Of Bricks and Glass: Learning to Accommodate the Everyday Rhythms of Home

Abstract

Much of the growing focus of research on home cultures and materiality emphasizes eventful or disruptive temporalities: extensions, renovations, retrofits. Here, we trace how homes and lives are reshaped materially and conceptually, in response to other less disruptive temporalities of accommodation. Interviews with suburban Australian households reveal how people gradually come to know the built fabric of their home over time. Lay expertise is acquired through small material adjustments across multiple timescales: triggered by overlapping rhythms of body and building amidst broader lifecourse rhythms. To explore the role material engagements play in mediating these rhythms we focus on two ubiquitous suburban materials—glass and brick. We seek to demonstrate how bodies learn to work with the qualities of these materials and adjust their rhythms to engender comfort through dwelling in place over time. These comparatively mundane processes of spatial, behavioral and material adjustment take on further significance when connected with questions of entrenched routines and practices, material stewardship, vulnerability, and the ability of households to adapt to a changing climate.

Keywords:

• homes
• materials,
• temporality,
• expertise,
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note

Notes

1 The use of dwelling here acknowledges a genealogy of Western phenomenological thought that looks beyond a material conceptualization of domestic space, to a broader notion of being-at-home-in-the-world (Heidegger 1971). Though there are many critiques of how the concept of dwelling has been deployed in a conservative way (c.f. Massey 1992; Massey 1994; Ingold 2005. See also Harrison 2007 for a more comprehensive discussion), our use of the term here reflects its constitution in movement. That is, as Ingold (2000) has argued, the notion that environments are continually under construction (and deconstruction) by a range of different agents. Dwelling makes space for the idea that environments are continually being recreated, refashioned and repaired by their occupants (Ingold 2000; 2005).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grants DP0986041 and FT0991193.

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grants DP0986041 and FT0991193. There are no financial interests or benefits arising from direct applications of this research.