Problem
There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.
Solution
In any urban area, no matter how dense, keep the majority of buildings four stories high or less. It is possible that certain buildings should exceed this limit, but they should never be buildings for human habitation.
To build one’s house is very much like making one’s will. When the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but that moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life. And so, in our towns and their outskirts, we have had during the last forty years not so much houses as poems, poems of an Indian summer, for a house is the crowning of a career.
In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house.
The connection between the life of the fire and the life of the inhabitant is also reflected in the custom of the housewarming ceremony. In contemporary America a housewarming party is given when a family moved into a new house. Perhaps all of the friends and their good wishes are thought to warm the house metaphorically. In traditional cultures, however, the warming is quite literal, for it involves the bringing in, or the first kindling, of the hearth fire, which then creates the proper spirit and sanctity to transform the house into a home.
The main problem lies in the often perverse arrangement of older houses, which face the road rather than the sun, and in the mania for glass windows on all outside walls.
Eisenman: I would argue that the pitched roof is – as Gaston Bachelard points out – one of the essential characteristics of "houseness". It was the extension of the vertebrate structure which sheltered and enclosed man. Michel Foucault has said that when man began to study man in the 19th century, there was a displacement of man from the center. The representation of the fact that man was no longer the center of the world, no longer the arbiter, and, therefore, no longer controlling artifacts, was reflected in a change from the vertebrate-center type of structure to the center-as-void.
Mrs. Tanizaki tells a story of when her late husband decided, as he frequently did, to build a new house. The architect arrived and announced with pride, “I’ve read your In Praise of Shadows, Mr. Tanizaki, and know exactly what you want.”
To which Tanizaki replied, “But no, I could never live in a house like that.”
There is perhaps as much resignation as humor in his answer.
House and home are two evidently different notions: house is a material, spatial and architectural concept, whereas home is a unique setting and product of the act of dwelling itself. Home is charged with subjective meanings, symbols, memories, and images.
A home is also a set of personal rituals, habits, rhythms, and routines of everyday life. In every sense of the word, home is an extension of its inhabitant. Consequently it can not be an object of design by an architect; it is secreted, as it were, by the actual act of dwelling.
“Tree is leaf and leaf is tree – house is city and city is house. A city is not a city unless it is also a huge house – a house is a house only if it is also a tiny city.”
— Aldo van Eyck