In our first tutorial class today each member of the class introduced themselves and then spoke a little about the main ideas and focus points we had for our upcoming Project Brief 1. These ideas were based around our current housing and our ideas of what a ‘home’ truly is.

 

Each person had a unique story to tell, a different perspective on what their living situation meant to them. I am always so interested in learning about the nooks and crannies of other people’s lives. The little details of their existence that helps to make them who they are.

 

For me, ‘home’ is such a sensitive subject. After my parents divorced, my whole concept of a home was completely displaced, and for many years my brothers and I spent our weeks and weekends moving between different houses and apartments all over Melbourne and the Peninsula. Both my dad and my mum moved places several times within the space of a few short years. We even spent a summer living in a caravan park by the beach while we waited for mum’s house to be built.

 

I think this is why I will probably never attach a sense of home and of belonging to the simple and systematic structure of a house or building. During those years of constantly moving between houses, apartments, and parents, it was only when I was embraced in my mum’s arms that I felt truly at home.

 

A house can provide you with comfort, safety, protection, relief, and an escape from the outside world. But home to me is love, and a house can never love you.