More Than Just A House. We are sheltered all throughout the…
By: Nicole Ann Bunao
Tags: Medium Writers, Home, Essay Writing, House, Architecture

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We are sheltered all throughout the course of our lives. From the nine months we spend inside the womb of our mothers, to the coffin where our body will lay until the worms have consumed our entire being. It is downright inconceivable knowing how we live and die confined in spaces within a solid shape of reflected consciousness in objects existing medially in the enclosed space of our very own universes.

Houses are what embodies our physicality. What we call home is a temporal personification of our existence evident in trinkets and whatnots, chattels and paraphernalia that swarm and permeate the sacred spaces where we perform our everyday rituals. These personal and individual dwellings become witnesses to our way of life, our habits and proclivity. The walls are the on-lookers and the audience, while the inhabitants are the performers in the dramatization of their customary and idiosyncratic essence of the daily life. Hallowed touches are exchanged between the surfaces of the skin, as well as fabricated and organic elements, where the act merges two energies creating a connection bounded by the inanimate and the conscious entities alike.

What we call home becomes the substantial domicile in the metaphysical space of reality and the world. Every nook and cranny of our house, its corners and hideaways, plays an important part in our role in the world, as it is a projection of our thoughts and communicates ourselves to the unrestricted and cornerless fraction of the great outdoors. It becomes a massive storage of memories and recollections, that every part of the house possesses an impalpable souvenir of what had taken place prior to what is commencing in the present, and with which we can habituate anytime.

The distinctive sensation of our homes gives us intense warmth and comfort, compared to other frameworks of a four-walled structures. It is where we feel most comfortable, and where we show our vulnerability. We coil into the depths of our homes whenever we anticipate the feeling of being shunned away from the external world, such as, the architectural geometry of a room metamorphoses into a solid space of solace and appeasement, rather than just mere shelter.

There is more to our houses than just trivial construction of materials put together to shelter our flesh. Architects design and build dwellings with the utmost attention to transform the structure into a home, convert the concrete and solidified spaces into something abstract that can exist intangibly in the phantom of our minds keeping us grounded and anchored to a material place where we resign oneself towards a familiar ease and consolation. The house starts to feel like a home the moment it is inhabited, and the inhabitant associate their minds together with the earthbound dwelling, fusing their energies into one familiar rhythm. The house, then, becomes our very own universe and the galaxy of thoughts and consciousness is centered around our sole being. “An architectural space frames, halts, strengthens and focuses our thoughts, and prevents them from getting lost. We can dream and sense our being outdoors, but we need the architectural geometry of a room to think clearly. The geometry of thought echoes the geometry of the room,” writes Pallasmaa in his book ‘Eyes of the Skin’.

Granted, in other words, our homes are what keeps us sane.