How well does the Architect know the house; I might well ask:

For whom do you design the house? Is it for your client or is it as much for yourself?

How well do you know them? And, how well do they want to be known by you?

So many questions, not so often asked, and at the root of my questioning lies the biggest question of them all – What is Home?

Is the home a machine for living in, is it actually a place at all, or is it within us, part of the fabric of who we are? Where are we if not at home in ourselves?

In Welsh there is a word for homesickness, it is “Hiraeth” pronounced “hear.eye.th”, it means more than just homesickness, it means a loss of connection, a deep yearning, a heartfelt loss. The Welsh language is very old, harkening back to a time when spirituality was not so religious, when there were more natural connections. Hiraeth has a similar sound to heart and hearth, they could so easily be placed together into the rhythm of a poem - they belong to the poetics of our space.

So back to my title question: If life is a house - What do we architects need to know?

Should we be versed in the Psyche-ology of what makes the house a home - can there be such a psychology? Just questioning this is perhaps enough. We cannot become versed in the individual needs of those who are to live in the houses we design, we cannot know them all that well, but we can appreciate that we are creating not just houses, but vessels within which the stories of our lives will unfold.

As architects we prioritise our time – time is money and our clients know the cost. Designing a machine to live in, we only need to take the brief for the functions the house needs to perform, the desire to make it beautiful is then a question of style – we do not need to know our clients all that well. Medical doctors have a similar approach, they take just a few minutes to talk, look and listen and in that time they diagnose, prescribe, and make the referral. If we want a more perceptive view we have to go elsewhere, to find an alternative – a complementary medicine.

Perhaps homesouls is a complementary medicine for the life of a house, or simply an inspiration to pause for a little longer at the beginning, to look and to listen more deeply, remembering that the house harbours belonging, it becomes a home.