Holiday Read

Over the Holiday Break I read the latest by Howard Mansfield titled Dwelling in Possibility: searching for the soul of shelter.  This book is a series of informal inquiries on the subject of shelter. He writes about both the lighthearted, with a discussion on house hunting, and the serious, with a discussion on war and the destruction of home. The majority of the book is a lively tome on how living and shelter have changed and what philosophy and common sense can teach us about recovering the art of dwelling. While house hunting stops to consider this question: “We have shelter from the rain and snow, but our houses aren’t sheltering our souls.”  Is this a common idea not spoken about?

 Is this idea of the inspiring home and being ordinary an untapped important idea as we consider how best to design and live in our places of dwelling? He quotes the southern architect Samuel Mockbee as an example of a definition of this older idea of dwelling. ” Everyone rich or poor, serves a shelter for the poor.” Should our homes inspire us or at least be a place we want to be?  Think of characteristics of where you live versus places you like in magazines or from visiting others homes. Do you think we should expect more from the houses we buy?  Mansfield writes, “If the house is diminished, then we are diminished.” Do you think this is true? Do our houses express who we are or do we become expressions our homes?

An interesting sub theme is this ideas of complete versus incomplete.  He tells some stories on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Zimmerman house and concludes by asking is a complete house a good house or does a home need to be incomplete?  He steps it up a scale when he talks about the debates that occur in his town zoning meetings over the way the town looks, should it be formal or left informal?  These stories reflect a difference in scale around a level of involvement as to how much time we care to spend concerning ourselves with how things look.

 Mansfield then presents us with short introductions to three philosophers who have three differing ideas of home or dwelling.  One looked for the meaning of words, one for silence and the other for dreaming. This discussion leads you to uncover what definition works for your version of house. The questions you might consider:  Why does dwelling as a word reflects a deeper meaning for describing a house or at least a place of gathering for life?  One might conclude that we use our words as uniformity or casualness, as the sameness of our homes today?

Consider this last idea, of uniformity or variety. What do houses have to be? What is an ordinary house? Is it traditional or is it modern?  Why does our built environment feel so banal or nondescript? Why do older houses hold our interest for the way you look? Consider as you read this book how ideas and built forms are various and different like how a summer house used to be from you primary residence. Think of the vernacular building of our rural past, like sheds or saunas that we now can purchase as ready-made kits. Does the convenience of everyone having the same trump the individuality for how each area of a state or region might have differed from the other?

In exchanging individual expression of our personality have we lost interest in the distinctness of our built landscape? The only thing that would have made the book more interesting would be able to sit across from the author and argue or discuss the idea within – the book can help you begin your own.