Viime ajat on pitänyt kiirettä Saanan ja Ollin puolella! Nykyinen vuokrakoti siirtyy uudelle asukkaalle kuun vaihteessa ja vielä ei Toukolaaksossa ole yhtään huonetta valmiina. Työ- ja remppakiireiden keskellä tarttui Helsinginreissulla mukaan pieni kirja, joka osuu niin isosti ajankohtaan että pakko esitellä.
Edward Hollis (s.1971) on brittiläinen arkkitehti ja kirjailija, joka on kirjoittanut
The School Of Life -kirjasarjaan opuksen joka tiivistää asumisen historiaa ja filosofiaa aikojen alusta nykypäivään mukavan kompaktiin muotoon. Hollis kirjoittaa viihdyttävästi ja kriittisesti ja kirjaa voikin suositella jokaiselle oman elämänsä kodinrakentajalle.
Seuraavassa muutama puhutteleva sitaatti ja tunnelmia meidän puoleltamme viikkoa ennen muuttoa.
"A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs of illusions of stability."
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Gaston Blanchard (The Poetics of Space, 1958, suom.
Tilan Poetiikka Nemo kustannus, 2003)
"Most of us make ourselves at home in places which were never really designed for us in the first place. But, somehow, making do, keeping what we must, chanting what we can, we manage. We change what we find, and in doing so, make it our own."
"Homes aren't just machines, and what they contain - the lives we lead in them - can't be manufactured as if they were. In fact things often work best when they are not being used for the purposes for which they were designed."
"Unlike the furniture which we equip our homes, or the buildings with which we shelter them, the objects with which we clutter them - the things of 'sentimental value' we value accumulate over a lifetime - solidify our memory and our knowledge of the world. Without these things to anchor them, our apprehensions slip away."
"We have lived for so long with the association between privacy and privilege they we have grown to assume that being separated from other people is a universal, desirable and necessary good; but just as often, studies have shown that people would rather put up with the inconvenience of being together, rather than luxuriate in being alone."
"No one has ever been able to agree on the definition of good taste, and they never will. Beauty is as ephemeral and elusive as the means we use to make it. It doesn't actually matter. Ultimately, the reason for decorating your home isn't to create an eternal work of art, to glorify the monarch, or to go one better than the neighbours. It's simpler than that: the purpose of decorating your house is to create scenery for the life, real or not, you'd like to live in it."
"Home is not something that will ever be complete. Home is a set of strategies we use to make ourselves at home in a world that, as we have seen, stubbornly resists the urge to stand still for long enough for us to perfect it."
"All along, we have worked worked with assumption that home resides in spaces, objects, and surfaces. We have assumed that, somehow, home can be found in a place, or that, in making places and things, we can make a home.
And all along we have found that those places or things that can guarantee privacy, repose, beauty, balance, function and origin are, like the end of the rainbow, just out of reach.
Perhaps, that's because home isn't a place, after all. Perhaps, instead, it's time."
Aamen.
