Objects of home : a place for architecture in the making of street-homes

Abstract

Objects of Home re-imagines a home without walls, without roofs without doors, scattered throughout Rome - connected by patterns of use and coincidence. Immersed in a city that is not so anonymous to those who know it, these settlements upturn the tropes of the family and the private realm as the only site of intimate and fulfilling relationships. It seeks out the marginal, un-pretentious, hidden and symbolic spaces of the city and waits for the different imaginaries of often forgotten subjects to animate and re-form these anonymous spaces through their very difference. Focused on the homemaking practices of the urban street dwellers, five familiar home-making patterns are traced to reveal the inconspicuous relationships formed between public space and its inhabitants. These moments of encounter produce places of social renegotiation, contestation, and collaboration that reshape the margins of a public space and through their recurrence and begin to transform the territory beyond a single ephemeral interaction. Repeated behaviors become ritualized, familiar encounters become community, and private possessions, gifted to the street, begin to organize new territories of individual personality. In the old but unrecognized processes of homemaking within the roman city, the body and living space become mutually constitutive - coexisting within the boundaries of private and public property.