This book is so petite and whimsical-looking you could easily mistake it for “bookshop candy”—those cutesy, little tomes perched around cash registers—but don’t be fooled. While this rambling meditation on the significance of home mixes plenty of wit and surprising factoids with occasional clichés, it also draws on such heavy-hitting intellectuals as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, Ingmar Bergman, and Gaston Bachelard.
The Meaning of Home grew from a series of essays its author, British journalist Edwin Heathcote, wrote as the Financial Times’ architecture critic, a position he has held since 1999. Expanding on those pieces, each of the 34 brief chapters focuses on an individual household room (front hall, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and so forth) or a discrete building component, (floor, ceiling, roof, or even, as he puts it, “Pipes, Wires & Sewers”).
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