what do houses want?

8/10/2019 What do houses want?

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Graduate Journal of Visual and Material CultureIssue 6 | 2013

1Dionne-Krosnick | What Do Houses Want?

What Do Houses Want?

Arile Dionne-Krosnick

Abstract

In his book What Do Pictures Want?, W.J.T. Mitchell questions ourapparent double consciousness when it comes to images: How is

it, in other words, that people are able to maintain a doubleconsciousness toward images, pictures, and representations in avariety of media, vacillating between magical beliefs and skepticaldoubts, nave animism and hardheaded materialism, mystical andcritical attitudes? In this essay, I will apply the main tenet ofMitchells query to an examination of the figure of the house,viewing it as a being in its own right. Paraphrasing historian NeilHarris, Mitchell writes: we often talk about buildings as if they wereliving things, or as if their intimate proximity to living beings madethem take on some of the vitality of their inhabitants, and with whattype of building do we live more closely, more intimately, than ourhouses, our homes? Therefore, for the purposes of this essay, I willdare to speak to houses and ask them what they want. I will look at

a few examples of houses from literature, cinema, and architecturehistory: the house built by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the house atNeauphle-le-Chteau in the film Nathalie Granger by MargueriteDuras, the blue house in Maude by Suzanne Jacob, and E.1027 byarchitect Eileen Gray. I hope that an in depth exploration of theseunique domestic spaces will reveal the possibility to understandspaces as individuals, and provide insight into the desires of allhouses.

Keywords

Architecture, houses, desire, W.J.T. Mitchell.


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House A house HomeIn a certain space it is good to sleep.In another it is good to dine or be with others.The serving spaces and the free spaces combine and areplaced to the garden or to the street to suggest their use.House implies a place good also for another. It is thatquality which is close to architecture.It reflects a way of life.It does not make small spaces for small people.Spaces transcend function.A House is more specific.

Louis Kahn

In his book What Do Pictures Want? W.J.T. Mitchellquestions our apparent double consciousness when it comes toimages when he writes: How is it, in other words, that people areable to maintain a double consciousness toward images, pictures,and representations in a variety of media, vacillating betweenmagical beliefs and skeptical doubts, nave animism andhardheaded materialism, mystical and critical attitudes?1 Mitchellgoes to great lengths to justify his right to question the desires ofimages. He admits that the living image is somewhat of a tropewith undertones of animism, vitalism, and anthropomorphism, andthat the question what do pictures want? itself may seem silly orimpossible. Yet the link between images and living things still

seems inescapable, timeless, even necessary. Mitchell alsosuggests a subaltern model of pictures as a means of introducingthe dialectics of power and desire. By asking what images desire,Mitchell is investigating not only their wants, but also theirshortcomings, and further, what we desire from them. FollowingMitchell's lead, in this essay I allow myself to examine the desiresof houses in order to examine the exceptional relationships weconstruct with our everyday architecture.

In their dealings with buildings, people seem to evince adeep-rooted tendency to attribute vital qualities to passivestructures. This is evidenced by the abundance of popular imageryand the common terminology used to describe and acknowledge

our built environments, as well as by the rituals that celebrate orcommemorate them. In this essay, I will take a step back from theusual attitude that architecture is unambiguously a product of thearchitects ambition and imagination. By entering into a dialoguewith architecture, I will attempt to approach the figure of the house


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as a being in its own right, a being imbued with attitude, agency,and desires.

In his book Building Lives, historian Neil Harris associatesnotable elements of the human life cycle with stages in the lives ofpublic buildings: the groundbreaking is like a baby shower, thelaying of the cornerstone is like a christening, the opening is like agraduation, etc. This may seem like an easy juxtaposition (and Imust admit that I am oversimplifying his arguments quite a bit forthe sake of expediency), but it does show how as a society wehave chosen not to overlook the real lives of buildings and, instead,to commemorate them as we do our own. Following Harris claimthat buildings are born, named, and presented like debutantes,Mitchell adds details about the rest of their lives: As they[buildings] age they become, like persons, shabby and

disreputable, or eminent and distinguished. When they areabandoned, they are haunted by the ghosts of those who oncedwelt in them, and are shunned like a corpse from which the soulhas departed; when they are destroyed, they leave ghostly replicasin memory and other media.2 Mitchell uses Harris' analogybetween the life of a person and the life of a building to help bridgethe gap between pictures and animate beings, and to rationalize hisclaim that images should be asked what they want. Mitchell asks:[H]ow do pictures resemble life-forms? Are they born? Can theydie? Can they be killed?3

As Harris argument is concerned with public buildings andmonuments, it cannot necessarily be simply extended to a

discussion of houses, my subject in this paper. Domesticarchitecture, it is true, does not nowadays lend itself to the plethoraof building rituals mentioned above. This is because, as Harrisexplains, people rarely build their own homes, many people rent,and most will live in many different houses throughout their lives.However, paraphrasing Harris, Mitchell writes: we often talk aboutbuildings as if they were living things, or as if their intimateproximity to living beings made them take on some of the vitality oftheir inhabitants,4and with what type of building do we live moreclosely, more intimately, than our houses, our homes? Therefore,for the purposes of this essay, I will dare to speak to houses andask them what they want.

I will use the postulates of Mitchell, Harris, and AaronBetsky as the basis for my examination in order to specify the closeconnections, both physical and emotional, between our bodies andour everyday architecture, with the goal of generating a newawareness of our relationship with our built environment. I will


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combine spatial theory, material culture, and feminist theory toshow how a close reading of domestic space can reveal historicalmodels of inequity that still permeate our attitudes and actions. Byspeculating on the desires of houses, I wish to convey theimportance of the bond between our vernacular domesticarchitecture and our popular culture, our fictions, and our reallivesthus revealing how a better understanding of the places welive in can help us to establish new knowledge of our ownrelationships and desires.

All building is necessarily an act against nature, writesJoseph Rykwert in Idea of a Town.5 The shift from nomadism tosedentary living is an act that divides nature from culture.Permanent building sets up a wall that traces a line dividing insideand out, and as such, the elemental division between public and

private. Accompanying this initial divide comes the separationbetween the sexes: men on the outside, women on the inside.According to architect, critic, and curator Aaron Betsky, thearchitectural division between outside and inside, public andprivate, mirrors a division between the sexes that originates withthe human body:

The architecture of the body would thus seem to determinenot just what we look like but how we behave and,ultimately, our place in the world. This argument has beenthe bedrock of all sexual division in our society. Thewomans body is an inside that nurtures and protects. It islike a house, and therefore, women stay at home. A mans

body is a weapon, a coupling device, an object thatcompletes itself outside itself. It is a temple. It projects itssymmetrical, vertical orders over the world andimpregnates.6

Domestic space today continues to have strong associations withcomfort, privacy, intimacy, security, family, purity, withdrawal,separation, memory, childhood, learning, and community. Thisprimordial relegation of the house to the womans domain, throughthe so-called logic of the body-architecture relationship, hasdiminished through time but still participates in our socialconstruction of the figure of the woman and mother, as well as ourunderstanding of the house as feminine.

In his analysis of images, Mitchell builds his reading of whatimages want through the figure of the subaltern. He advances: theconstrual of pictures not as sovereign subjects or disembodiedspirits but as subalterns whose bodies are marked with the


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stigmata of difference, and who function both as go-betweens andscapegoats in the social field of human visuality.7Similarly, I wouldpropose that a subaltern model of the house could revealsomething of the hidden potential of buildings to act as individuals,to influence change, and to exert authority just as [t]he subalternmodel of the picture [] opens up the actual dialectics of powerand desire in our relations with pictures.8In this essay, I will look ata few examples of houses from literature, cinema, and architecturalhistory, in order to decipher the often quiet, always elusive voice ofdomestic architecture and its particular desires: the house built byLudwig Wittgenstein in Vienna, the house at Neauphle-le-Chteauin the filmNathalie Grangerby Marguerite Duras, the blue house inMaude by Suzanne Jacob, and E.1027 by architect Eileen Gray.While fiction allows for the kind of narrative constructions andpersonification of the house that I am interested in, I think the

houses from the factual world also will have a lot to say. I hope thatan in-depth exploration of these unique domestic spaces will revealthe possibility of understanding spaces as individuals, and provideinsight into the desires of houses.

The Wittgenstein House, Ludwig Wittgenstein

Situated in Vienna III, Kundmanngasse 19, the PalaisStonborough was completed in 1928 and is the only example ofarchitecture by Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein(1889-1951). A singular example of 20th century domesticarchitecture, the house that Wittgenstein built is nonethelessdistinct both visually and theoretically from the contemporaneous

types of modern architecture being produced at that time, such asthat of Adolf Loos or Mies van der Rohe.9 After its completion,Wittgenstein's house received little recognition and further, evencondemnation from the architecture community and completedisinterest from the Austrian government as to its preservation.From 1969 to 1971, architecture historian Bernard Leitnerspearheaded a movement to save the house from demolition andorganized a movement to have the house designated as a historicallandmark in an impassioned battle to finally bring recognition anddistinction to the architecture of Wittgensteins house.

Attempts to understand the Wittgenstein house have oftenled critics to assume a direct relation between Wittgensteinsphilosophic investigations and the realization of the architecture, asthey would be predisposed to do when comparing an architectswritings with their buildings. However, in this case, Leitner warnsagainst such attempts, which are misleading: Architecture cannotbe applied philosophy. Only a clichd misunderstanding can refer


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to this multi-layered, complex art of architecture as logic translatedinto a house []. Wittgensteins architecture must be read andunderstood in the language of architecture. It should not be treatedas philosophy translated into a building or as applied thought.10Ina further note Leitner writes: Wittgensteins architecture cannot bededuced from his writings. His intention is manifest in the building.The process leading to art is not reversible.11Wittgenstein was aphilosopher of logic and language, and so it is indeed appropriateto decipher and to speak of architecture in the proper language ofarchitecture. The houses desires are made manifest spatially andreveal themselves through its architecture, separate fromWittgensteins written words. Even though the house was broughtinto being by Wittgensteins will and design, in order to fullyunderstand the specific power of this building it is important to lookat its own life, beyond its philosophical beginnings.

The house was originally commissioned by Wittgensteinssister, Margarethe Stonborough, to Paul Engleman, an architectfriend of her brother. Stonborough wanted a home that wouldembrace her culture and lifestyle, and the composition of the planreflected her involvement in the design process: Her program ofspaces can be clearly read in the very first sketches: representativerooms for entertaining, music, dining, library and, characteristically,a terrace in front of those spaces with tall window-doors. She knewwhat she wanted.12 Engleman, unsure that he understood thedetails of Stonboroughs expectations, conferred with Wittgensteinand soon after yielded all control of the design to his friend.Wittgenstein was personally very invested in the project, as

evidenced by his possessive wording in various letters from 1927and 1928: My house, My building, What I had to demand13The idea of the house then, was born of Margarethe Stonborough,introduced by Paul Engleman, and delivered by LudwigWittgenstein. Stonborough had specific programmatic wants andher philosopher-brother used his time as an architect to explore thephysical language of building, creating a unique and rationalbuilding that reflected his own pursuits. Leitner writes: Wittgensteinbuilt a different kind of privacy. This is not a question of taste butrather one of attitude. This attitude becomes evident in the sense ofspace of the individual rooms, in the tightly woven spatialconnections, in material, color and details. In Wittgensteinsarchitecture one cannot be separated from the other. Everythingdetermines everything else.14 Wittgensteins personal investmentgave form to a house that comes to life through time and withmovement; its particular attitude is composed of subtle shifts in theproportions of the rooms and in the sequencing of space.Geometrically and conceptually, everything is connected.


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Once built, the house stayed a private affair. It emanated adifferent kind of comfort, a new kind of privacy. It was madeexpensively and showcased artificial materials, primarily metal andglass. It was a discrete individual, yet falsely modest in itssparseness and its appearance of extreme simplicity. It knew that itwas different from the other, modern houses, but didnt try toimpose itself, explain or justify itself. The house invites you in, andwithout indicating clearly a sense of primary direction; it then letsyou choose your way: the hall [has an] ambivalent character,namely that of a directional/non-directional joint-like center.15Thehouse is dynamic, closed and open at once. It shows off thisdoubled quality again in some of the passageways where pairs oftall and slender double glass doors, either transparent, translucent,or metal, separate inside from outside, without sealing off either

space completely. The house is elegant and secretive. The placebetween the two doors is fleeting; this joint becomes its ownspace when the doors are open, and can disappear back into thehouse at a moments notice. The doubling of doors allows eachroom to have a character of its own; you are invited to stay or totransition if only one pair or both is left open: These are twogestures pointing in opposite directions: leaving a space andentering a space.16Metal doors lead to different important public orprivate spaces, the salon and the bedroom, suggesting a subtlesense of hierarchy, a gradation of openness to closedness, but alsoof restfulness because of the cold, muted color.

Even in its completeness, with its internal rationale, the

house is not constricting; it thrives on movement, undefinedpossibilities, and in this indeterminacy, a freedom and hospitality:And this architecture, which is independent of stylistic period, is ina sense timeless, can be furnished, inhabited, and brought to lifewith antiques or modern piecesas long as their quality doesjustice to Wittgensteins spaces.17 I would argue that this timelessattribute is something that can be aspired to, but not controlled bythe architect. Rather, it is a quality that the house itself emanates:so long as it feels respected, it is willing and ready to adapt toanything.

So far, Ive described the house as an independent beingwith qualities and emotions. But what of its desires? This house,more than anything, wants to be lived in. Attuned to the desires ofboth the client and the architect, the house flourishes, feels its bestin action: The house in motion refers to the house in use. Use isnot functionality (the path between sink and stove). Use is actionsuch as opening a door, interlocking window-doors or raising metal


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curtains. Wittgenstein gives movement to form based on the laws ofmechanics. In contrast to the machine aesthetics of the twenties,movement to Wittgenstein is mechanics: lever, weight, support,energy, friction.18 The house is not an independent anddisinterested entity; rather, it is an adaptable being, willing toplease. It is sure of itself, with its distinct symmetries andproportions, but it craves the human touch and the thrill of newsituations and new discoveries, which are only possible throughinteractions with loving homeowners.

Neauphle-le Chteau,Marguerite Duras

Nathalie Granger, a 1972 film by writer-director MargueriteDuras, is the story of two women and a house. The women (playedby Lucia Bos and Jeanne Moreau), whose relationship to each

other remains undisclosed throughout, spend the day doing choresaround the house while their daughters are at school. On the radiowe hear the news: the police are on a manhunt for two adolescentboys on a killing spree in the area. The only physical disruption atthe house is the arrival of a door-to-door washing-machinesalesman, a young Grard Depardieu. The title character is thedaughter of Lucia Boss character Isabelle, a disobedient younggirl who has been expelled from school and might be sent toboarding school.

The film was set in Duras own house in Neauphle-le-Chteau, a region in the central-northern part of France. The actionhappens exclusively inside the domestic space, inside the house

and within the grounds of the property, in the backyard. Theatmosphere is intensely feminine. We follow the characters througha routine of womanly chores: cleaning, washing the dishes,clearing the backyard of natural debris, dredging the pond, ironing,and sewing. The house in this instance is a womans domain.Duras portrays the house as a character; there is an intentionalityand purpose to every shot of the residence: Duras said that herhouse was, in effect, her script, and she hired the acclaimedcinematographer Ghislain Cloquet to film it. His velvety black-and-white images offer views through windows and doorways, downcorridors, into mirrors, and of walls and floors. Re-creating her dailyexistence in the old house in Neauphle-le-Chteau, Duras uses theapparatus of a major motion picture to make refracted homemovies, as if trying to make sense of her life and surroundings.19Duras home is not only the setting for domesticity, but also acomplicit feminine character amongst the cast. In a sense thehouse plays the part of Duras herself, equal parts instigator andbystander.

Video still from NathalieGranger.


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Architecture historian Aaron Betsky dates our associationof domesticity with womanhood to the Middle Ages: It is from thisperiod that we can date the formalization of the space of women asthe domestic sphere. It is the space inside, the space of domesticfurnishings, the space of family relations, the space that is notrecorded or represented. It is the invisible, always changing,flexible, and sometimes even comfortable space of everyday life(Betsky 1995, 62). Women had been relegated to interior spacesand inferior positions before medieval times, but during this period,the development of guilds excluded women even from the activitiesof craft-making and from the production of the goods that shapedtheir own spaces. The connection between femininity anddomesticity has not dissipated with time. The modern women ofNathalie Granger still find themselves excluded from the exterior

world, from common notions of productivity and activity. Durashouse is the interior space where quotidian activities take place andwhere families are constructed and deconstructed. There is noshame in this space; there is only fluidity, a slow passing of the day,inside the house, outside of the world.

The women in residence at Neauphle belong to that house,just as that house belongs to them. Duras imbues her characterswith both a sense of presentness, of this day in this place, and ofimpermanence, of the spaces history and future. In her book ofessays, La Vie matrielle, Duras speaks of her house:

Jai pens trs longtemps acheter une maison.

Je nai jamais imagin que je pourrais possderune maison neuve. Neauphle, la maison a adabord t deux fermes bties un peu avant laRvolution. Elle doit avoir un peu plus de deuxsicles. Jy ai souvent pens. Elle avait t l en1789, en 1870. la croise des forts deRambouillet et de Versailles. En 1958 ellemappartenait. Jy ai pens jusqu la douleurcertaines nuits. Je la voyais habite par cesfemmes. Je me voyais prcde par ces femmesdans ces mmes chambres, dans les mmescrpuscules. Il y avait eu neuf gnrations defemmes avant moi dans ces murs, beaucoup de

monde, l, autour des feux, des enfants, desvalets, des gardiennes de vaches. Toute la maisontait lisse, frotte aux angles des portes, par lepassage des corps, des enfants, des chiens.20

Video still fromNathalieGranger.




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She says: Jcris sur les femmes pour crire sur moi, sur moiseule travers les sicles,21 and so it is with her film NathalieGranger. It is a story of two women, but also of the one womanMarguerite Duras, and above all the story of the house, of being in,and of living through, ones own house.

This house wants to protect. It knows it has but fewdefenses against the exterior world: we see all the windows;looking out of windows, we are shown the patio doors, the outsidereflected in a mirror, women walking out of doors. It cannot stop thesalesman from entering the house, but in this womens world, thiswomans house, he breaks down and can no longer keep up hisappearances of purpose. The house is quiet but not calm; it has theoutside on its mind. The radio brings the world in, the threat of theoutside is conveyed inside.

The Blue House, Suzanne Jacob

The 1988 novella Maude, by Qubec writer SuzanneJacob, follows a couple, Maude and Bruno, who live in anabandoned house on the edge of town. Bruno takes care of Maudeand Maude gives Bruno a reason to keep living. He sells herdrawings for money and invites people, anyone, to visit. Maude isalternatively apathetic, curious, dangerous, self-assured,dependent, free. The house and the garden were discovered byBruno for them to live in: When he found the house, a house onthe edge of town, abandoned and open, he didnt tell her. Hewandered around the wide open house. When he was sure it was

abandoned, he took Maude there. At least thats what he toldMaude. As soon as Maude accepts what he tells her, Bruno startsbelieving it, forgetting that he lied, if he lied. Maude felt at homeright away in the house.22 Maude is perfectly herself inside thehouse: she sits on a yellow chair in the garden and she watches alilac tree. Maude is also herself out of the house, slamming doors,dancing in town, attacking other women, visiting other men.

Maude and the house understand each other; they dont tryto be anything more than what they are. This house is perfectlyitself. It was left empty, at the edge of town, absolutely satisfiedbeing on its own, and when it was found it welcomed Maude andBruno. This house is patient, unconcerned with human transience.This house doesnt seem to want much, as it knows there is awhole other world outside of itself:

Theres more to life than walls. You cant live onlyinside the walls. The walls can end up sagging.


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Theres nothing on the walls. The walls are bare.Theyre not, theyre blue, says Bruno.Sky blue, says Maude.Blue, says Bruno. Blue-blue,Paint blue, says Maude.23

Maude and the house both belong and dont belong to Bruno hes only found them: The house doesnt belong to anyone.Theres no one there. We painted it all blue and now its our home,Bruno says. There is nothing to be afraid of. If the owners comeback, we havent touched anything, everything is there. We paintedit blue, thats all.24 In the same way that he met Maude, hediscovered the house: He found her, this deaf woman, he undidthe knots in her hair, he closed the umbrella, he found the house,open without a key, they repainted the walls, blue, blue

everywhere, no, she has no right to be restless like this, no right toturn the TV up loud (Jacob 1997, 43). Bruno is still concerned withappearances and about finding his place in the world and making aplace for Maude without seeing that whichever place shes in isalready hers: Maude with her blue hair in her house with the bluewalls.

Domestic space, historically the space of women, is usuallyremoved from the power-play of city planning, monumentalbuilding, and individual architectural genius that give a place itsparticular identity, its place-ness: Women were thus deprived oftheir ability to enter into the plays of power because they couldusually not gain access to, build, or define those forms that would

identify them as something more than just a human being andinstead invest them with rank, privilege, wealth, and a particularidentity. Women were no place and thus were no one, at least inthe grand scheme of things. Inside their no-places, however, theystill lived and made a world for themselves. It was a world menoften feared and thus tried to contain.25This is still Maudes space;her house is a no-place and she is a no-one. Maude seems to bethe model of no-one and yet an unrivaled someone. This house,adaptable, tolerant and uncomplaining, while certainly a no-place,is the central place of this little drama.

E.1027, Eileen Gray

High above the Mediterranean Sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin sits E.1027,a house built by Eileen Gray between 1926 and1929. The modern white house was designed for the architect andher partner, architecture critic Jean Badovici. After Gray andBadovici leave the house, Le Corbusier proceeds to slowly occupy


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the site, which he had known, visited, and esteemed. He paintsmurals inside E.1027 and after the war even builds himself ahouse, le cabanon, overlooking the property. Architecture historianBeatriz Colomina has suggested that through this transgression, LeCorbusier was attempting to contain, overshadow, and ultimatelyefface Grays sexuality by colonizing her architecture. In a letter toVladimir Nekrassov from 1932, Le Corbusier writes: Why then topaint on the walls [] at the risk of killing architecture?26Colominaexplains: The mural for Le Corbusier is a weapon againstarchitecture, a bomb.27By violating architecture, and concurrentlyGray herself, it seems that Le Corbusier imbues the building with apower of its own. E.1027 is no longer simply architecture; it trulybecomes Grays surrogate. W.J.T. Mitchell describes this tendency:Two beliefs seem to be in place when people offend images. Thefirst is that the image is transparently and immediately linked to

what it represents. Whatever is done to the image is somehowdone to what it stands for. The second is that the image possessesa kind of vital, living character that makes it capable of feeling whatis done to it (Mitchell 2004, 127). Le Corbusiers actions are aimednot only at the material building, but at its very essence and even atthe body of the architect herself.

What did the house do that made Le Corbusier want toenter it uninvited, want to mark it, to dominate it? Architect andresearcher Katarina Bonnevier offers a new look at E.1027 thatmight elucidate the mysteries and desires surrounding the house bypresenting a queer reading of the space. Gray built according tomodernist principles, but did not subscribe to the fundamental

guideline, the strict form follows function directive. She did notdistinguish between the traditional hierarchies of architecture andinterior design; rather, Gray was sure of her focus: the thingconstructed has greater importance than the way one hasconstructed it.28 E.1027 retained a beautiful simplicity andfunctionality, but every aspect was subject to the same attentionand care. Furthermore, function became malleable: The boudoirwas proposed by Gray to be a multifunctional space for all aspectsof lifepleasure, rest, studies, business meetings, and parties.29Uses were varied, options were multiplied, and the standardunderstanding of private and public were overturned: The boudoirin her interpretation became the most public space of the building,as well as the most intimate. There is no spatial opposition betweenthese two categories; in fact, there are no such absolute categories,rather the Grayian boudoir supports a multitude of situations. []That which is being performed in the space, with the help of thearchitecture, decides what space it is.30 This performativity wasinherent to the design: Gray herself said that the house had been


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designed in the camping style, a style of territorial impermanence,of being on the run, being mobile.31Through its in-built motions, itsinvitation to action, the house wants to remember movement, thehistory of traveling houses, of nomad tents.

In the first century B.C., the Roman architecturaltheoretician Vitruvius published a document codifying rules ofbuilding and city planning, which came to be considered somethingof an Architecture Bible.32 He proposed a theory of buildingarranged in proportion to the idealized male body, as well as aprinciple regulating the arrangement and layout of the rooms in abuilding according to the new standard of functionality: Bygeneralizing specific acts or needs, like sleeping, eating, orentertaining, the architect can tame them with reproducible form.[] This act of arrangement finally buries or imprisons the activities

of daily life and the woman who is at the heart of this.33

Theseancient rules are still the ones dominating most of todays builtenvironment in the heterosexual matrix of architecture.34

E.1027as a whole was active: activated by alternatives, bymovement, by choice, and as such it broke out from under theauthority and domination of modern design as masculine: Thebuilding as an act is ambiguous, open to interpretation, not confinedwithin normative constraints.35 Le Corbusier, with his architectureof unity and of prefabrication, may have been directly targeting thisambiguity, trying to conceal the sensuality and enigma of potentials,to remove the narrative inherent in E.1027in order to replace it withhis static forms and figurative sketches, and to reframe Grays

architecture as heteronormative.

E.1027was alive, in its own way. Bonnevier embraced thehouses ambivalence, its refusal to be easily categorized, andrecognized it as an opponent of the status quo. On the other hand,Colomina conferred on the house at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin therespect it deserves, unmasking the motivations of its detractors: asColomina clearly demonstrates, Grays house never had a properhistory. To the contrary, these older models of historical inquirybased on what have come to be understood as patriarchal notionsof autonomy, authorship and intentionalitybetrayed the work ofEileen Gray.36Eileen Gray herself did consider E.1027 to have alife of its own: Gray calls the habitation un organisme vivant. 37Abeing with a future, a present, and a past, a house with aphilosophy and a sexuality, a place that welcomed change.

What do houses want?Do they want anything from us? from each other?


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Does a house even want us in it?

Houses, like images, are built upon shifting premises, potentialimplications, and hidden truths. As subalterns they are essentiallypowerless, however this only strengthens the force of their desires.These desires may exist primarily in our own speculations andimagination, yet they still affect us considerably. In order to betruthful and genuine in our inquiry into the desires of houses, a shiftin our expectations and behavior must occur. For Mitchell, thismodification/dislocation consists of two parts:

(1) the assent to the constitutive fiction of picturesas animated beings, quasi-agents, mock persons;and (2) the construal of pictures not as sovereignsubjects or disembodied spirits but as subalterns

whose bodies are marked with the stigmata ofdifference, and who function both as go-betweensand scapegoats in the social field of humanvisuality. Its crucial to this strategic shift that wenot confuse the desire of the picture with thedesires of the artist, the beholder, or even thefigures in the picture. What pictures want is not thesame as the message they communicate or theeffect they produce; its not even the same as whatthey say they want. Like people, pictures may notknow what they want; they have to be helped torecollect it through a dialogue with others.38

I have tried, in my own way, to follow this perspective, to enter in adialogue with my houses, to search for answers within them ratherthan without.

Houses want to know us. A house can have many names:room, studio, bachelor, 1 Bedroom, 2 Bedroom, loft, apartment,penthouse, town house, condominium, mansion, castle. But thisname is only a designation of its form. The house wants to beknown. Wittgensteins house wants you to see its logic, wants youto recognize its geometry, its distinct symmetries, truly feel itsspace. Grays house wants you to be free, wants you to escapeand to run away with you. Flexibility is the houses specific attribute.A house is a fluid space: even the most constrictive residence hassome versatility; it welcomes anyone and everyone who will treat itwith respect. A house well lived-in will take on aspects of its owner,it will adapt its personality; it wants to be friends. A new house islike a stranger: you meet tentatively, see if you can develop a realconnection, a perfect fit. Maudes house, like Maude, wants to be


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left to its own devices: it is Brunos home so long as he needs it forMaudes sake. Duras house is a member of the household; itwants to be more than a spectator, it wants to be a relative, to bepart of the family, part of its genealogy. Houses as individuals haveindividual wants and needs: the country home is happy in a remotelocation; the vacation home is happy to see visitors; the city houselikes to snuggle up to its neighbors; the suburban home needs itsspace. Houses want purpose. More than the purpose of thearchitect, more than the expectations and uses of the homeowner,their materiality and their physicality, the activation of their designand their location, give them presence, an essence. Houses, asimages, want a voice: Above all, it wants to be heard animpossibility for the silent, still image.39 And as for the distinctionbetween house and home? The house is what we want; the homeis when the house wants us back.

Arile Dionne-Krosnick is currently an MA candidate in Visual andCritical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago andholds a BFA in Art History and Studio Arts from ConcordiaUniversity. Dionne-Krosnick explores her interest in the history andtheory of architecture through a combination of research and studiowork. She is a visual artist and academic whose practice bridgesnotions of space and place in art historical and architecturaldialogues. While in Montral, Dionne-Krosnick was an assistant inthe communications department at the Canadian Centre for

Architecture and she currently holds a position as a publicprograms intern at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies inthe Fine Arts.

Notes

1W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves ofImages(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004): 7.2Ibid.14.3Ibid. 52.4Ibid. 14.5Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban

Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1988): 174.6Aaron Betsky, Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture, and theConstruction of Sexuality (New York: William Morrown andCompany, Inc., 1995): 3.


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7Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 46.8Ibid. 34.9Wittgensteins architecture is rooted in mechanics: he makes useof weight, friction, and energy, as opposed to the machineaesthetics of efficiency and streamlined productivity preferred byhis modernist counterparts. Further, Wittgenstein is unconcernedwith creating a gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). His designprocess does not reflect the revolutionary social concerns that leadmodern architects to devote themselves to the open-plan and themodular order that was meant to liberate humankind.10 Bernard Leitner, The Wittgenstein House (Princeton: PrincetonArchitectural Press, 2000): 10, Note 1.11Ibid. 13, Note 24.12Ibid. 24.13Qtd. in ibid. 22.14Ibid. 35.15Ibid. 67.16Ibid. 76.17Ibid. 88.18Ibid. 11, Note 8.19 Richard Brody, A House of Her Own, The New Yorker(December 8, 2008): Accessed November 29, 2012.20 I thought for a long while about buying a house. I neverimagined I could ever own a new one. The house at Neauphle usedto be a couple of farms built a little while before the Revolution. Itmust be just over two hundred years old. Ive often thought about it,It was there in 1789 and 1870. Its where the forests of Rambouillet

and Versailles meet. And in 1958 it belonged to me. I thought aboutit some nights till it almost hurt. I saw it lived in by the women. I sawmyself as preceded by them, in the same bedrooms, the sametwilights. Thered been nine generations of women before me withinthose walls; dozens of people gathered around the fires children,farm workers, cow girls. All over the house there were surfacesrubbed smooth where grown-ups, children, and dogs had gone inand out of the doors (Marguerite Duras, Practicalities, translatedby Barbara Bray [New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990]: 43).21I write about women in order to write about myself, about myselfalone through the ages (ibid. 46).22Suzanne Jacob, Maude, translated by Luise von Flotow (Toronto:Guernica, 1997): 12.23

Ibid. 10.24Ibid. 10.25Betsky, Building Sex, 32.


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26 Qtd. in Beatriz Colomina, Battle lines: E.1027, in The Sex ofArchitecture, edited by Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, and LeslieKanes Weisman, 174 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996).27Ibid. 174.28 Gray qtd. in Katarina Bonnevier, A Queer Analysis of EileenGrays E.1027, in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial productions ofgender in modern architecture, edited by Hilde Heynen and GslmGaydar, 168 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).29Ibid. 166.30Ibid. 166.31 Sylvia Lavin, Colominas Web: Reply to Beatriz Colomina, inThe Sex of Architecture, edited by Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway,and Leslie Kanes Weisman, 187 (New York: Harry N. Abrams,1996).32Vitruvius text De Architectureis most commonly known today asThe Ten Books on Architecture.33Betsky, Building Sex, 48).34Bonnevier writes, The heterosexual matrix is a precondition forhow we understand our built environment. In other words, buildingsparticipate in the construction of norms, but they seem to be aboutbricks and mortar nothing else. In domestic building activity, theheterosexual matrix is often blatantly obvious (A Queer Analysisof Eileen Grays E.1027, 167).35Ibid.166.36Lavin, Colominas Web, 184.37Bonnevier, A Queer Analysis of Eileen Grays E.1027, 167.38Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 46.39

Ibid. 45.

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Bonnevier, Katarina. A Queer Analysis of Eileen Grays E.1027. In

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Brody, Richard. A House of Her Own. The New Yorker. December8, 2008. Accessed November 29, 2012.


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http://www.newyorker.com/arts/events/revivals/2008/12/08/081208gomo_GOAT_movies_brody

Colomina, Beatriz. Battle lines: E.1027. In The Sex ofArchitecture,edited by Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, andLeslie Kanes Weisman, 167-182. New York: Harry N.Abrams, Inc., 1996.

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http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566850Lavin, Sylvia. Colominas Web: Reply to Beatriz Colomina. In The

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