Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Whenever we venture out into the world, we set out from home, and compare the unfamiliar things we meet with things that we already know. The home is charged with meaning, because it is the basis of what we know, and is closely involved with the most personal aspects of our lives. It has witnessed our indignities and embarrassments, as well as the face that we want to show the outside world. The home has seen us at our worst, and still shelters and protects us, so we feel secure there, and have surprisingly strong feelings for it, even though they go unnoticed most of the time. The same feeling can be invested in other things, and they too can contribute to the feeling of ‘being at home’. Anything that we recognize as familiar, even something as immaterial as a tune, can somehow become ingrained, so that it becomes somehow a part of where we are, and if it is portable, like a tune, or a memorable episode in a novel, or an idea of how it is right to behave, then these things are part of who we are. We carry these immaterial things around with us, along with an idea of home. The building that we call home we leave in one place, and when we wander we wander away from it. A nomadic tribe, carrying its tents along with it, has an altogether different sense of what home is, but ‘we’ (those of us with a home that stays put) can feel at home in surroundings that are not actually our own, if they have familiar characteristics, whether or not they actually look like the places where we live. If I have a deeply ingrained expectation that I will hear a family or neighbours around me, making their own human noises as they go about their own lives, then I might find myself disturbed by the eerie silence to be found in an isolated house, or worried by the creaking of unfamiliar timbers, juddering of strange plumbing, hooting of owls, or scampering feet that I hear in the night. There are many aspects to the home, and the actual solid building is only a part of it. The thing that matters most about my home is that I know it, and I do not think about that most of the time, only really noticing it when something changes, such as when I move house, or when I have unfamiliar visitors and cannot behave with my usual levels of freedom. I have to acknowledge different (temporary) thresholds as I move about the house, if I don’t want to walk in and surprise them. Business hotels try to make their rooms consistently the same, so that we start to feel at home in the whole hotel chain, not just in one building, even if we are in distant and unfamiliar parts of the world that we have never visited before. We know what to expect and more or less where we will find it, so we can continue with the minimum of disruption, and have contact with local character in controlled and limited doses, returning to a temporary substitute ‘home’ in the hotel. We can use our intuition, and it will work. Moving in an unfamiliar culture always turns up little moments of disorientation, such as when the disreputable-looking man in the bar claims that Margaret Thatcher is his mother as well as mine (which he seems to mean as a gesture of camaraderie) or a motor cycle screeches to a halt and I am asked, puzzled, why I’m not in a taxi — a question no one has ever asked me in Europe. These moments are stimulating, in their way, and turn out to be memorable, but they remind me that I’m a long way away from home and the things I know. It is no wonder that the best travel writers always turn out to have a taste for the surreal, which can be turned into humour, anxiety, or enchantment, but is always a state of mind to be passed through, and is never quite the state of serenity associated with being at home.