1.22.2007

Dispersion: Family, Identity, and the Delocalized Home

Where’s home? Usually an innocuous question, to some it is cause for consternation. To ease confusion, the question can be rephrased. Where do you live? Universally less ambiguous, this question can be answered with little hesitation. But why should there be a distinction between the two inquiries?
Home connotes a single geographical space. City, region, and country are often called upon to describe the condition of Home. Associations tied to place are privileged and often dominate meanings of Home. Furthermore, the idea of Home is coupled with the idea of family. Home is the territory where family is defined.
The geographic fragmentation of family is a common contemporary condition. The dispersed family often requires a reinterpretation of Home. Thus, my thesis proposes to investigate the meaning of Home as the territory in which the shared identity of the geographically dispersed family is constructed.
In this investigation, I will draw upon personal ideas of Home and family. Although personally relevant, conditions of fragmentation, asynchronicity, plurality, and dispersion are also representative of a general postmodern reality. In assessing an alternate nature of Home, I will consider globalizing trends including increased personal mobility and electronic communication, multiple sites of habitation, and wider social and infrastructural networks. As local spatial conditions dissolve or become blurred, temporal coordinates are elevated to emphasize and anchor the meaning of Home.
In trying to reformulate the idea of Home, I will be examining my own family and the ways we negotiate family identity despite geographic separation. I will characterize how we communicate, forms of interaction, and our routines. As an alternative to place-centered definitions of Home, I have begun to envision Home as a kind of geographically dispersed infrastructure facilitating familial interactions, traditions, and rituals usually carried out in a typical home. In doing so, I will be exploring Home not through the redesign of a house, but through multiple (probably small-scale) architectural interventions that will involve existing infrastructure, institutions, and networks.
In envisioning Home as an infrastructure for the negotiation of family identity, I will begin by considering the synthesis of the supermarket and the automobile. Providing, respectively, for the modern necessities of sustenance and commuting, they represent a link to domesticity. As a context for daily life, these institutions are ubiquitous locally, nationally, and internationally. By considering these institutions as a departure point, I emphasize the prosaic aspects of domesticity in the construction and negotiation of family identity.

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