A House for Hermes: Topologies of Encounter

Homelessness, rootlessness, accelerated mobility; all seem to define the contemporary condition. In such a fluid and volatile dynamic of continual transience, what constitutes home and place? Where are we to dwell? How are we to make our home in the world? How is place to be made? In many respects the history of the house in the 20th Century can be seen to mirror this shift to what could be called a new nomadism. Indeed, the fate of the house as object seems no different to that of all objects under late capital – it seems to melt into air –both physically and conceptually as a significant cultural determinant.

This mutability and plurality of position arising from the multiple dislocations of contemporary experience gives rise to another sense of home, to a conception of dwelling as “a mobile habitat, a mode of inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and closed structures.”

The notion that dwelling may indeed be constituted by movement and incessant change is not only a challenge to received notions of ‘house’ but contests the localism of many powerful assumptions about culture, particularly those which understood dwelling to be the circumscribed local ground of homogenous collective life. The notion that routes precede roots, rather than the other way around remains surprisingly troubling despite the fact that virtually everywhere one looks, the processes of human movement and encounter are long established and complex, despite even the evidence of etymology which shows the word “dwelling” itself to contain in its root the sense of movement, of going astray, of delay and hesitation.

A House for Hermes is an ongoing and aggregating exploration of these questions though a manifold of art and design propositions combined with cultural and philosophical research and speculation.

Project Title

This commitment to the design of places is progressively sharpened through engagement with the teaching and research of design at Universities across Australia and internationally, as well as through regular participation in design competitions, conferences and Public Fora.Stutterheim / Anderson is a Landscape Architecture practice grounded in two inter-dependent qualities: an awareness that our fundamental responsibility is to the Earth as the dominant force with which we negotiate as designers, and a fine-grained attentiveness to the temporal and spatial, physical and immaterial forces which constitute place. The results are robust and resilient projects tailor-made to specific places. This commitment to the design of places is progressively sharpened through engagement with the teaching and research of design at Universities across Australia and internationally, as well as through regular participation in design competitions, conferences and Public Fora.

Project Title

This commitment to the design of places is progressively sharpened through engagement with the teaching and research of design at Universities across Australia and internationally, as well as through regular participation in design competitions, conferences and Public Fora.Stutterheim / Anderson is a Landscape Architecture practice grounded in two inter-dependent qualities: an awareness that our fundamental responsibility is to the Earth as the dominant force with which we negotiate as designers, and a fine-grained attentiveness to the temporal and spatial, physical and immaterial forces which constitute place. The results are robust and resilient projects tailor-made to specific places. This commitment to the design of places is progressively sharpened through engagement with the teaching and research of design at Universities across Australia and internationally, as well as through regular participation in design competitions, conferences and Public Fora.