HOME SWEET HOME

Sweet Parliament Home - Andres Jaque

Only in the UE there are 80 million people living in shared houses. Paris, Berlin, London, none of them are the capital of Europe. The real capital of Europe is a city without exteriors, a city of 80 million domestic interiors connected through skype and the social networks. As Andres Jaque states, “ sharing home is a massive and diverse phenomenon, an invisible urbanism that challenges the way housing and the city have been thought in the last decades. A metropolis without urban designers, an architecture without architects that discredit the most sublime disciplines”.

Indeed these 80 million of domestic interiors are no more than dilapidated and ramshackle flats, full of old furniture and objects whose owner is uncertain. These interiors are the background scenery of the nomadism, of this state of temporality that most of these buildings imply. Home doesn’t represent us because it doesn’t belong to us. Home is just a stop.

In a shared apartment, home is no longer familiar but a space of uncertainty. The dialectic public/private recognized in the Greek polis has no more sense.  Home is no longer the pacific and apolitical space of the oikos , but the very core of the political activity.  Home is no longer the refuge of pacific intimacy but a piece of disputed urbanity. “Home sweet home” is over.