Cite this article
Obied, A. (2025) ‘From home to the unhome: An architectural model of a phenomenological inquiry’, Architecture Papers of the Faculty of Architecture and Design STU, 30(2), pp. 14-19. https://www.doi.org/10.2478/alfa-2025-0009
SUMMARY
The world has recently been confronted with horrifying images of large-scale domicide—the deliberate destruction of home—whether through California’s wildfires or wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Compounding this crisis are a global housing shortage, mass migration, and the economic aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges disrupt the traditionally positive meaning of home, which has long been deeply tied to architecture and the house. At the same time, modern architectural theories and practices have also questioned this notion, prioritising progressive design and modern living. Architects such as Adolf Loos, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier envisioned an architecture stripped of homely sentiment, both in theory and practice.
Building on these observations, this paper explores a new philosophical and architectural approach to home, focusing on its disruption and the emergence of the “unhome.” Arising from the phenomenological tension between Martin Heidegger’s existentialism and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical phenomenology, the unhome is introduced as a conceptual extension of Levinas’s critique of Heidegger. This shift reframes the opposition to home, transitioning from an existential to an ethical question. Through an architectural lens, the unhome is conceptualised as an experience emerging within the home, revealing its inherent vulnerabilities and contradictions. The discussion culminates in a conceptual model that visualises the architectural interplay between home and unhome.
To establish the meaning of the unhome, the paper first examines the concept of home and its antithesis in Heidegger’s philosophy. For Heidegger, home is deeply existential, enrooted in place and soil. Drawing on Mircea Eliade’s theological phenomenology, home serves as an ontologically sacred place against the homogeneity of space. Moreover, his concept of Dasein (Being-here), Gelassenheit (serenity or releasement), and Dwelling emphasises a binary opposition between Being-at-home and Being-in-the-world, or home and not-home. This suggests the metaphor of a homely sphere, where architecture encapsulates and protects the interior through a clear demarcation between inside and outside, established by tectonic, visible, and defensible boundaries.
Conversely, Levinas challenges Heidegger’s enrooted notion of home, arguing it promotes exclusivity and a kind of paganism. Instead, he posits that home is not tied to roots but rather to the freedom of detachment and wandering. In this sense, the unhome emerges as a Levinasian antithesis of home—not merely its absence, but a paradoxical coexistence of attachment and estrangement within the home itself. The unhome is also linked to the experience of the Freudian uncanny, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar and the boundaries between inside and outside dissolve. In other words, the unhome is the emergence of the unfamiliar within the home, disrupting the familiar and known. This disruption stems from an internalised Other, manifesting as a sense of self-division or conflict. However, Levinas’s ethical framework advocates for a response of kindness and responsibility toward the Other.
Based on this philosophical dialogue, the paper proposes a conceptual model of the unhome, both critiquing and complementing Heidegger’s homely sphere. The model explores three key aspects: 1) A Sphereless Home, where dissolved spatial boundaries make home and not-home indistinguishable; 2) The Otherside, where the unhome exists in a liminal state of hybridity, challenging the binary opposition of self/Other and inside/outside; and 3) An Architectural Nexus, where the unhome remains architecturally linked to the home as its metaphorical shadow, embodying the duality of heteronomous and autonomous experiences.
The architecture of the unhome is further explored through four dimensions: 1) Scale: the unhome predominantly exists on the domestic scale but also manifests within the urban landscape of the city; 2) Place: the destruction of home (domicide and topocide) disrupts and challenges Heideggerian ideas of belonging. Levinas’s uprootedness, in contrast, presents the unhome as a liberation from geographical determinism; and 3) Materiality: architectural elements such as darkness and transparency heighten the experience of the unhome, reflecting the destruction of home and its symbolic ties to the human body, mortality, and fragility; and 4) Porosity: openings like windows and doors mediate the home’s vulnerability to external forces, regulating its relationship with the world.
The concept of the unhome challenges traditional, idealised notions of home, offering a more complex and ethically nuanced understanding of dwelling. By juxtaposing Heidegger’s emphasis on rootedness with Levinas’s ethical openness to the Other, the paper reveals the unhome as a site of existential and ethical tension, where the boundaries between home and not-home are continually negotiated. The unhome is not merely a negative experience but a potential catalyst for ethical transformation, redefining home as a space of freedom rather than dogma. Ultimately, the unhome invites us to reconsider inherited meanings of home in a world marked by loss, displacement, and uncertainty.