes to support their way of life, facing undue stress and feelings of disconnect" (bounded-choices). Where this page's Heideggerian sources dwell from the fourfold's located ground, Hadjiyanni dwells from the divided family's stretched one. See appropriation, domestic-interior.
  • The Kitchen as a Place to Be (Potter 1990/2006) — dwelling's continuity register at the instrument scale, and its limit-case: "the taking of food being a prime agent of precisely that [continuity]. There is nothing really instant about food; although meals are pretty basic, there is process, ritual, and continuity involved, and I think this kitchen had the feel of that" (p. 268) — the meal as the daily act through which dwelling sustains itself, the kitchen its designed carrier. The same source supplies the register's limit-case: when the owner moved, "she was so attached to the structure that joiners were employed to dismantle the whole thing and re-erect it on an entirely different site" (p. 268) — dwelling's attachment carried by a transplanted structure ("so much for 'place and occasion in design'… but at least a continuing one-off for its user"), the home's continuity tested against the continuity of its instrument rather than its location (compare Campos's nomadic interior, liberated-interior). And the conversion doctrine that makes dwelling historical: "to enter history into them, and to expose the meeting of old and new expressively" (p. 268) — see material-memory.
  • Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — dwelling's becoming and its dialectic, from the Woolfian room: "this room is my life's wealth, it is 'decorated' by numerous things self-gathered and inherited, both consciously and unconsciously, it is room becoming interior; after all with a room of one's own, one is free to do this" (p. 341) — dwelling as the freedom to self-gather, the room "decorated" by a life becoming interior rather than by a plan or a collection; the dwelling's double valence stated in the refuge-prison pair — the room as "a refuge, a place of order, 'dry land'" against "the outside… dark and watery" (p. 341), yet also "a prison, constructed of conventions and illusions… that we return to with predictability" (p. 342) — dwelling as both the predictability we choose and the confinement that predictability becomes; and the room's endurance beyond its occupants ("although empty rooms are rooms 'devoid of human beings,' they still endure," p. 342) — dwelling surviving the dweller as the room's own duration. Where this page's Heideggerian sources dwell on the fourfold's located ground and Lawrence on the social variables, Taylor dwells on the interior process: dwelling as "room becoming interior," ever-changing, "many rooms – many Bernards" (see becoming-interior, refuge, occupant-as-designer).
  • Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — dwelling's fear-side, the page's first account of dwelling as unsafe: "I do not believe the house is a safe place. For me, it is a collision of dream, nightmare, and circumstance, a portrait of the inner life. The primal shelter is also the site of primal fears" (p. 356); dwelling as defense — "As a natural extension of the primal need for protection and nurture, the dwelling is also a defense against the primal fear of loss of protection. Occupying the territory between reality and illusion, the dwelling could be considered a creative 'space' that defends the individual against the anxiety of being alone" (p. 358; the transitional-space thesis, Winnicott via Adams); the house as "a transitional space… an 'illusory,' malleable, adaptive character that assimilates unexpressed and unacknowledged anxieties and feelings of loss" (p. 358); and the daily practice — "we daily recreate within our dwellings the intimate internal landscape of our fantasies, the spaces of our primal needs and fears" (p. 359). Where Heidegger's dwelling is the fourfold's gathering and Bachelard's the image's inhabitation, Troutman's is the psyche's mirror: "we dwell in the home and the home dwells in us" (editors' headnote, p. 356). See fear, hidden-spaces, transitional-space, childhood-spaces.
  • Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — dwelling's Deleuzian register, the page's counter-ground to the fourfold: Illich's dwelling-trace formula joining Benjamin's on the page — "all living is dwelling, the shape of a dwelling. To dwell means to live the traces that past living has left. The traces of dwellings survive, as do the bones of people" (quoted p. 392) — dwelling as the inhabiting of what past living deposited, universal ("all living is dwelling") rather than existential; and the home/the home separation that protects the concept: "it is crucial that we separate the ideas of home and the home, home and house, home and domus. The latter terms in these pairs of contrasts are proper, normative, and may have little to do with comfort" (p. 395) — dwelling-in-Wise's-sense being the becoming, not the proper: "home is a becoming within an always already territorialized space (the home, the house, the domestic)" (p. 395); and the anti-originary thesis that decouples dwelling-as-home from Heidegger's located ground: "Home is not an originary place from which identity arises. It is not the place we 'come from;' it is a place we are" (p. 391). Where Heidegger's dwelling is the fourfold's gathering and Bachelard's the image's inhabitation, Wise's dwelling is territorialization: "the whistling and comfort-effect that is home, not the house necessarily" (pp. 394–395). See home, milieu, trace.
  • Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the production-housing charter: dwelling's distinction from housing stated in the genre's own epigraph — "Did you ever really consider the wonderful difference in the meaning of the words house and home? A house is a structure to live in. Home—the dearest place on earth—is that structure that is a part of you—made so by its association with your family, their joys and sorrows, their hopes, aspirations and fears. It is a refuge from the trials and struggles of the outer world" (p. 11, from Aladdin's 1919 Catalog of Readi-Cut Homes); the dwellings-shaping-dwellers thesis via Churchill ("we shape our dwellings, then afterward our dwellings shape us," p. 83); and dwelling's design deliverables — the layering of details ("The application of interior details is a process that the homebuilder may start, but that the occupant must finish," p. 165), the emotional qualities of room scale ("many rooms in a typical house are too big, and… smaller sizes may actually benefit the design's emotional qualities," p. 139), and the house's anticipatory work ("the degree to which design has successfully anticipated how most people want to live in the plan," p. 146). Where Wise disarticulates dwelling from the proper house, Wentling's genre assumes the dwelling is buildable — the wiki's practical counter-register (see home, domestic-interior, flexible-interior).
  • Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — the house and the neighbourhood as the medium of architectural memory and place: Goldberger's Passaic and Nutley recollections (pp. 110–14); Wright's hearth-centred houses as the symbol of the nuclear family (p. 28); and dwelling as the everyday base from which architecture is perceived.
  • source-notes/arendt-1958-the-human-condition
  • source-notes/berger-luckmann-social-construction-of-reality
  • source-notes/broome-1986-essential-method-segal
  • source-notes/clucas-2000-cultural-phenomenology-and-the-everyday
  • source-notes/colley-2006-bodies-and-mirrors
  • source-notes/goulthorpe-2006-notes-on-digital-nesting
  • source-notes/luna-yim-2023-language-of-contemporary-architecture
  • source-notes/rudofsky-1964-architecture-without-architects
  • source-notes/seigworth-gardiner-2004-rethinking-everyday-life
  • source-notes/smith-2018-design-studio-phenomenology
  • source-notes/taylor-2018-shape-shifting-dynamic-design

Open Questions

  • Can "dwelling" be operationalized for critique, or does it risk a nostalgic, counter-modern posture (cf. Heynen, and the ethical function of architecture)?
  • The Beechers double dwelling across death — the earthly house as "training… for their eternal home" (p. 43). Is every theory of dwelling a secularization of this eschatological structure (the house that exceeds its occupant's present), or does Heidegger's fourfold already contain the transcendent reference (the divinities) that the Beechers make explicit? See christian-house.

Theme

  • Phenomenology — dwelling as the foundational application of phenomenology to architecture.
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