Remodelling Home

by Edward Hollis, Architect and Author

‘As safe as houses’ we say, ‘there’s no place like home’, ‘home is where the heart is.’ Our homes are something we depend on. They are there to keep the rain out; to keep us safe from prying hands of thieves, and the prying eyes of the curious. We hope that our homes will be places we can raise families, and that one day we can pass them on to our children. They are, after all among the first things that they draw: the central door, the four windows, the pitched roof, the chimney with smoke rising into the sky. We expect our homes to make us money.

Strange it is, then, that Claystation celebrates the home in something as formless, un-dependable, and malleable as plasticine. For the duration of this exhibition, houses and homes will rise and fall with both speed and regularity. They will change as fast as hands can model clay, and at the end, they will all be rolled into one vast shapeless ball and thrown away.

It’s nothing new. Homes – or, at least, houses – have never been safe or dependable. We’ve learned the hard way that bricks and mortar, solid as they might appear, are an unreliable investment. The reassuring images that children draw of houses are mythic. Just as kids know the sounds of farmyard animals they have never seen, so little urbanites draw the suburban dream. They’ll leave home as soon as they can, anyway. Homes are beset with paranoia: locked at night, and veiled with nets and venetian blinds. They are always leaking. There’s nothing safe about Houses.

Houses, more than any other type of building, then, are subject to change. When we move, we fill our new homes with objects from the old one; we repaint or paper the walls; we might even knock them down. Then we lay the table, light the candles, and sit down to eat.

To inhabit somewhere, to take possession of it, is to remodel it. We know that, soon enough, we will finish the meal, and wash up, and the flowers will wilt on the table. Others will replace us in the house, bringing their own possessions with them. They will repaint some walls, demolish some, and build others. One day the house will be gone; and the many homes that passed through it will be remembered in nothing more than fragmentary clues, captured inadvertently in the blurred background of a photograph or two.

At all sorts of scales and durations, from a quick tidy to a spot of redecoration, from purchase of a new sofa to major building work, we remodel our homes. In this sense, we are all designers. The French call their homes ‘immeubles’ – immovables, and their possessions ‘meubles’ movables. But the truth is more complex. Homes are always on the move, always changing, so are their contents, and so, ultimately are their inhabitants.

Houses aren’t like bricks and mortar, however much they may appear to be. Rather, they are as malleable, as formless, as arbitrary and temporary, as a ball of soft clay.

Edward Hollis
Edward studied Architecture at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh before joining a practice, working first on ruins and follies in the coastal lagoons of Sri Lanka and then on Victorian villas, old breweries and town halls in Scotland. He is now Head of Interior Design at Edinburgh College of Art and the author of the acclaimed ‘The Secret Lives of Buildings - From the Parthenon to the Wailing Wall’.