Tag: Home

• May 10, 2014

  How the ‘problematized world’ can never become a home

  My last post rushed to this conclusion: ‘Thus, the problem-solver who tries to make the world into a home cannot do so.’ Let me try again, this time more slowly, in order to reach this conclusion. Recall that the kind of person we are describing believes that, in a basic sort of way, the world is full of problems and…
• October 8, 2013

  Prefab lives? Prefab’s lost question

  After the housing crisis, prefab homes have been making a reappearance. ‘Prefab lives!,’ Allison Arieff proclaims jubilantly. For green builders, the venture is to see whether the best of industrial design and manufacturing can be put in service of a sustainable mission. Questions soon turn technical: how to cut costs; how to use green materials;…
• June 26, 2013

  There is nothing worse than a house that is too done up…

  ‘A house, I know, is but a temporary abode, but how delightful it is to find one that has harmonious proportions and a pleasant atmosphere. One feels somehow that even moonlight, when it shines into the quiet domicile of a person of taste, is more affecting than elsewhere. A house, though it may not be…
• June 8, 2013

  Wandering babies in Topanga Canyon…

  Early in Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby exuberantly proclaims that there is no place he would rather live than in a cottage and, in particular, in a cottage that in all respects resembles the one the Dashwoods have let. Eleanor replies–come, come now, dear Willoughby–that the hallways are dark and the quarters are cramped. Would he really…
• September 17, 2012

  Musings on a mountain home

  Are you alone, dear philosopher, there on that northern rock, bordered by ocean on one side and by sea on the other? Long ago, Philoctetes was–was alone, that is, was homeless, atopos, unmoored and unmanned… Feel free to look around at the blank walls, at the one-woman fashion show, at the small piles of Yes’s and…