Coccia, Emanuele. (2024). Philosophy of the Home - Domestic Space and Happiness. Penguin Books. 191 s.
First published in Italian as Filosofia della casa. Lo spazio domestico e la felicità (2021).
Sketches of every building that I personally have lived in: various places in Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Canada.
What is a home? What does it mean to feel at home? These are questions which have always deeply interested me, not least because they are inseparable from a further discussion about how we want to live. They constitute the main theme of “Philosophy of the Home – Domestic Space and Happiness”, where philosopher Emanuele Coccia explores the home as an ontological and phenomenological concept and discusses how the home becomes a physical and psychological part of life.
Immediately the title reminds me of the book “The Architecture of Happiness”, where Alain de Botton (2006) attempts to find connections between our physical surroundings and a sense of well-being. De Botton claims in this book that we are dependent on our surroundings to communicate ideals to us, ideas about how the world should be. Our identity is not entirely self-determined; we have a need for a home in the physical world just as much as in the psychological world which can become a part of our self-image. Coccia would likely agree (he believes that a home has the same impact on the body and soul as the clothes that we choose to wear), but where de Botton limits himself mainly to the home as a material environment, Coccia proceeds quickly to consider the psychological aspects of a home in addition. For him the home “is not only a spatial problem” (p. 6); it consists also of “memories, feelings, experiences and especially the lives of others” (p. 19). A home creates a certain intensity in existence which alters our way of being, for to live at a place entails also to enter into relationships with certain things and people there which are intensive enough to make happiness possible.
The author introduces most of the chapters with personal stories that demonstrate how various experiences from his own life have contributed to form his understanding of the home. These stories are one of the strengths of the book, because they invite the reader to reflect on his or her own unique history and all the places and events which have given rise to one’s own idea of home. Especially interesting is a story about a time when Coccia had just moved to Berlin to start a new job. Before he had the chance to purchase furniture or other domestic items, his bank card suddenly stopped working. He had nothing to sleep on, nothing to prepare food with; he found himself in an empty room. It was through this experience that he discovered that “space in its pure geometry is simply uninhabitable” (p. 57)…”The home in terms of form – its floor, roof and walls – is really, per definition, uninhabitable” (p. 58). All the material things that the human organism requires to survive beyond shelter, together with many of the events which are attached to our sense of home, are not derived from the material form of a house. They must be brought into the room from outside – food, water, clothes, furniture, medicine, other people.
This story reminds me of a time in my own life when I had moved abroad to Moss, Norway after graduating to start my first job. Just like the author, I found myself in an unfurnished apartment with a new start. I had taken with me only the most necessary items, mostly clothes (and tennis rackets), and my whole life was packed into a few suitcases in front of me. There was little else in the apartment when I first walked through the door. I sat on the floor and drank water out of a plant vase (laughs) which as luck would have it came with the space.
Coccia demonstrates correctly that a home is necessarily more than a house. Perhaps this expanded boundary is becoming increasingly common, especially in cities where more and more people live in small apartments and most of daily life outside of sleep happens at other places. Beyond the choice of a few surface treatments, the spatial qualities of these apartments are often of little significance. With modern technology it is in addition possible to see images from countless places across the world at the touch of a screen. More of our experiences at home are becoming supplemented by technological means. Coccia claims that the final consequence of an expansion of a sense of home beyond the walls of an apartment is an identification with life as a holistic phenomenon, and thus with all other forms of life and places on the Earth.
If the home expands to encompass more than a private space, do we still need physical homes? Coccia would probably not claim that we can completely get rid of our houses. There is something unique that happens only in the spaces within them, and he recognizes that “if the life that unfolds inside [the house’s walls] was identical to the life that lies outside, we would not have a need for a home” (p. 106). According to Coccia, we need a home “for the same reason that we have a need for writing. Normal experience is never sufficient: it is not enough to regard the world as it is, it is not enough to be a part of it by attaching our silhouette to its surface…To live in the world is to transform its structure, it means to become the Earth’s way of writing” (p. 105). His observation is a positive one, for the greatest weakness in Coccia’s discussion is that he repeatedly devalues the significance of architectural qualities and the conscious design that can produce them to combine with the psychological and make a satisfying home possible. He says about the home that “its form is quite irrelevant” (p. 5), that it is “of little significance – just like its style, size or substance” (p. 106); he even writes straight out that “[n]early none of [the home’s] qualities has anything to do with architecture or design” (p. 19). We that work with the design of spaces know on the other hand that the forms of the spaces in a home are decisive in creating the preconditions for the unique experiences which can take place there, that spatial qualities strongly affect feelings as the background to other events in existence. We do not create a home with space alone, but all architects know of the potential functions of space. Perhaps it is similar to that which Coccia describes about his own experience of being a twin – just as twins share a common life history but each individual personality sets it on a unique path, designers can give a common sense of home a diversity of unique expressions.
Some people choose consciously or unconsciously to remain near the place where they came out of the world and move only a couple of times in their entire lives. Neither I nor Coccia received such a fate. He writes that he has moved 30 times so far; I am living right now in my 12th home and dream of more. Even after living in many different houses for longer or shorter periods, I have not really felt myself seriously at home in any of them. Sometimes I wonder if I ever am going to get a satisfying feeling of having a permanent home somewhere, regardless of whether it is attached to a certain house, city or country. Is this feeling even possible, or is it only an outdated, unachievable ideal that is the internal fabrication of my own history and desires? This book offers no solution to such thoughts, but it does give better insight into the problem. It deepens a holistic perspective on the home as a phenomenon, and in the same spirit as de Botton’s “The Architecture of Happiness” it invites us to cultivate an increased awareness of what the home means for us personally, which preconditions for a feeling of home we create when we design houses, gardens and urban rooms and how the unique experiences of various places affect how we experience life as a whole. Perhaps the home that I dream about is not a problem that has to be solved, but is rather a feeling that can be created regardless of where I happen to be by learning to find a home in myself.
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