Let us deal with the most immediate and valid concern when presented with a new series entitled Home (Apple+ TV) that promises an in-depth look at the different and architecturally interesting ways various people of vision have chosen to build and live in theirs. Namely: is it Grand Designs with knobs on?
The answer, I am very happy to tell you, is no. Or at least, just a tiny, tiny bit, just occasionally. A forgivable amount, I would say, and my tolerance threshold is low. People do, every now and then, say things such as “Life itself should colonise the space”, but the saving grace of Home is that a) there is no Kevin McCloud and b) unlike most of the genre, it looks outward rather than in.
Instead of simply marvelling at Sequoia and Theodolite’s bravery in building a six-storey poured-concrete and wickerwork habitational constructivation on a sand dune, it uses each individual home as a jumping off point for an examination of wider movements, issues and possibilities. This has the happy further advantage of fitting in rather than jarring with current – surely unanticipated by the makers – lockdown conditions. We are all at home trying to look outwards.
Anupama Kundoo’s home – the Listening House in Auroville, India – for example, is built using materials from within a 20km radius of the building. It is constructed using traditional skills as a repudiation of the western style and techniques that dominated the country for centuries under British rule, and a restoration of local industry and the status of craftsmen who have kept 4,000-year-old pre-colonial arts alive down the generations. It’s a house very much embedded in the natural world around it – walls are perforated to let in light and air, plants cover a sweeping verandah and the handmade brick construction makes the whole thing look as if it has grown straight out of the earth.
In Sweden, Anders Solvarm has given the back-to-nature idea the twist needed in a more intemperate climate by building his house within a giant greenhouse, creating a self-sustaining patch of Mediterranean greenery in the middle of snowy Scandinavia. His human terrarium – or naturhus – is at the forefront of a movement that seeks to minimise our ecological impact at every turn. Our own greenhouses, complete with vegetable plots, self-contained greywater systems or minimal heating requirements to minimise the global greenhouse effect, are a satisfying solution to consider.
Theaster Gates is the son of a roofer who grew up on the west side of Chicago and – as a bright boy – was transported to school on the north side and watched through the bus windows every day as the landscape changed and improved with every mile further from home he got. He grew up to be an artist with a degree in urban planning. He has spent decades acquiring and transforming abandoned buildings near his adult south side Chicago home into community gathering places, endeavours and museums of local and wider black experience, to make the place feel like home in a wider sense to a growing number of citizens.
“I built things with what I had,” he says. And now he has, in effect, a town of his own, scattered across another, but connected by his aesthetic and his urge to revivify a neglected place and its people. “When you walk past an abandoned building,” he says, “it’s hard not to feel heavy.”
Perhaps the most purely fascinating on its own terms is architect Gary Chang’s 344 sq ft apartment in Hong Kong. He calls it the Domestic Transformer and is using it as a laboratory in which, and with which, to solve his overcrowded city’sproblem of housing provision. Simply put, Chang lives in one room that he can transform into any other at will. Walls slide and reconfigure the space – a bench becomes a desk becomes a kitchen counter becomes a dining table. A cupboard opens to become a kitchen; everything else slides away to let down a Murphy bed, or to let the apartment become a home cinema or the bathroom or a walk-in closet …
It’s completely astonishing, like a real-life Tardis but with an entirely tranquil doctor at its heart, in absolute control of everything and quite possibly set to change the world more than any time lord ever dreamed.
So many different conceptions of home – what it can be when uncoupled from convention, how wide it can go philosophically, how much it can contract when practicality requires – make this a series that asks even greater questions about what of those things we once imagined immutable we can choose to accept or reject. It’s a grand design indeed.
