Breaking & Entering

Draw your house, says the teacher to the child. This place is yours, render it. Then draw your room.

House also means apartment, basement, garret. Or maybe shelter, but then the drawing would have larger rooms, blue and grey, and one’s room is just a corner. The art assignment is really an interrogation.

Houses modify time and space. We can speak of an indoor time, a time of changing houses, a time between houses or a homeless time. There are all kinds of theories on how best to arrange indoor space and how the mind is eased by symmetry and juxtaposition. But you can never be certain that the house itself will comply. How many talk to their houses like they do to their plants or dogs?

Later in life, we count the houses where we have lived. This is probably nostalgia and not a genuine attempt to understand time and space. Either way, it will end in envy and sadness. House and home are really the sole property of children. Without sentimentality, without pity, they move in and out. Without reflection, they move from house to house in the present tense, which is eternity in miniature.

Architecture has very little understanding of the nature of houses. Parapsychologists have a little more, but when faced with the problem of the eviction of the dead, the most they can offer is a heavenly lease whose terms are best disputed by sensitive lawyers (themselves). Both professions have an unhealthy dependency on money. Neither of them can equitably separate us from our houses.

“I hated him, but I loved going to his house.” An impossible statement. The hated one has become his house and vice versa. (This is not the same as saying you hate someone but they have a beautiful house). Yet one can say, for a variety of reasons, that “I loved her, but I hated going to her house.” Only sometimes is a loved one their house. This is a law of occupancy of the mind.

Agoraphobics also fear the indoors, just less than the world outside. They are caught between the two and there is no home for them. Maybe it is purely a question of being unable to deal with angles that do not decisively conclude (in walls, windows, ceilings). The idea of distance is terrifying. One might get lost following any number of trajectories with the eye. Terrifying—and most terrifying of all is the open sky.

Is it possible to conceive of someone who has never left their house, not because of disability or paranoia, nor because of fanatically protective parents or a coming Apocalypse, but simply because they were incurious? I have everything here. And perhaps not even incurious, just sated by one or two or ten rooms.

Front doors: Impenetrable seals, barriers made against the immemorial right of sanctuary. Where were the first doors hung? On palaces and banks and private repositories. The door was then given to the masses. Even if the rest of your house has collapsed, the upright door must still stand. Then you still have property and the right of refusal. No entry!

When walking the streets at night, the windows of houses give us small scenes which we embellish in our heads. We catch people moving around doing strange tasks or imagine that closed blinds conceal still stranger duties. Hitchcock’s Rear Window is the best example of this game. The hero, played by James Stewart, is as immobile as a house. All the action is seen through windows, and the murder happens just out of view of the camera/window frame (afterward, the victim is transformed into a suitcase). The entire building looks like a great display case or a stack of television screens. Surveillance is a desperate thrill. There is nothing to do but watch and fantasize out of ennui. Even the crime is solved out of boredom—incredibly, Stewart has become bored of Grace Kelly. The windows facing the street are never seen; the back courtyard is the whole of the film’s universe. Stewart watches his neighbors, same as before his leg got broken, but he has never met any of them. Unsurprisingly, he works as a journalist.

The production of bricks dates from around the Bronze Age. So does recycling them. Where have all the bricks from the ancient ziggurat at Dur-Kurigalzu gone? Some no doubt ended up in the new works of conquerors, but perhaps a few support some lonely shack or make cobbles where a bum sleeps off his drunk. This is irony in architecture.

Plat maps in City Hall show invented values which rise and fall with a neighborhood’s fortunes. However unreal these entities may be, a true psychic estimation of city housing remains impossible. We like to think we can find traces of the past in order to know where we stand. Yet this is only to console ourselves with the illusion that the past hasn’t left us behind.

The idea of common house ownership was a Cold War strategy. In order to show the largesse of capitalism, New Deal programs like the GI Bill and the other federal housing acts had already made affordable housing available to the working class. You will not be shuttled from Stalinist block to Stalinist block. You will have a garden and a lawnmower and your own car (or two). After the Cold War was ‘won’, housing became the main target of the forces unleashed by this morbid victory. The sell-off of public housing allowed banks to seize vast urban tracts, cutting out the bribe-taking local middlemen and turning the city into a great fire sale. Next they came for the once-sacrosanct American Homeowner. By giving mortgages to all, the banks generated immense fields of debt and used foreclosure to acquire the homes of people set up to default. The tools are deregulation, distorted liquidity, capture of federal oversight, ‘market-based solutions’ (fraud). Again and again it happens. Unlike Dr Frankenstein, the banks have nothing to fear from irate pitchforks. In the casino, the House always wins. In the associated vice of real estate, the House is the bank and wins twice.

Mortgage: length of (property’s) death, Dead to debtor and creditor, a rented limbo which becomes prey to speculation. Value is the myth attached to the castle. 85% of all US bank lending is mortgages. Rescued from purgatory, the souls of houses enter paradise through the ivory gates of Interest Rates.

Houses of Rothschild, Morgan, Usher. The house was the blood, the very bodies of aristocrats in the ideal granite of the great name. It was once fashionable to move ancestral holdings from the seat of empire to the colonies. Did it matter how many of the ancient lineage were buried out back? Water of the earth, we are at home everywhere. These days the wealthy care little for their houses. The flow is coldblooded cash and its derivatives. The important seat is the fiber optic cable which carries money transfers or the tiny house of a post office box in a tax haven. New money is less given to gesture, but like the medieval barons, it is nervous about the loyalty of its private armies.

It is estimated that one person died for every million spent on building skyscrapers nationwide during the Roaring Twenties. I read that the construction of the Empire State claimed five lives. I know it was more. But these buildings cannot really be considered houses. A house has rooms but rooms don’t always make a house.

The cruise liner offers all of life’s necessities. But this seabound home is merely a room where someone else makes your bed. Sirens and mermaids do not sing as the ship crawls by. For those onboard, fatal melodies come from diabetes and malaise, which are intrinsically masculine. A cruise liner can never be a house, though houses can certainly sit on water.

Architectural conservation saves stunning relics and imposing structures from the base taste of cannibal private equity. Ornate houses are anthropomorphized into poor huddling things under threat, waiting for a guardian angel called landmark status while trashy neighbors plot revenge. Such an inhuman conservation sees only its own blessed reflection while it wars with the parasitic developer class, a war which cannot really concern us even as it makes the city landscape disposable. Soon the saved houses will stand under private guard, safe from the town houses and their infernal envy. As for the developers, they have moved on to other catastrophic freedoms.

The wretched of the earth can occupy old houses, even ones that were once grand. ‘Blight’ is a creation of city powers, just as migration is a creation of international powers. Refugees and ruins are manufactured. Your homeland is no longer visible. Strangers have entered your house looking for you. Time to find a new house.

Old newspapers, family photos, broken machines, letters. Exile is at a tension with habit. Wandering around the house is confined waiting, an energetic listlessness with a nervous way with walls. Once you get to the place, the daydream of living there is impossible to resist. Then dreams less sweet when you are asked to leave.

Relics of lives sit on the street after the sheriff or the EMTs have gone. Nothing is sadder than these curbside museums. Even the most grandiose furniture looks useless, scarred up and busted down. Some of it will be taken in, but the objects most precious to the uprooted or deceased are worthless. Reminders of worlds, gifts, secrets of one life joined to others via things. But then again, maybe they are not treasures. Just that someone forgot to throw them away. It is easy to read too much or too little into an empty house.

Unheimlich, Freud’s uncanny, un-hearth-like, unhouselike, unfamiliar, not a home. From this follows that mysterious statement: I’m not at home. An uncanny remark, all the more occult because it is so common.

When a house becomes vacant, it usually keeps its address. Street numbers will always continue, blind in succession like armies. After demolition, a new structure takes over this magic mathematical entity. Yet numbers can die, eaten up by larger buildings or expressways or the revision of streets and code. Under these new calculations, does anything survive of the old sum? Only when someone recalls a few foggy figures, numbers which used to add up to a friend.

Right after a friend has moved away, the familiar façade of the house seems both out of place and fixed forever. The interior has become utterly unknowable and foreign. Soon, even the qualities of the front of the house fade and it takes a little longer to remember how it felt to wait on the stoop. The door is a crude time machine, which fooled us for a moment that we still lived in their past and now transports us less accurately than it did after the first rattle of departure. When this opiate sensation vanishes, what familiarity remains then becomes unfamiliar or uncanny. It is like the old door, like the old house—even though it is the old house, it is now merely alike. This familiar-unfamiliar house may itself take the place of the old friend. Then beware—you are already part of the landscape.

A dark house on a lonely street. Signed, Condemned. Windows broken, jawed plywood, roof full of holes. A kettle on a stove, a cat picking through the rubble, a charred bedpost. Who lived there, we wonder? We might have passed them a hundred times when they were alive. Only now have they become interesting. Their ruined house has made them interesting—even fascinating.

Who needs ghosts? If they truly existed, all houses would groan under their phantasmic weight. And is this poor place doomed to be just a hotel for damaged spirits? More tenants, more fools who think ownership is permanent and property is not theft. O world, free me from these squatters—needy souls crying for safety and warmth, dying of no warmth, locking and unlocking, hoping and waiting... But no house can speak. Bound by telephone wires and strangled by cables, houses stand until they fall down or we bulldoze them to make way for more profitable relics-to-be.

Yet who doesn’t see some ruin while passing by on the train and think, I would like to save you. I want to live there. There is something about this place…

As we grow older, the rooms and hallways of all our homes mingle together in strange, distorted dreams. This house of sleep uses a memorial geometry which tends toward confusion and nightmare just before we wake. We dreamt we were back in rooms we can no longer enter, but somehow they are still there.

Most houses today are built to quickly collapse. Think of all those grotesque prefab black boxes eating up streets The Nazi hack Albert Speer was the first modern exponent of building ruins. These uninhabitable silhouettes were to express the duration of the National Socialist state, a mystical order so powerful it could transform the past into perfect contemporary decay. When the fake ruins of Berlin were turned into real ruins by the Red Army, reality came screaming back. As our prefab houses crumble, their living ruins will be torn down and replaced by others of even less staying power. Soon, all houses will fall apart overnight. The owners will be forced to wait for crews to come and rebuild them, hoisting panels up from the beds of great trucks in mere seconds. Tuckpointing is as dead as the dinosaurs.

There are few things more extraordinary than the sight of a single house still standing while the rest of the street has been leveled. This conjures up all kinds of fantastic stories in the mind, and also the strange desire to live alone in such an isolated building flanked by desolate city land. Maybe this is the only way one can truly be alone in the modern world.

Houses wear down with routine. Decades of feet on floors, holes in the walls, countless layers of paint, rats gnawing the lath. Termitic and patient, slow decay swarms—a constant siege by the elements, myriad predators, natural obsolescence. Roofs leak, patched, replaced. People die and their substitutes quietly move in. Every house is always in crisis. Every home is under fire from primitive weapons whose power may stall but whose ability to marshal time will make them invincible in the end. Finally, people just give up and live in the shambles. Or they are forced to leave dwellings designated ‘uninhabitable’ by law. Inhabitants furiously try to outrun their own entropy as well as the deterioration of wood and stone. The house outlasts you and every other guest. All the rest is salvage.

We have delt with pure houses here, apartmentized or not. The SRO and the Projects stand in the same relation to the house as the car stands to the bus.

Aside from children, it is the elderly who truly live in a house. They remain until the end, while children are the first to leave. Inside the house, they are the only ones who are able to recognize each other as they pass. The rest of us are lost indoors. Paying rent, we think we own and if we own, we think we must belong.

There is only one person left. Perhaps they lived their whole life in the place, staying around as if staying were just another accident. Though the house is strong and upright, it is lived in less and less—at least in the old way, in the old dispensation. Its transformations continue. Something has occurred which may even be a collective decision, or some secret deal made with time. Dylan Thomas said it best:

For the drooping of homes
That did not nurse our bones,
Brave deaths of only ones but never found,
Now see, alone in us,
Our own true strangers' dust
Ride through the doors of our unentered house.

Two verses earlier, he had already identified the source of the echo in houses:

Now in the dark there is only yourself and myself.

Sometimes the house shows a little mercy toward those who have treated it as if were only a home.