Home

That's my home up there (above) and there is plenty wrong with my conception of it. Both 'home' and 'family' are terms we should be uncomfortable with, but conservative politicians and UKIP loonies will evoke both time and time again. It gets tiresome. I had a friend who set up a 'House and Home' studio in architecture school. I remember it being a bit of a disaster. Why? because unless you want to get in to some really dodgy territory, the concept of 'home' is not (in my view these days) consistent with the necessary abstractions that architects should make with regard to human inhabitation that should tend once more towards rational solutions to need. 'Homes' fulfil themselves, they do not need architects or anybody else for that matter to sanction them. When the Venturis tripped up, they did so in precisely this territory, and many of us followed them in to that particular hole throughout the eighties. 

My 'dream' for instance, of a house on stilts sitting somewhere like this (actually the sea wall at East Mersea; my childhood playground) really has to stay precisely that, because it's a silly idea. OK it's a genuine silly idea in the sense that I have it, but it's daft. Going 'home' is also daft, because it isn't, it's a curious sentimentality of memory and circumstance. 

Being attached to places is just that, and if I were to encounter 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking' I'm sure in the first instance it would give me a headache, in the second remind me of nasty Nazi's and thirdly make me reflect that if the passengers on the train from Colchester to London are anything to go by, I do not want to associate myself in any way at all with the 'Essex boy' that I am, since whatever that idea was, it has now become a cross between Jamie Oliver and the cast of TOWIE, slipping towards the latter, and in general my observation of the tribe reminds me unfortunately of Germany before WW2, nomatter the cast of lovely dogs. Such was my appreciation of the scene this weekend anyway.

My further revelation that I love the image above, and I really loved being back on that sea wall, AND that I love being back in London in our little unite d'habitation, makes me appreciate my enjoyment of Le Corbusier more. I like this, and I like that, much of the rest is just twitter.