Even if we are stuck at home, can still be a social being in virtual ways. Rooms that we live become somethings else not really physically but virtually, that allows us to be a physically individual and virtually community. We can still drink coffee while talking our friends as in coffee, connect our teachers as in class, work as in office, read as in library, moreover, all these activities can be done in the same table. So, it is a question that interaction between function and space contrarily functionalists said before. Otherwise, nowadays, it may be agreed that emotional and intellectual interaction -not just with outside but also with ourselves- is even more than before. “Machine-house” dream is not working anymore. Reconsideration of functions of house as far as we know (kitchen, bedroom etc.) must be thought ,with an eye to new technologies, as new scenarios that has more fluid spaces, more indefinite boundaries, and more complex human requirements and their relations.
These consequences make our houses more important, not just for physical requirements but also as an impersonal environment that effects our emotions and thoughts, besides, with awareness about that our psychologies affected by environment unconsciously.
According to Freud, human-beings are in search of space as warm, peaceful and exorable as its mother's womb. Baby in there has physical senses but has not self-awareness of its physical being. It has not image of entity. Baby experiences situation of being absent. Otherwise, had physical sense without its awareness of body boundaries, causes that baby experiences situation of integrity & entirety. It may be drawn a parallel between this Freudian phenomenon and our conditions while experiencing quarantine. Physically being absent but virtually, being in everywhere.
F. Kiesler got inspired Freud just as other surrealists. Unconscious relations between spaces, boundaries were important. But, while designing Endless House, Kiesler had other ideas as his word “Correalism” that is concept about interaction of humans with its environment and technology. Endless house was the house that allows transaction and transmission of environments; it was poem, sculpture, dance and theatre on the contrary to boxes of machine-age. Functions were actually rituals in Endless House.
It seems that Kiesler’s ideas for house are useful to create a new kind of space of living with adding new opportunities and technologies as soft machines, structural inventions, new material etc. While keeping his main ideas, houses may transform to more suitable place for digital era.
[the project got honorable mention Locked-Down Competition : instagram.com/lockeddownin120homes/]
References
Bauer, C. (1928), ‘Machine-Age Mansions for Ultra-Moderns’, New York Times Magazine, April, 10.
Vidler, A. (1996) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. MIT press, Cambridge.
Breton, A. (1960) Nadja. Grove Press, New York.
Bachelard, G. (1992) The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, Boston.
Altınyıldız Artun N. (2014) Sürrealizm/Mimarlık. İletişim, İstanbul.
