A Deeper Sense of Home
M. Palacio, 1890.
Tuukka Toivonen March 11, 2025
‘The predicament of private life today is shown by its arena. Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. […] The functional modern habitations designed from a tabula rasa, are living-cases of manufactured by experts for philistines, or factory sites that have stayed into the consumption sphere, devoid of all relation to the occupant.’
- Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia (1951/1994¹)
What does home mean to you? Is it a place you like to return to at the end of a long day? Is it a container of calm solitude? The warm presence and familiar smiles of significant others or the enthusiastic welcome of a furry pet? Passing through the front door, do you see yourself exiting a stressful, chaotic world and entering a domestic realm where the rumblings and unpredictable movements of that world outside give way to security and comfort? My guess is that this sense of relative peace and interiority is integral at least to your idea of the home, if not its entire reality.
If we take a moment to reflect, most of us can probably call to mind the feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place or dwelling. We can also easily imagine its opposite, being ill at home and feeling uncomfortable, unsettled or like one does not really belong to a place. Until a short while ago, I had never thought very seriously about the meaning of home beyond these basic distinctions. Then a brief post on trail hiking prompted me to think again about the nature of being-at-home-ness.
The post recounted how a good number of the hikers appear to find a sense of home on the trail. These explorers seem to feel most ‘at home’ not when sheltered inside a fixed structure or a familiar daily setting, but when in movement – under the open sky, traversing and surviving challenging terrains in unpredictable conditions – often taking considerable risks along the way.
This subtle, perhaps simple insight got me wondering whether our assumptions of fixedness and insularity associated with the home, which now seem normal and even ideal to many of us, were but distortions that kept us from seeing a more complex reality. If it really is possible for some of us to experience a sense of home out in the open, in constantly changing conditions, does that not suggest that physical seclusion and stability are in fact not essential for feeling at home in a place and in our present lives? Does it not imply, further, that we might not be quite as fulfilled and nurtured in our contemporary physical and social home environments as we tend to assume? Perhaps the truth is that many of us have yet to fully explore what could truly make us feel at home in the world.
If we look at architectural history and anthropology of the home, we can help set these ponderings in a wider context. In the classic work Experiencing Architecture, Steen Eiler Rasmussen notes that before the onset of modernity, the very crafting of homes and essential implements was a communal, rather than private or commercial, enterprise that entire villages took part in. The individuals who would come to occupy a building were directly involved in its formation, and the consequence was that ‘houses were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use and the result was a remarkably suitable comeliness’ (Rasmussen 1959/1992, preface). By the middle of the 20th century, much of this had changed and not for the better, according to Rasmussen: ‘in our highly civilized society, the houses which ordinary people are doomed to live in and gaze upon are on the whole without quality’. What had been lost was not merely the aesthetic harmony of housing or the communal, situated dimension of the home-building process, but also a broader sense of attunement with local ecosystems, landscapes and even seasons. The anthropologist Tim Ingold has written extensively on dwelling, environmental perception and settings that should be viewed as fully alive rather than inert. He observes that industrialized modes of production have disrupted the sense of reciprocity that people feel towards the land they inhabit while also stymieing the local material and relational flows that constitute a living place.
“Despite the dramatic erosion of all that used to root our physical dwellings in something greater than their most visible features, what should we do to find a deeper sense of home in contemporary conditions?”
This understanding can help us appreciate why the alienation and isolation of our present-day homes is at once more profound and tragic than we might initially envisage. It is as if the living roots and rich entanglements that used to make up a home have been surgically removed, leaving behind a mere empty shell, an anonymously designed structure without personality serving as a socially unmoored container. We may have become more mobile and free from the constraints of place-based communities as a result, but at what cost?
Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, Richard Hamilton. 1956.
As disturbing as this may seem, it can also bring us some relief. If our abodes have themselves become radically untethered from the life-giving relations and processes that used to ground them in place, it should not then come as a surprise that we struggle to feel fully alive in them. How could we feel a deep sense of homeliness and rootedness in buildings or places that have become so abjectly rootless, lifeless, and deprived of the flows that used to both constitute them and nurture the inhabitants’ souls?
Before you pack up your rucksack and set out on a long hike or pilgrimage, consider instead searching for a nearby place that retains some degree of rootedness, history and entanglement. For Jenny Odell, the artist and author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, such qualities could be found in Oakland’s Rose Garden, built into a quiet hillside. Having made the decision to ground herself in this tangible place, Odell quickly came to value the way in which the garden offered her an enriching, contemplative space. Far from furnishing an experience of total isolation, the garden opened her up to notice the diverse forms of life frolicking around her, starting with birdsong. As her moments of ‘doing nothing’ continued, the sound of ravens, robins, song sparrows, chickadees, goldfinches, tomawhees, hawks, nuthatches and others became so familiar to her that she no longer had to strain to recognize them. These unexpected friendships and the coziness she felt within the garden’s labyrinthine layout gave Odell a real sense of home not in a building or even a group of humans but in a fluid bubble that while removed, was a fruitful setting for connection, affective experience and fulfilment. It does not matter whether or not Odell viewed the Rose Garden as an actual home but that she found something that powerfully grounded her life, her thinking and her artistry, through stillness as well as movement, and through her newfound other-than-human acquaintances.
Architects and designers, too, are starting to pay attention to how a stronger sense of home, or at least homeliness, might be supported by their creations and the ways in which these interact with their surroundings, even in urban environments. The maverick Japanese architect Yamashita Taiju elevates coziness into a core design principle that informs how he creates everything from offices to commercial complexes. He seeks to also cultivate a sense of flow (nagare) and movement in and around the structures he enacts, believing that without a lively sense of dynamism spaces grow stale and boring. Many other designers are experimenting with how the boundaries between the 'inside’ and ‘outside’ of a structure could be erased or at least minimized when crafting comfortable new dwellings and how they might rejoin local ecological rhythms and regenerative material flows.
So, despite the dramatic erosion of all that used to root our physical dwellings in something greater than their most visible features, what should we do to find a deeper sense of home in contemporary conditions? I believe that, as a first step, it will help if we set aside binary thinking and embrace how privacy and connection, shelter and openness, stability and movement can combine to generate a fulfilling experience of being ‘at home’. Indeed, it is the presence of these seemingly opposing dynamics that used to bestow our homes with aliveness and meaning. That said, we do not need to (and cannot) revive past realities; instead, what we can do is translate the search for a deeper sense of home into a creative act. We can rediscover the kinds of flows and nurturing qualities that feel both anchoring and enlivening for us in our unique life-worlds. In doing so, we are at liberty to draw inspiration from those who feel truly at home on the trail as well as those who feel more cozy in capsule-like concrete apartments floating above sprawling cities. Perhaps this is how we will ultimately find a more enduring sense of home on Earth as well, as a species that so often appears ill at ease on the very planet that birthed it.
Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world, in this age of the artificial.
¹ Adorno, T. W. (1994). Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (E. F. N. Jephcott, Trans.; 8th ed.). Verso. (Original work published 1951)
² Rasmussen, S. E. 1992. Experiencing architecture (23rd ed). MIT press. (Original work published in 1959).
³ Odell, J. 2019. How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.
