Who Has a Key

I stand in the doorway of a flat where I used to live. The hallway is the same. The third floorboard still creaks. The light switch is where my hand looks for it. I stop on the threshold. I still know how I used to move around the room. But now I am no longer sure whether I am still allowed to. Perhaps someone else lives here now. Or perhaps only the person I shared the flat with has gone.

The measurements have not changed. The space has.

None of this shows on the floor plan. There, a hallway remains a hallway. A room measures twelve square metres. A door opens inwards. The body knows a different geography. It knows where I will not bump into anything in the dark. Where the floorboards give. How far the hand has to reach to find the window handle.

As long as we are at home somewhere, we do not have to keep checking where we stand. We walk to the fridge without thinking about the way. We take up space without first asking permission.

Strangeness begins where this ease ends. When the hand still finds the light switch, but I no longer dare to press it.

That does not mean floor plans are irrelevant. A staircase asks something different of the body than a ramp. An open kitchen allows different encounters than a closed one. Spaces open up some possibilities and make others harder. What they cannot determine is the meaning these possibilities take on for a person.

A window can open the view onto a garden. But at the same time it can make me feel watched. The property of the window is the same. The experience is not. And it may change simply because someone outside stops walking.

The idea that the right architecture can produce the right life is nonetheless remarkably persistent. We plan a kitchen where the family comes together. A children’s room that allows concentration. A living room that promises company. On the floor plan everyone sits at the table. Nobody is sulking in silence. And the question of who clears up afterwards has apparently been settled as well.

We draw floor plans as if we could draw relationships.

In 1951 a house was completed near Plano, Illinois, that stands like few others for the ideals of modern architecture. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had designed it for the physician Edith Farnsworth. Glass walls. A largely open layout. A seemingly direct connection between interior and landscape.

But Edith Farnsworth lived in it.

In 1953 she complained in an interview that she could not even keep a rubbish bin under the sink without spoiling the appearance of the house. The kitchen, she said, could be seen from the road. So she hid the bin somewhere else. The architecture was taken care of. The rubbish less so.

The complaint came in the middle of a dispute. Mies had sued Farnsworth for unpaid fees. She had countersued over the building costs. At the same time, the magazine House Beautiful was campaigning against modern glass architecture. So Farnsworth was neither speaking as an uninvolved resident, nor did her statement appear in an uninvolved medium.

What is interesting, however, is something else: what happens when a building designed as an aesthetic ideal turns the everyday actions of its occupant into a problem?

Farnsworth described a feeling of constant vigilance.

This is more than a question of missing curtains. Anyone who constantly experiences themselves as part of a picture in a room begins to look at themselves from the outside. The house becomes a stage on which even putting out the rubbish becomes a design decision.

But the glass alone does not explain this experience. Another person might enjoy exactly this openness.

The problem lies in mistaking an architectural intention for a human experience.

Someone who lowers their voice in a stranger’s flat may do so because of the high ceiling. Or perhaps because the host does not make guests feel welcome.

For one family, the open kitchen may be the longed-for centre of life together. For one member of that family, it may be the place where they are never unobserved for a moment. A missing wall does not mean there is no longer a boundary between people.

Sometimes a door would be the kinder solution.

Security needs reliability. Sometimes boundaries too. Freedom needs ways to escape those boundaries. What gives one person safety can mean confinement for another.

So who decides what kind of closeness is wanted?

Whoever pays for a house does not necessarily determine all the relationships lived in it. And whoever lives there is far from free to change it to suit their needs.

Edith Farnsworth at least had the means to take her conflict with Mies to court. She lost the case and was ordered to pay around 14,000 dollars. Later the two reached a settlement. Very few people can negotiate their housing problems in a lawsuit with a world-famous architect.

Those who rent may not change much. Those who earn little often cannot move out. For someone who uses a wheelchair, a staircase is not a matter of taste.

Spatial freedom therefore depends not only on what was built. But also on who can decide, pay and change.

And even then something remains beyond planning: time.

A children’s room is first furnished with expectations. Later it may be a room full of keepsakes that nobody uses any more. A shared bedroom may stay unchanged after a separation, although the bed is suddenly too big. In a kitchen, after a person’s death, their chair is still there. I could put it away. I don’t. I could sit on it. I don’t do that either.

The floor plan is unchanged. People’s relationship to this space is not.

A home is created through use, through habits and through the expectations we have of one another. An ugly hallway can mean more security than an award-winning entrance hall.

Only, familiarity is not yet security. People can also come to terms with cramped space, noise and lack of privacy because they have no alternative. Familiarity is no proof of freedom.

Architecture does not determine whether people love, hurt or leave one another. But it influences how they can meet, where they avoid each other, and whether they find a place where they are allowed to be unobserved.

It can make closeness possible. It cannot create it.

And it cannot make anyone stay.

Whoever has a key can open a door, provided they still have the right to. That is a considerable possibility, especially for someone who lacks it. But the key says nothing about whether anyone is still waiting behind the door. It does not say whether I am welcome, or whether I myself still want to live there.

Perhaps a space is a home when I do not have to answer such questions anew every time I enter.

The hand still finds the light switch. But I let it drop.

Source: Joseph A. Barry, ‘Report on the American Battle between Good and Bad Modern Houses’, House Beautiful, May 1953, pp. 172–73, 266–72; quoted in ‘Mi(e)s Conception: The Farnsworth House and the Mystery of the Transparent Closet’, Society and Space. Farnsworth’s remarks are paraphrased. On the lawsuit: Martin Filler, ‘Life in a Glass House’, The New York Review of Books, 11 February 2021.