What do The Three Little Pigs’ houses and the Cabanon project by Le Corbusier have in common? And what about Farnsworth House – the transparent dwelling designed by Mies van der Rohe for his beloved – or the Big Brother’s studios? Is the house still a primary asset that make us masters or the bourgeois dream has vanished along with the economic boom? What is a house in the sharing economy and architectural reproducibility times urged by migrations and wars? How Ikea has changed our domestic imagery and living?
The homes we are raise all these and many others issues related to the home concept. According to Luca “the house is not only a bordered space but it has become a new landscape, a public space where contemporary idiosyncrasies and neurosis take place”, a filter “to read the fragments of our future”.
The book is divided into eight chapters that tell us about as many stories around the house, as “solid”, “dominant”, “sacred”, “transparent”, “domestic”, “rootless”, “invisible” and eventually “the house i am”.
At a time when “the domestic space seems crushed between social housing and interior design”, an active thinking on this theme is more than necessary. “Starting anew from the houses we are and carelessly live in means to get back to the primary acts, renewing symbols and ideas that have given value to our places (…) to reconsider what we want and express every time we inhabit, transform and share a house”.
“Building a critical and conscious thinking on the many houses that we are” is a starting point “to produce new visions for the years to come”.
Luca Molinari, The houses we are (Le case che siamo), nottetempo, 2016
English translation by Joanna Durham and Jennifer Knaeble.