From home to the unhome: An architectural model of a phenomenological inquiry

Amidst and against the many challenges and disturbances facing the meaning of home, the “unhome” emerges from the phenomenological dialectic between Heidegger’s existentialism and Levinas’s ethics, addressing the challenges and disturbances to the meaning of home. Heidegger argues that home is located topologically, within the bounds of a homely sphere, governed by an apophantic and exclusive binary: home versus its opposite—the world or not-home. Conversely, Levinas offers a less assertive and more dynamic perspective, critiquing Heidegger’s views as uncritical and excessively topological. Levinas defies this binary opposition, framing home as an ethical question rather than a purely spatial construct. In this context, the unhome arises as a Levinasian ethical inquiry into what opposes home. This paper explores the architectural connotation of this phenomenological dialectic and extrapolates from Levinas’s broader phenomenology of the Other to propose an architectural conceptual model of the unhome. This model critiques and complements Heideggerian perspectives and introduces a novel approach, framing the unhome as a hybrid plane of existence where architectural experience becomes chiral. Furthermore, the paper elucidates key architectural concepts—scale, place, materiality, and porosity—through which the unhome can be architecturally experienced. This exploration positions the unhome as profoundly architectural, communicating the dilemma of choosing freedom over security through tectonic elements. It redefines the meaning of home, shifting it from a primarily existential construct to a profoundly ethical one.