Portable Home_Essay — seungeonnnnn

Figure 1 Frame, French, 1773-93, Carved and gilded wood. Victoria & Albert Museum.

The guilt frame that surrounds a painting, such a frame is not a part of the artwork, but it nonetheless conveys the sense of the painting’s importance; it pops up the works, as it were, making it seem important (Adamson 12). It seems to provide a limited space that cannot be pinned down as being part of the work or separate from it. Thus, it requires a logic of its own. This is what Derrida calls the parergon.

Figure 2 'The Primitive Hut', frontispiece of the second edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier's Essai sur l'architecture, 1755. Designed by Charles Eisen.

The most celebrated ‘primitive hut’ in architectural history appeared in 1755 as a frontispiece of the second edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier's Essay on Architecture to show the ‘natural’ origins of the Greek temple. Thus, it is an architectural archetype embodying what is natural and intrinsic. The most primitive huts are “nothing but a roof,” advocating honest structural use.

Figure 3 IKEA's BILLY bookcase designed by the Swedish designer Gillis Lundgren in 1979.

The 'BILLY' is a standardized, functional bookcase that forms a central part of IKEA's product matrix. Its design is focused on simplicity and practicality, allowing it to function globally across different cultures. The form does not retain any identical features, produced by mass-production.

Abstract

This research suggests the potential of a portable bookcase to add a sense of belonging within the transient and homogeneous environments of modern housing. In the era of spatial compression, individuals are increasingly losing self-identity in mass-produced living spaces. Utilizing architectural and craft theories, this study argues that the bookcase functions not merely as a piece of furniture, but as a supplement. By analyzing the intersection of symbolic form and material practice, the study proposes that a bookcase crafted by the archetype of the house can become a “portable home.” The symbolic form should be grounded in tectonics for manual actualization to avoid becoming a visual illusion. Through a synthesis of the house archetype and tactile material engagement, the bookcase is conceived as a small-scale home that represents personal identity in a mobile world.

1. Introduction

The contemporary world is shrinking, while the ability to reach distant places within hours has paradoxically expanded, and a new spatial concept emerges. Marc Augé calls the “symbolic universe of recognition,” creating a false familiarity with distant places and people (Augé). This spatial compression creates a sense of deterritorialization in which individuals live increasingly outside traditional territorial bounds.

Simultaneously, the vast majority of housing built today has the touch of the mass-production. As Christopher Alexander notes, “Adjacent apartments are identical. Adjacent houses are indentical” (Alexander et al. 45). Consequently, modern housing is rarely perceived as a true home. Rather, it threatens one’s self-image as a unique personality, reducing the inhabitants to “an anonymous filing-cabinet collection of selves.” (Cooper 134). While Individualization accelerates, the homogeneous environment fails to support it. Although personal information and belongings are increasing, individuals are losing their “self” within the house. A new medium for representing identity is necessary to moderate this phenomenon.

This research proposes a speculative idea. Carrying one’s “home” to settle in indistinct inhabited spaces to retain a sense of belonging. Home is a unique space where the self is reflected and personal identity is symbolized. Based on an analysis of the connection between the bookcase and the house, this paper argues that the bookcase can be a new conception of home - portable house containing personal stories. This argument is constructed through an interpretation of architectural and craft theory, focusing on the complementarity between symbolism and tectonics.

2. From Bookcase to Home

2.1. Spaces storing and displaying “self”: Bookcase and House

A bookcase is defined as furniture with horizontal shelves designed to display attractive things within an ordered presentation, and to avoid environmental hazards such as dust or light (Mattern). These collections become individuated objects, appreciated for their aesthetic values and arranged through the memories they hold.

To understand the self, man grasps at physical forms or symbols to transmit the “archetype” - a node of psychic energy within the individual and universal unconscious linking man to his primitive memories – into concrete substance (Cooper 131). The house serves as a vertical means of protection and a social face. Therefore, a strong correlation exists between the bookcase and the house; both reflect the user’s image. We shape living spaces based on personal taste, utilizing them to store and display expressions that we convey back to ourselves. The complex history of the house, accumulated through layers of stories, transforms physical space into “Home.” With time, we adapt to a new house, and it seems to adapt to us; we can relax when we return to it, put our feet up, and become ourselves (Cooper 131).

Likewise, a bookcase accumulates personal stories by containing personal collections. Through this property, it becomes a monumental space within the house. It presents a spectacle and offers a moment for collective interaction, like the fireplace - the hearth, the first groups assembled; around it the first alliances formed (Semper 536). As Frank Lloyd Wright considered the fireplace the “psychological center of the home,” the bookcase represents one’s own placeness – a sense of belonging that is relational, historical, and concerned with identity - in the standardized environment. The main difference between them is mobility. The bookcase exists within a building, while the house is grounded in a community. The idea of mobile homes is often perceived as a threat to the stability of the majority community (Cooper 134). On the contrary, the bookcase offers the benefits of mobility without this threat; it is a portable home that settles within the existing building.

2.2. Supplemental existence

As a portable home, the bookcase is a “supplementary” object that reveals the self by containing personalized items. These items are typically autonomous, conveying abstract impression, as Mondrian’s painting is aggressively autonomous, which is to say self-standing, not to be touched, as an object of purely visual contemplation (Adamson 4). The bookcase functions not just as shelves, but as a frame for navigating this abstract impression.

This relationship parallels the connection between craft and art. Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting(1978) explored the parergon (Figure 1). Derrida argues that a painting needs its frame as much as the frame needs its painting. The customized frame is crucial; it must not upstage the art, and in achieving its end, it effectively disappears. Through this complementary relationship, the bookcase becomes the frame (craft), and the individuated objects are the art.

However, a “slippage” can occur in which the relation of the supplement to the autonomous work becomes obscured. The sculptor Constantin Brancusi is a case. He is a model for abstract sculpture, but his work navigates an anxiety between the autonomous and the functional object. Scott Burton, who curated a Brancusi exhibition in 1989, noted that “Brancusi’s individual piece of furniture was both itself and a representation of itself.” (Adamson 19). The object functions as both a pedestal (supplement) and an autonomous sculpture. Burton saw this “doubleness.” If the base can be art, why are the sculptures not just furniture? He noted that work in this uncertain doubleness tended to be hewn from timber, while distinct autonomous works were often made of brass or marble (Adamson 20). Brancusi used craft as a language of relative refinement, selecting materials to subjugate them to the total compositional effect. The appropriate application of style and material is linked inevitably to the concept of the supplement.

3. Form and Material: Symbolism and Tectonics

3.1. Symbolic form

To conceptualize the bookcase as a portable home, a symbolic form is required. The distinct form of the house can frame the intangible concept that the bookcase is home. Like a gilt frame, this symbolic form provides something necessary to the art (personal items) but is considered extraneous to it. It conveys importance and props up the objects.

The unique shape of a house is derived from the “primitive hut” (Figure 2). The roof of it is the essential symbol of home. The connection between the geometry of roofs and their capacity to provide psychological shelter as a symbol is from universal cognition - they had archetypal properties (Alexander et al. 571). Man needs to understand his experience symbolically.

Furthermore, the rectangular house predominates today. The circular or organic shape has often been preserved in the form of the dome for religious or important secular buildings rather than dwelling buildings, recalling much earlier times (Cooper 143). Thus, the rectangular form of the houses symbolizes man’s early beliefs, the archetype of the house form, such as the primitive hut. It represents a natural and spontaneous striving that adds to the biological bond of the house.

Using this symbolic house-form for a bookcase subverts the establishment of professional architects. The public is becoming increasingly abstract and defined by their consumption of the built environment rather than their shaping of it (Adamson 90). Most furniture is unified in form without public involvement (Figure 3). A universally recognizable house-form allows both designers and the public to understand the same meaning. As Roland Barthes suggested in Mythologies(1957), if buildings and objects were imbued with symbolism, viewers and users would be more likely to relate to them on a psychological level (Fiell and TASCHEN 572). However, emphasizing only the symbolic form might cause the doubleness Burton noticed in Brancusi’s work. The danger is that a house-shaped bookcase might be perceived merely as a quotation or kitsch allusion - an autonomous artwork rather than a supplemental frame. To function as craft (frame), the bookcase must be organized around material experience. It needs to be actualized through appropriate materials and making, indicating it becomes a supplementary entity that navigates attention to the individuated objects it contains.

3.2. Manual actualization

Although the house-shaped bookcase conveys the concept of “portable home,” the limit of its representation generates a visually pretentious illusion. It might be seen as an intangible creation of theory, far from “authentic” being. To serve effectively as a frame for the “self,” the bookcase requires manual actualization.

Kenneth Frampton distinguished between building and architecture as the opposition between objective craftsmanship and abstract space. He encourages thinking about craft broadly, suggesting architecture is realized through an understanding of skill and material as fundamentally linked to authentic engagement with the world (Adamson 101).For Frampton, architectural form is most interesting when caught in an internal dialectic – crafting space that shows the intrinsic tensions of the medium.

The conflict between the simple being of the building and theoretical identity is resolved through “tectonics,” derived from Gottfried. Tectonics is a way of creating an intensified experience of abstract principles through skill and material. Frampton saw this in Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, “the suppression of the tectonic in the planar space-endlessness of the interior finds its countervailing reification through the careful placement of material and the precision of small-scale detail.” (Adamson 98). Abstract ideas must become reality through craft-based practice for authentic communication.

Tim Ingold proposes that material properties are neither objectively determined nor subjectively imagined, but practically experienced through skilled engagement. Every property is "a condensed story,” describing properties means narrating what happens to materials as they flow, mix, and mutate within specific environments (Ingold 14). The material properties are experienced through touching and crafting, not through theoretical terms. This is explained in Anni Albers’s weaving, which appeals not only optically, but also through its tactile juxtaposition of materials. To see it is not enough; one feels the need to rub it between one’s fingers to appreciate its design (Adamson 5). By revealing intrinsic material properties through the understanding of making and material, the realized bookcase becomes a work of craft, grounding the symbolic form in reality and avoiding the trap of mere optical effect. Through this synthesis of symbolic form and tectonics, the bookcase is perceived as a portable home for the self.

4. Conclusion

The deterritorialization caused by the compression of the contemporary world has made the concept of “home” increasingly fragile. As housing becomes more standardized and life more transient, the need for a space to retain the self has arisen. This research argues that the portable bookcase provides a plausible solution as a “supplement” – a frame that supports and navigates the “art” of our personal identity. As the house protects inhabitants, the bookcase protects the narrative of the self.

However, this expansion cannot depend only on symbolic form. As the “doubleness” in Brancusi’s work suggests, a form as a visual effect risks being an autonomous illusion or a pretentious quotation. Therefore, the authentic realization of a portable home requires the synthesis of symbolic form and material tectonics. The intuitive form of the house conveys the psychological archetype of shelter, and manual actualization settles this symbol in reality. Genuine material engagement transforms the bookcase from a simple piece of furniture into a monumental space for the self. It emphasizes the possibilities of the bookcase as an architectural sculpture synthesizing memory, form, and material around us. Not just transporting books, but the center of the self, it allows us to live authentically in the indistinct spaces.

Bibliography

1) Adamson, Glenn. Thinking through Craft. Bloomsbury Academic Berg, 2013.

2) Alexander, Christopher, et al. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford University Press, 1977.

3) Augé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe, Verso Books, 2023.

4) Cooper, Clare. “The House as Symbol of the Self.” University of California at Berkeley, 1974, pp. 130–46.

5) Fiell, Charlotte & Peter, and TASCHEN. Design of the 20th Century. Taschen GmbH, 2023.

6) Ingold, Tim. “Materials against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues, vol. 14, no. 1, June 2007, pp. 1–16. Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127.

7) Mattern, Shannon. “Before BILLY: A Brief History of the Bookcase.” Harvard Design Magazine, https://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/articles/before-billy-a-brief-history-of-the-bookcase/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2025.

8) Semper, Gottfried. “From The Four Elements of Architecture.” Architectural Theory, by Harry Francis Mallgrave, Oxford, 2006, pp. 536–39.

Figures

1) Frame, French, 1773-93, Carved and gilded wood. Victoria & Albert Museum. Adamson, Glenn. Thinking through Craft. Bloomsbury Academic Berg, 2013.

2) 'The Primitive Hut', frontispiece of the second edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier's Essai sur l'architecture, 1755. Designed by Charles Eisen.
www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Primitive-Hut-frontispiece-of-the-second-edition-of-Marc-Antoine-Laugiers-Essai_fig3_329661276. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.

3) IKEA's BILLY bookcase designed by the Swedish designer Gillis Lundgren in 1979.
“Bookcase, Billy, White, 80x28x202 Cm.” IKEA, www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/billy-bookcase-white-00263850/. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.

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