geography of the home: writings on where we live

"the house is home to many things. far more than four walls and a roof, it contains our private and public lives, our families, our memories and aspirations, and reflects our attitudes toward society, culture, the environment, and our neighbours."

i am reading this to further understand what home means for each for us , most importantly focusing on the chapters about the front door and the library.

i love how the author akiki busch describes front doors:
"these assemblages of curious architectural appendages squarely face each other in their own eccentric conversation"

she asks the question why do i love my useless front door? the front door continues to appeal to our sense of arrival. call it the ceremony of coming home. the architecturally anachronistic front door's main purpose is to be evocative, to remind us of a time when public and private rituals structured people's lives.

the front door was traditionally designed to present the house to the world at large, to welcome other. it was once the generous, hospitable part of the house. today as we withdraw from a world which seems increasingly violent and disordered, we tend to view our homes as shelter and retreat; a sense of graciousness offered to the outside world is less relevant to the way we live.

moving onto the library- it should be a beautiful thing, a simplicity of shelves and books, a composition of essentials-essential information, essential furniture. do you believe in a big room designed exclusively for books? the library is a room that contains human wisdom. call it a room that reflects our relationship with knowledge. because knowledge is like anything else- when you love it- you want to do something for it.

this change from physical space to electronic space signals one of the ironies of our time: the more information we have, the less room we need to put it in.

the abiding desire for a library may simply suggest that people who love to read don't always want to read on their computer screens or to have their reading to be an 'interactive experience'. what they want is to linger over words on the printed page and they want to do this while they're apart from others.

in the past, people tucked away in their libraries, assumed there was a comfort to be found in the knowledge they could put their hands on. in front of our glowing computer screens, we no longer make that assumption.