FROM THE CITY-HOUSE TO THE HOUSE-CITY IN THREE DOMESTIC KNOTS

Abstract

The house, considered as a set of rooms, opens up the possibility of defining its habitation based on how those rooms are joined and knotted together. The way of knotting has not remained stable over time, nor has the mode of habitation. The first great European house, the Roman domus, knotted those rooms in unbroken continuity, open to the sky in the middle. This continuity made the house an unchangeable domestic abode, that united men with the gods in a way that was considered eternal. After two world wars, the eternal European city no longer existed, and a triumphant America transformed the domestic Roman knot into a juxtaposition of rooms that Louis Kahn moved closer to the ground in the Adler House. The house became a fragmented continuity of rooms whose route becomes an Eden for domestic appliances and its occupants. And then, at the beginning of this millennium, contemporary Eastern architecture introduced a new knot by contiguity that Ryue Nishizawa carried out in the Moriyama House. Occupying this abode results in flow between the rooms, adding movement as a new room. The house, as a consequence, is transformed into a place of immediacy of rooms and nature, opening the household’s calendar to cyclical time, in tune with that nature. The goal of this domestic story, which jumps from Europe to America and ends in Asia, will be to identify the different ways of inhabiting and with them to define the different cities that emerge from these three ways of domestic knotting.

Keywords: Room, house, city, domus, Adler House, Moriyama House.