Hi everyone...Maybe we could use this page for sharing thoughts and bibliograhy? ~ Sarah
Hey house people. This is your profesor speaking. Just wanted to contribute a few bibliographic items with the hope of helping you guys with finding specific case studies. Since this paper is a short one, it will be very advisable to choose something, a case study very specific to write about.
- Blier, Suzanne Preston; 1995. The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression. University of Chicago Press. At the Rock - This is a fabulous ethnographic study of the "traditional" mudbrick Batammaliba (Mali) houses- which seem to connect in very interesting ways to the metaphor of human body.
- Joyce, Rosemary; 2000. "Heirlooms and Houses: Materiality and Social Memory." in Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies. R. A. Joyce and S. D. Gillespie (eds.) University of Pennsylvania Press: 189-212.
- Bailey, Douglass; 1990. "
Living house: signifying continuity" in The social archaeology of houses. Ross Samson (ed). Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 19-48.
Omur
Any Umberto Eco fans in the group? The Poetics of Space reading is making me think of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna - a recent book of his. The main character loses his memories and reconstructs them by exploring his childhood house...the exploration of the interior self through exploration of a house was an important motif in the book. Omur, could we use a novel as a case study? In any case, like most Eco, it's pretty dense (I think most of it probably went over my head...), but it's beautifully written and certainly physical and mental space, nostalgia, forgetting, childhood, home and memory are major themes. ~ Sarah
I think it would definitely be interesting to compare that Eco novel and the Bachelard. I'm not too familiar with Eco but it sounds really cool. I was also interested in looking at some examples of literature but wasn't sure if that could count as a 'case study'? The Bachelard in particular made me think of certain sections of Combray from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as well as Georges Perec's book called Species of Spaces, both of which focus on the home as embodying memory spaces and becoming representative of interiority and human consciousness. --Cassie
Posted at Apr 13/2009 02:55PM:
madeleine: Hi guys, I decided to head in a slightly different direction than I was originally thinking. Now, I'm planning on focusing in on prefab houses in the post World War II period (with my specific case study being Lustron-brand houses). I'm compelled by the idea that the materiality of a home can be reduced to a collection of reproducible parts. Surprisingly, satisfaction with these prefab houses seemed to be very high. Anyway, I want to explore the ramifications of a standardizable housing unit and how memory functions in such a space.
I also just wanted to update you with some books I found going through the library in case you're interested. I've checked them out but let me know if you want to borrow them at some point.
1. At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space edited by Cieraad
2. The American Home: Material Culture, Domestic Space, and Family Life edited by Thompson
3. Peeking Through the Keyhole: the Evolution of North American Homes by Friedman
4. The Prefabrication of Houses by Kelly
Additionally, I've found a lot of articles on JSTOR about prefab homes and Lustron houses although not so much on memory/house in general.
Back to: Assignment 2. Memory groups
