Place of the house in the context of the city

Annotation. Some aspects of the relationship between the house and the city, defined as typological objects of architectural design and as categories of human habitation, are considered. The context of the city, therefore, acts as a generalizing concept that measures two spaces - physical earthly and experienced by man. The physical space represents buildings and infrastructure elements constructed by man that objectively modify the natural landscape; the experienced space is a phenomenon of a more multidimensional order - subjective and collective at the same time. The house (home), the city (town) and the landscape - together they absorb the whole experience of a practice whose logic of origin can be perceived through the optics of experience not only as reasonable, but also as paradoxical. Accordingly, the aim of the study is to reflect on the extent to which the individual manages to locate in the city not just the appropriate building, but precisely the house(s) - as 'inhabited space'(home). Fixing the patterns of "urban habitability" will allow us to move on to a discussion of design method and experimental typologies in the future.


Introduction
Let us separate the use of terms in the English version of town and house: "town" and "home" will be referred to the designation of the subject of architectural activity, its main and metaphysical content, and "city" and "house" -to the characterization of the main objects of activity.Further in the text of the publication these terms will be used depending on what in this proposal (thesis) is considered primary: subject or object, meaning or physical material of design.
The problem field of our research can be tentatively formulated in the form of the following main polemical subjects-questions: 1.What does the phenomenon of losing and finding a home mean?For Martin Heidegger, the theme of home is associated directly with the socio-economic processes taking place in the world, the consequences of which are the loss of the ancestral home and the emergence of the phenomenon of 'rootlessness and homelessness'.The philosopher equates the loss of home with the alienation of man, who finds himself in the "world of technology and things" [1] 2.How can house (home) and city (town) help each other?3.How do we reconcile our desire for a habitable environment with contemporary strategies of urban commercial construction, uneven settlement, concentration of capital investment, simplification of typologies and neglect of cultural capital?4.How should the architectural profession respond to the apparent divergence between modernist utopias of life-building and reality

The place of home as a metaphysical problem
At the first stage of the research, we determine that the task of searching for the "place of home" is a metaphysical discourse rather than a search for a place on the map, because the concepts of home and city have a philosophical, general cultural background.At the metaphysical level, the home and the city are defined as two fateful substances capable of transferring metaphorical contexts to each other.That is, the architectural work on the house project conceptualizes, translates, and interprets certain properties of the city, understood as an archetype of adventure, competition, and survival.In turn, the inherent image of the archetype of the house-home as an image of one's native place, unconditional protection, and coziness is able to exist as an abiding intention in the creation of cities.For architectural theory and practice, both concepts must be understood in inseparable connection as a humanistic code of habitation.

The problem of the loss of home
However, as the process of urbanization and mass resettlement of people from rural areas to cities takes place all over the world, the preservation of house, defined in cultural studies as "ancestral home", is being lost (fig.1).Together with the loss of ancestral home and place, there is an effect of destruction of human cultural identity, the source of which has always been the ancestral home itself, preserved traditions, memory of generations of family, neighborhood, natural uniqueness of the place and craftsmanship skills.Philosophers define this phenomenon as the effect of man's loss of "self".Spengler in his famous book defines this sad story as the "sunset" of European civilization [2].The pioneers of the modernist concept of life-building took the emerging processes of urbanization for granted, but criticized the chaos and unsanitary conditions of the early capitalist city districts and, at the same time, the historically established urban centers; as compensatory measures for technological development, modernists proposed socialist principles of "equitable" resettlement of "new urban workers" in newly built areas with "correct" planning of territory and services (Howard, Garnier, Corbusier, Niemeyer) (fig.2,a).As industrialization developed in the USSR, the practice of building "right cities", derived from the concepts of the "pioneers of the Modern Movement", was increasingly applied, but with adjustments that reduced the architectural quality due to mass typification.As a result, all over the world, large cities created neighborhoods for people who had left their villages, left their ancestral homes, cultural codes and craft skills behind, and received in return jobs in offices and assembly lines, residential units in high-rise buildings, a functionally delimited city, transportation and other services.

People without an ancestral home
A person living in an urban cell (apartment) ceases to feel connected to his native territory, the boundaries of his personal space are erased and his way of life changes dramatically.The more people begin to occupy similar residential cells in his multi-storey house, complex, microdistrict -the less tangible ties with neighbors and place he gets (fig.2,b) .The experience of loneliness and solitude in the big city is perfectly described by many authors, and this dramatic plot is not easy to overcome even for people who are not engaged in flow production, but who try to find their voice in scientific work and artistic experiments -as the British writer Olivia Lang confirms in her book "The Lonely City".[3] The exception is the settled urban dwellers who have lived in the same place for several generations: we know that a number of cities have preserved historic neighborhoods whose buildings and inhabitants have the characteristics of "ancestral homes" and hereditary citizens.However, the percentage of such localities in relation to the total area of megacities is very small.In small towns, this situation may look more preferable.

Mass culture, hidden violence and simulacra
The growth of cities and the increase in the number of immigrants are the factors responsible for the loss of subjectivity and the rebirth of original culture into mass culture.Its various variants produce an average cultural product that is part of the line of mass consumption.In turn, the habituation to average standards coincides with the process of development of brands that support the emerging hierarchical model of consumption in the range from mass to elitist, sometimes with a significant distance from each other in terms of the number of customers and quality.Architectural practice adapts these versions of professional engagement in the form of work for mass housing or as star projects for the elite.The cheaper the projects -the more fictitious the merits of residential cells and complexes; the more expensive -the more actively the star brands of the best architectural firms are applied.Mass culture exerts hidden pressure on people, realizing the idea of fashion, digital reality, and other products that are not related to people's personal initiative (Fig. 3).The search for home as a philosophical and professional theme The loss of the ancestral home, which entailed the surge and strengthening of mass culture and the loss of subjectivity by the city dwellers, has marked before the cultural and professional community the problem of the reflexive citizen, his ability to build his destiny, to build a home and to settle in a place ( a house and a city).To a large extent, the concept of subjectivity can be associated with the idea of happiness.Philosophers associate the concept of "finding home" as "the equivalent of the search for being in philosophy", largely with the aim of finding "one's roots", the meaning of life and overcoming the attitude to reality as meaninglessness.Two objects (house and city), two entities, form the phenomenon of a life-affirming scenario: the more interesting the city, the more reliable the presence of house becomes; and the more fulfilling the life inside house, the more relational and secure the city becomes.Actualizing the above-mentioned meanings, we begin to equate architecture with destiny, and the home-town with its material and artistically constructed biography.
The primitivization of the house and the city aggravates the author's directing of personal destiny, but in the case of high-quality architectural scenography we are entitled to enjoy its phenomenon: the synthesis of scenography and destiny -in different versions -as something very simple and poor, or unusually rich and plentiful.
The city provides an opportunity for human beings to make choices and find the means for existence (survival) and habitation.Habitation, compared to existence, is a more holistic state that connects practical commitments and intentions with the subject's deepest experiences.The practical basis of urban existence (existence and habitation in the world) is a set of social and physical circumstances, including buildings, infrastructure facilities, territory and labor market.Behind this bullet-point list lies the rich nature of the human experience of happening, associated with two basic states: 1) wandering through the city, searching for home and 2) finding home.
In the cultural paradigm of dwelling and in its poetic dramaturgy, wandering is an essence inherent in finding.The home acquired in the process of wandering becomes the meaning-forming formula of the life plot, respectively -the very notion of wandering goes far beyond the boundaries of our usual notions of movement within urban space.Wandering appears as a combination of physical movement and destiny.For Odysseus, the space of wandering -the "city of destiny" -is the Oikumene, while outside his royal palace, the entire island of Ithaca is the space of home.
Studies of philosophers, psychologists, experts in the field of urban culture and architecture are devoted to the relationship of the subject traveling through the city (in the space of wandering and destiny).S.N.Rymarovich [4], who studies the concept of "finding home", refers to Heidegger's ideas, equating dwelling in a house, understood as a generic place, with the main theme of philosophy -the problem of human existence.Wandering in a broad sense is precisely a man's search for his home and, in fact, for himself.
The architect as a "traveling actor ": method, sensibility and typologies Traveling and walking around the city to some extent creates the effect of the actor 's meditative immersion in a physical illustration of the philosophical discourse of being.Special research tasks can accompany this fascinating action.The procedure of tactile encounter with the city includes not only philosophical associations, but also architectural analysis and artistic optics -together filling the initial information about the "urban context" as a space of wandering and survival with voluminous impressions.
In philosophical, cultural and psychological dimensions (Buber, Spengler, Freud, Jung, Husserl, Heidegger), the subject traveling through the city (the world) is a participant in the civilization drama of "alienation and search for home" (alienation of home is, according to Heidegger, "loss of self"), and for this study, the figure of the actor -architect, who tries on all possible roles, stands out: from the author of formed impressions and concepts to the imaginary inhabitant of the city, immersed in the drama and procedures of "wandering in search of home".
Understanding the philosophical basis of this subject is as important for the architect as the experience of developing architectural models.
In our study, the city is a spatio-temporal continuum and a super-object, at the same time a collectively produced scenography of dramatic episodes occurring in the process of traveling.
The "traveling subject" defined in the study -in accordance with our agenda -is an architect whose immersion in the urban context is accompanied by a rethinking of typological standards and ways of being present in what is happening, including the pleasure of traveling as such.Alain de Botton, in his book The Art of Travel, describes the experience of moving in space outside his own home, where he was quite used to being in a state of melancholic calm.[5] The method of working with the typologies of the house as a generalized type of all urban structures, just like the subject's search for an ancestral home, needs immersion in the happening.It is known that the sensitivity of the architect is the sphere of human empathy, but this quality manifests itself not only in relationships, including imaginary ones, but also in many ways -in the method of working with models, in the degree of tactile sensitivity, in the variety of elements of the context that can be detected.

The emergence of a humanitarian agenda for the profession
By combining the practical sensitivity of the design method with an understanding of the human odyssey, an interesting critical revision of the typical and typological patterns of the house emerges for us all.But when empathy and sensitivity are lost, when skill and empathy are disconnected, the architect unwittingly or consciously isolates himself from the actual humanitarian agenda of his presence in what is happening.
And here a dilemma arises: if the architect does not interact with the actual context, the city and the house begin to do without his participation.The living environment of uncontrolled development of localities provides numerous examples of self-building, characterized by interesting and diverse architectural solutions: sometimes curious and sometimes exquisite.A profession that ignores the real life of localities: urban non-central areas, small towns, periphery, suburbs and villages, begins to choose ways around the current agenda: exclusively in favor of development, or in the direction of "star projects" within the image strategy of the authorities.
The criterion for the achieved quality of home and city is a habitable environment -that is, a place where every day that passes evokes warm feelings and does not disappear without a trace, and where each person has both a home and a city at the same time.The task of architectural research and design concepts is to explore both concepts at the same time: to see the house as a city and the city as a house (Fig. 4).

Two types of "city dweller"?
The sitizen interests us as a "dwelling actor ", that is, as an author of his own cosmos.The author's cosmos implies a search for a certain balance between two types of the sitizens: a person who mainly lives in a house on his own territory, and a person who prefers the city and its offerings.
The key characters of architectural research and typological concepts are the figure of the craftsman ("man engaged" -homo engaged), who lives in the house and is occupied with WHAT he can create ("the first type of citizen"), and the wanderer ("man wandering"homo nomadic), who is in constant search of life meanings, earnings and adventures ("the second type of citizen").
The question of whether we can talk about one and the same actor experiencing two different states is answered in the studies of sociologists: the "wandering man", "hired" by the system (the city) to develop an alienated product, continues to dream of finding his home, while the "master" has to leave his home from time to time in order to interact with the system (the city).
The prevailing choices and motivations continue to predetermine the subject's biographical scenarios, but they can be combined and grow within a single personality.The story of the "Soviet city dweller" who got used to "living in two houses": a city apartment and a dacha ("six hectares") remains well-known; neither became a home as such, but only provided an opportunity to experience two differentiated states: relative comfort in the apartment and a portion of habitation in an improvised self-built dacha.

Game scenarios of post-industrial environment -the way to "natural form" as a new architectural genre
Returning to an authentic ancestral home seems to be impossible for modern man, but existence inside urban cell apartments is a rather problematic choice, not without the flavor of hopelessness.
Strengthening of the role beginning in the biographical directing of fate is associated with the strengthening of performative behavior and the formation of new "urban traditions", which means a change of behavioral strategies prompted by the cultural intentions of the post-industrial environment: from too pathos and serious to playful.The idea of dwelling in many ways means the awakening of a playful impulse in the subject, an ironic (but not cynical) attitude to the models of reality being constructed.
The architectural process is not an exception to the proposed paradigm of the playful beginning and conceptualization of "not pathos", "not ideal" architectural method and language.Self-irony within the professional method means humility before the fact of the impasse of the high syllable, the rigid sign, the vivid statement -all that Robert Venturi protested against.
Examples of this approach can be found in urban areas under reconstruction, where something "great" remains in the past and the new is ready to grow among the ruins.Vyacheslav Vershinin's house in the historical Samara quarter is an example of humility and, at the same time, of the everyday painstaking interaction between the house and the man-master, the guru of meditation and irony; and everything that happens there is a performative picture: once upon a time, a hundred and more years ago, the house and the courtyard were the urban estate of a merchant with a specific family name and family history, and now it is the space where Vershinin's life world (cosmos) is formed.[6] (Fig. 5), (Fig. 6) a b Fig. 5 a-b: Vyacheslav Vershinin's courtyard in neighbourhood No. 13 in Samara is a space of performative behaviour: here every moment of life of residents and guests turns into a meditative ritual, performance and transformation of the insignificant into the eventful.
Fig. 6.Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, USA, 1964.In the house designed for his mother, Robert Venturi envisioned a new unambitious type of playful behaviour and architectural form.The language of his proposed "postmodern method" denies the frontal demonstration of form as an expressive sign, and suggests that the "strange" and "inarticulate" should be considered more vital than the "beautiful" and " understandable".

City-home: the concept of a wanderer's dwelling
If in the binary formula the city is written first and the house second, it means that we actualize the second type of urban dwelling -the life of a "wandering city dweller" (nomads).
As in the case of the master, the search for the formula and form of the house, adequate to the model of wandering behavior, should, in the end, lead us to a rethinking of the typical lodgings, shelters, places for overnight stay or hired work -in the accepted terminology -"apartments," "cottages," "hotel rooms," "offices," "clubs," and "workshops" accepted in big cities.
Nomads, "wandering city dwellers," are fundamentally subjects of the system, embedded in business, politics, or the conveyor belt.Place plays a secondary role for them, while the established social institutions play a primary role.Game behavior -due to the rules of competition -involves a significant amount of risk and simulation.But play should still be fostered -otherwise a sense of social loss and unhappiness is added to the uncertainty of choice over time.From this point of view, it makes sense for architects and developers to think about the idea of integrating personal cells (temporary nests) into the structure of established typologies of public infrastructure of the city.
The practice of nomads dwelling in various "houses" (shelters) around the world is a well-established prototype of the meaningful construction of the city-house.In architectural experiments, the plot is not limited to apartments and studios, inhabited garages and sleeping compartments in airports, but there are already examples of arbitrary artistic statements on the theme of nests, such as the parasite house on the roof of an exhibition center."Homelessness" is therefore a concept that does not necessarily mean the absence of the possibility to "arrange" one's life (overnight accommodation) somewhere, but to an essential degree it is evidence of the human choice to "do without a home".
Beyond the philosophical stance, artistically meaningful play and performance, so necessary for the post-industrial city, a negative scenario is emerging for migrants to megacities around the world -in the form of "man-towns", minimized to light-deprived places to sleep, arranged in between each successive "journey to the city" (the Chinese experience).
The trek "for survival" and "play," -as yet, remain opposing urban scenarios.Play, if it occurs, indicates the emergence (continuation) of urban behavior as ritual.The behavior of habitual visitors to Parisian or Amsterdam cafes in historic urban neighborhoods cannot be called anything else but a game.
In the development of the game scenario, the concept of "Many Integrated Nests" can be proposed, considered as a typological and game experiment, offering architects a new inspiring vector of professional self-realization.
According to this concept, the city-home is formed as a strategy of typological transformation in the sphere of multifunctional urban objects with the integration of inhabited nests directly into the epicenters of activity.The performativity of this act will give new impetus to the design concepts of public urban objects.As a result, the residential apartment typology occupying vast urban areas will gradually come to naught.Nomads have the whole world at their disposal: the whole world becomes a "city of wanderers", a "city of nests" (Fig. 7).

Signs of "nest architecture"
Nomads, itinerant city dwellers and travelers who have not decided to trade temporary landing stations (apartments and nests) for attachment to a specific place (house and workshop) will continue to use established typological proposals.Apartments are sometimes also referred to as home or nest, but they have nevertheless been neither for over a hundred years.They do not become a house because they have lost their three-dimensionality, their place, their facades, their courtyards, their trees, their self-sufficiency, and they are not so easily called nests, for such typology has escaped generalization and stylistic articulation as a cell for a brief interlude of wanderlust.
In order to formalize an authentic image of apartments and nests, architects will have to accentuate and elaborate the scenario of the apartment as a family space (for raising a child in a nomadic family), and the specificity of the architectural scenario of nests -as cells for solitary wanderers in the city (in oikumens).
All the well-known features of the modern architectural language, as opposed to the natural form of the house, can be quite applicable in this work -so that the two types of the city (natural and modernist) can complement each other and create the effect of multivalence and polyvalence of urban space.

Postproject, or "alternative habitat scenarios" (ACS)
A playful method called "postproject", is part of the general strategy of performative design.Its design is based on a playful rearrangement of cause and effect: first, an object built by "someone" is discovered, and then its design origin and possible client are reinterpreted.The procedure and products of post-projection have the magical property of inspiring innovative and event-driven scenarios of inhabitation.
In contrast to the generalized models of two types of urban behavior -master and nomad -in the postproject the anonymous form of the found object is given an intriguing scenario, possibly with a quite mysterious inhabitant (a character of a fictional story), oriented on playing out a unique variant of his or her destiny: hence the established name of such eventful stories -"alternative habitat scenarios" (ACS).
The unfamiliarity of these scenarios is justified by society's need to manifest the subject's creative capabilities, as well as the architect-author's own intentions to develop his imagination and overcome the "ACS territories" closed to the profession.

Conclusion
The place of home in the context of the city, as evidenced by the opinions of researchers, is a problem of metaphysical and socio-cultural properties, confirming the fact of the urban transformation of the way of life of a significant part of the population.
The resettlement of people to cities as a result of the technocratic boom and new market relations has led to the rupture of new city dwellers with the places of traditional habitat "Life-world" according to Husserl [7] and the actual loss of the ancestral home.У. Razova draws attention to the term "ethos" proposed by Heidegger to designate "lost home and place" as the essential principle of being [8] Accordingly, in place of traditional valueshandicraft labor, the transmission of experience and rituals from generation to generation, memory, close neighborhood ties, closeness to nature, preservation of tactile contact with the environment and pleasure from each lived moment -the author's space in generalcame and took the place of the model of existence in a situation of alienation from home, native place and one's own product of labor.
This model formed a way of life of the "new citizen", not connected with the historical urban environment, but built in accordance with the algorithms of functionalism, nurtured on the basis of early modernist utopias of the "bright future".Accordingly, the role of architectural activity was largely reduced to servicing the typologies of the functionalist strategy of the house and the city.The house in this model was replaced by the residential cell -as a typical element of temporary "comfortable stay" within the extended urban routes between different points of the "algorithm".
The study translates the metaphysical subject of the search for a house -as a psychological and socio-cultural problem -into the subject plane of architectural method.The addressees of typological searches and experiments are two types of townspeople and, accordingly, two types of house and city.
The first type is the inhabitants of localities -craftsmen living in houses, inhabiting a specific place and creating their unique product, earning on the territory, for the territory, for the city-polis, focused on the values of place, house and workshop.In the binary formula "Home-City", the word "city" is written second through a hyphen, which can signify the procedure and values of the type of environment denoted by this word."Craftsman City" is a dense environment, built on the principle of historic urban neighborhoods, saturated with a variety of craft workshops, studios, classrooms, laboratories, street retail -everything that results in intriguing pedestrian routes, new locales, not alien to architectural participation provided -not pathos, close to the anonymous genre of "natural form".The ancestral home cannot be returned inside the new city, but the new "city of masters" ("natural city") may have a chance of finding a "real home".
The "natural city", in turn, turns into a home, thanks to the total legalization of personal "living rooms" (studios and workshops) and the emergence of hospitable communities capable of overcoming the alienating spirit of competition; while the home begins to acquire the properties of the city through the integration of "event spaces" and the unobtrusive presence in the "living rooms" (workshops) of employees, spectators and clients.
The second type of city dwellers is people-strangers (nomads); mass culture, routes, distant goals, "big games", speed and alienated product are the value prerogative of this type.
Apartments, summer houses, cottages, cabins, chambers, hotel rooms, tents, train compartments, trailers, hostels -all this can be defined as a typology of "nests", temporary shelters that provide nomads with affordable short-term rest, preferably as diverse as possible.
The wandering type of city dwellers corresponds to the whole world as an accessible or potential space of habitation: everything in this world is alienated from the subject, but everything is infinitely diverse.And it is this type that absolutely needs architectural genres that are habitually based on the discourse of typological experiment [9], authorial expression, self-expression, "clear message" and artistic impromptu -all those approaches that are traditionally so nurtured by modernist philosophy of method.And in this case, the binary formula is written through a hyphen as "City-Home", which may mean the secondary character of the house in the value hierarchy of "wanderers".
With all the differences between the identified types of the "new townsman", a person imbued with the ideas of the house-city acquires the ability to empathize with himself simultaneously as a master, the inhabitant of the house, and as a wanderer, the inhabitant of the city.The search for and acquisition of the house is categorized in unity with the search for and acquisition of the city.Workshops embedded in the living space maximize the differentiation of standard typologies while preserving the tactile priorities of the man-made environment.And at the same time, new distant goals, the energy of wandering and distance expand the boundaries of dwelling from the "natural city-polis" to the "city of the world" with its endless set of virtually alienated, but in its own way intriguing phenomena.

Fig. 2 .
Fig.2.The intention of the pioneers of Modern Architecture to make the city more rational and convenient for living, turned out to be the disappearance of habitation, the construction of typical residential cells and the loneliness of citizens: a. Le Corbusier's "Ideal City", open source illustration; b.A man on the balcony of the ninth floor of a residential model building in Samara.Photo by the authors.

Fig. 4 .
Fig. 4. a-b: "Architecture without an architect": harmony of random elements of self-building.Experience of Samara people's construction.Photo by the authors.

Fig. 7 .Fig. 8 .Fig. 9 .
Fig. 7. Wandering city dwellers (nomads), as cities grow, will be able to afford a continuous change of shelters -"nests" designed as separate modules, autonomous clusters or "parasitic houses": a. model of the object "Living Room and Nests", Malakhov-Repina workshop; b-Hossman House in Paris, ru.Pinterest.com;c -Parasite house on the roof of Las Palmas exhibition centre in Rotterdam,