This brings me to point four: Inhabitants will have to find ways to cope with fluidity.
When there is a lightness to the architecture, new fluidities don’t just exist in the social norms but in all kinds of visibilities and spaces.
Let’s look back at modernism again. It was a grand idea, in the 1920s, to cope with mass-production, to say that we don’t need custom-made items to express our individuality. We can express individualism using combinations of standard items.
But what do people do once space itself becomes commoditised? They will begin to repersonalise it. They begin to pin it down.
This manifests in a number of ways. One way I’m thinking of are the Neolithic tombs built by farmers in England around the advent of farming—burrows [I’ve written about burrows before]. These were burial mounds made of several tonnes of rubble.
When people invested in land for farming, they really didn’t want to be moved on by people who wanted to take the land from them—by people who would move from place to place. They fought back by personalising the space in the deepest way possible: by burying their ancestors there in tombs that must have taken years to build.
It’s a sign, to any invaders, that this space definitely isn’t commoditised. The farmers aren’t moving because they refuse to move away—they actually can’t move away. They’re bound by their ancestors. They are tied to the land.