Have a room of your own. A house of one’s own, accommodation, one’s keys. To have a door to cross, which allows you to say to yourself, finally barefoot and finally slumped, that you “are at home. This need is fundamental. However, the house remains, according to the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia, a place “very little and very, very badly thought out”, much less thought out than the city. To present the reflection differently, the author signs House philosophy. Domestic space and happiness. Free visit of these pages.
“During the months of the great pandemic, I often wondered what our lives would be like if it were our homes and not the cities that had been made inaccessible by the virus”, wonders Emanuele Coccia in his latest book.
“What would have happened, he continues between the pages, if we had been forced to become all tramps, homeless, to free ourselves from our homes? I have often wondered if, in this case, we would have allowed ourselves to follow the thread of our friendships and our loves to reorganize our life together. Are we able to imagine and construct domestic realities shaped by relationships other than those of kinship and solitude? »
The author, who has already expressed in Metamorphoses and plant life his idea that we are all, on Earth, one and the same thing, fundamentally linked, could only call for a house that is more porous, more open, more mixed, more open to biodiversity — like the Bosco Verticale in Milan, for example, these two residential towers designed by Stefano Boeri with the help of horticulturists and botanists. Trees, shrubs and plants are integrated into the building.
moving houses
The pandemic is accelerating, at breakneck speed, the need to think about the house of tomorrow. An already urgent need, according to the philosopher, since it is necessary to respond to the climatic, identity and migratory crises. Our lodgings of the future will have to be able to respond to these crises, which cross both the private and the public. And the confinements acted as revealers of the shortcomings of our current homes, of our inability to live there fully – a fundamentally relational idea, for the philosopher.
The reflection to be held on the house, whether philosophical or architectural, is constantly pushed back with the dust under the carpet. Emanuele Coccia reported in a telephone interview the words of an architect friend, who had begun his studies in Italy and finished them in France: “In Florence, the first thing they taught him was how to transform a building facade into work of art. »
“In France, the first thing they were told was, in an apartment, to put the children’s room and that of the adults very far from each other, to make life more pleasant for some like others. There is this kind of know-how which is still very limited today, ”says Mr. Coccia.
Build your nest
The moves, according to Mr. Coccia, demonstrate that the houses do not exist; only home-made exists, a very long ballet of reciprocal domestication of things and people. A way also to sanctify certain objects, certain memories, to the point of giving them a soul, and to keep them around us so that they in turn re-electrify our souls.
What confinement has revealed, believes Emanuele Coccia, “is that basically, we have delegated to the city almost everything that makes our life interesting and pleasant”. Museums, restaurants, cafes, theaters, places to be together. “From the moment we close the door of our house behind us, everything that makes our life pleasant — pleasures, encounters with others, even work — stays outside. »
“Because basically, the house remained a common space: everyone’s life took place in the city. The house was mostly a garage where we went to sleep, eat, do things… body in fact. It is not surprising that cities, losing their sensitive lives through confinement, have been deserted in an unprecedented way.
For his essay, the philosopher, who teaches this session at Harvard the history of ecology and fashion, bases his thoughts on personal stories from his thirty moves. Associates it, as for a palace of memory, each beam of thought with a room in the house – kitchen, cupboards, beds, corridors, things that lodge there.
The end of modernity
“With the pandemic, work no longer necessarily has to take place in the city. He has become a domestic again. And that is perhaps the greatest revolution from an economic point of view since the origin of modernity, ”believes Mr. Coccia. “Modernity was born of this movement through which the city tears away from the house, from the domestic space, from the wealth of large families the production of wealth”, he recalls, to make it a public, political affair. .
“Now we are experiencing the opposite movement. Everything will also change because the hostage of the houses by the city was done by work. And if it jumps, everything jumps: and the affective order between people also jumps. “Social networks, accessible on cell phones, also mean that we now carry our homes, our intimacies in our pockets, also believes the philosopher. Another card that blurs the traditional deal.
“We must seek to imagine houses capable of transforming quickly, as quickly as the climate and the weather can change”, he concludes at the end of his essay. Houses which will have to “make collective discipline of the mixture, believes Mr. Coccia: mixture of classes, mixture of identities, mixture of peoples and mixture of cultures”. Surprise box houses, to imagine.