The House of Meanings

The House of Meanings is a modular design created by Susanna Torre, it was not meant as a specific house, but as an open-ended, “unresolved” space matrix of parallel walls for the creation of human dwellings. Torre takes architecture to a task that blindly reproduces a fixed set of functions for each room, therefore assuming the relations that are enacted within them. Her critique derives from questioning the typology of the nuclear family home that had often brought with it a gendered division of labor. As an alternative to an architecture freighted with a fixed ideology, Torre proposed The House of Meanings – neither an open plan nor defined plan, but an elementary structure that can respond to change. The House of Meanings is designed together with and partly by the end-user and can adjust to a specific time, place, and person. It goes against normative spatial theory. Torre has defined the project as “the formal integrity and completeness of an architectural object with the changing and temporary patterns that arise in the process of dwelling.” Based on an open-ended matrix of parallel walls, the two unbuilt projects for Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo were assumed to exist “in a ‘present’ state of completion, capable of being altered” by the formal logic of vernacular building. In addition, the Wall has been inscribed in Western literature as a representation of the Mother — both good and bad, so the open matrix was a way of providing enclosure and protection without the rigid distinctions that used to be made between public/private, outside/inside. In the House, not one but many meanings can take shape, remain elusive, or become layered one over the next to become components of a continuous spatial matrix. These ideas are manifest in Torre’s diagram of The House of Meanings, which is a plan, metaphor, and manifesto all in one.