Megaron (May 2014)
A Contingency in Architecture: Is ‘House’ a spent notion in Postmodern Daily Life?
Abstract
Housing has always been of special interest to architecture and interior architecture, which is understandable, given its primary role in individuals’ lives. In particular, the beginning of the 20th century and the impact of modernism on social life created diversification in viewpoints on housing and housing interiors. Housing has had an active, varied, and disputatious history, starting from the avant garde, flexible, and chic spaces of modernism alienated from tradition, to the colourful, cheap, and inarticulate signs of postmodernism. Of course, these changes were not easy to achieve. The change of social organism, innovations in technology, differentiations in individuals’ needs and demands, and their social status created the most essential components of this process. As we leave the twentieth century behind and move through the the first quarter of the twenty-first, it seems that even as housing remains as important as ever in individuals’ lives, some differentiations in what it represents are attracting attention. Today, as an object of consumption, the house stands somewhere beyond being a statement of daily dynamics, taste and an expression of the identity the consumer defines as representing the social groups to which he belongs. The aim of this study is to analyse the conversion of the house since the beginning of the 20th century in respect of the space identifying and identity creating factors of the individual, who sees house as an consumption object in daily life, and transformes “home” as part of his life; and to reveal the possible existential results.
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