Π ν ύ ξΠ Ν Υ Ξ

Edited by Adolfo Del Valle & Oskar Johanson | Printed by PageMasters for the Architectural Association | pnyx.aaschool.ac.uk | pnyx@aaschool.ac.uk | © PNYX 2019

WHAT IS A HOUSE? In this week’s issue Hanna Rullmann shares some of her own research on the diverging definitions across various temporal and spatial contexts, revealing something of the legal, cultural and social implications of each.—EDS.

STATUTE OF THE INHABITABLEHanna Rullmann

Grandpa unfolded a map on the table, dragged his finger along the digging border and pointed to the town he had chosen: Hoogeveen. We, as diggers, could not live in the built-up areas, but the peatland behind it granted free establishment as part of the ancient use of what is called ‘maintaining fire

and smoke’ [‘vuur en rook houden’]; if a house is built somewhere on the field during the night, and there is evidence of a fire and smoke in the chimney at dawn, the owner of the land has no legal right to expel its inhabitants from their newly-built residence. (Thomas Rosenboom, 1999, trans. by the author.)

UNTIL THE LATE 1800s the phenomenon of ‘maintaining fire and smoke’ was common amongst peat diggers in the east of the Netherlands. These diggers worked itinerantly; when peat ran out in one field they would move to another, each time rebuilding their house. They were allowed to do so freely, without permits or land ownership, so long as they were able to construct their house in one

night, the definition of which was given as the presence of a working chimney by sunrise.

The centrality of the fireplace to the definition of a home was evident in language and even the tax system; for a period of time the expression ‘to have smoke’ (both in Dutch and in German, ‘rauch haben’) became synonymous with dwelling. Housing was taxed on the condition of a chimney.

As peat gathering became obsolete over the course of the 19th century, the tradition of ‘maintaining fire and smoke’ died with it. However, the practice of overnight house construction is found in many forms around

22 January, 2019 ISSUE 54

WEEKLY COMMENTARY, RESEARCH, AND REVIEW

P N Y X

Above: Response from the Barbados government to a request from the author.

Above: Every house in Israel by law must include a shelter room, known as the Mamad, which conforms to certain standards: a minimum area of 9m2, 30cm-thick walls of reinforced concrete, a 210cm-high vault-like door, etc.. The image above shows the installation of a Mamad in an apartment; an example of the military bleeding into the domestic, appropriating the private as a public matter, and becoming part of a daily routine. (Supplementary reseach by Ido Tsarfati. Image: Elrom LTD, a Mamad construction company).

the world to this day, each advancing different definitions, both formal and informal, for a built structure fit for human habitation. Consider, for example, the Turkish gecekondu (gece meaning ‘night’, kondu meaning ‘landed’, or house landed in one night).

Within these practices, and more broadly in the ways in which housing is described in tax law and other regulations, household routines come to assume legal value and a kind of definitional threshold given to elementary domestic functions. But what are considered to be the principles of domestic life? At what point is an activity domestic, and thus private, and at what point is it public?

An act that is deemed private takes on a different (sometimes legal) status when performed in public. For example, during the Occupy movement in the US, tents were often seen as ‘symbols of protest’. However, as soon as they became actual residences, used for sleeping and eating, a trial found them to be a danger to the public. As Anna Feigenbaum has observed in The Disobedient Objects of Protest Camps (2014), ‘fake sleeping’ was allowed as a form of protest but ‘real sleeping’ (as well as peeing, sitting and lying down) in public space was illegal.

Georges Perec, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, writes about the linguistic quest for a space without a use or function: how does one describe a space that is not necessarily empty, or potentially awaiting use, but utterly and ‘intentionally useless’?

For all my efforts, I found it impossible to follow this idea through to the end. Language itself, seemingly, proved unsuited to describing this nothing, this void, as if we could only speak of what is full, useful and functional. [...] How to expel functions, rhythms, habits, how to expel necessity? [...] The effort itself seemed to produce something that might be a statute of the inhabitable. (Perec, 1999.)

In other words, the search for something that cannot be inhabited generates a vocabulary for the opposite: the inhabitable. In this framework, observing ways of inhabiting space through law and classification becomes a study of a language constructed to determine a public, systematic definition of the private; a vocabulary that standardises the very basics of human existence while at the same time delineating tools for governing.

Whether it is a distinction between the legality of public and private activities, or the formalising of certain domestic objects and spaces (such as the chimney) as lawful standards, what is deemed acceptable is subject

to the ambiguity of the cultural traditions, politics, economics, geographies and climates of different countries and districts.

In order to test this framework, between 2015 and 2016 I sent letters to legal and urban development departments of various countries, requesting formal descriptions of a ‘house’ or ‘dwelling’. Below are some of the following definitions I received in response.

In Barbados, ‘the test to determine if a building is a dwelling house is whether it is used regularly as a place to sleep’.

In Latvia, for a construction to be considered housing, it must feature ‘basic requirements,’ defined as ‘wall energy efficiency, sanitation and a kitchen’.

In Finland a dwelling needs to contain space separated by closed walls, have its own entrance, a kitchen and a floor area of at least 7 square metres.

In the Philippines a ‘housing unit’ includes structures ‘not intended for habitation, such as caves, boats, abandoned trucks, culverts and others, but which are used as living quarters by households’.

In Sweden a building is defined as ‘a permanent construction consisting of a roof or a roof and walls, which is permanently placed on land, or entirely or partially underground,

or is permanently placed in a certain space in water, and is intended to be constructed so that people can dwell within it’.

In Germany, a building is defined as a roofed enclosure, ‘to be entered by human beings and suitable or assigned to protect human beings, animals, or objects of any kind’.

We can see that to place something dynamic, civil and private into a legal context is to produce a language that points towards almost absurd (im)possibilities. Either vague and open-ended (such as Romania’s definition: ‘a construction consisting of one or more rooms’) or highly specific (such as Singapore’s ‘wall, fence, platform, staging gate, post, pillar, paling, frame hoarding, slip, dock, wharf, pier, jetty, landing-stage or bridge,’ above or below the ground), the practices and spaces of dwelling become abstracted into a set of commodities and legal loopholes. Thus codified in law and regulation, these definitions of the domestic become instruments of capital; objects of economic value, trade and tax. For example, in Finland, the requisite dwelling surface area there of 7 square meters might become an asset to developers, subject to speculation. In other communities, dwellings are left in a permanent state of unfinished construction, never to become ‘complete,’ in order to avoid property taxes.

In addition, a clear-cut division between private and public activities or spaces (what is within the home and outside of it) directly informs policing in situations where the private is forced to take place in the public realm. Just as the act of sleeping in the context of the Occupy protests obtained both a private and a public status, the illegality of dwelling in public space forms the grounds for expulsion of migrant-built informal settlements at Europe’s borders, and the bare minimum of what is deemed to be an acceptable space for inhabiting shapes the construction of social housing.

To form a ‘statute of the inhabitable’ reframes cultural tendencies as instruments of state control and economic systems; to challenge this control is to think of strategies that circumvent and re-appropriate the very same methods by which it is established, whether it starts with the chimney as a means to establishing a household despite of legal grounds, or ‘fake sleeping’ as a protesting method.

Hanna Rullmann is a recent graduate of the Centre for Research Architecture and has a background in graphic design. Currently she works as a researcher at Airwars in London.

Edited by Adolfo Del Valle & Oskar Johanson | Printed by PageMasters for the Architectural Association | pnyx.aaschool.ac.uk | pnyx@aaschool.ac.uk | © PNYX 2019