Home & Emotions

Behind Symbiosis is a sentence from Bachelard: the house is a tool for analysis of the human soul. The home holds shelter and design, but also something else: the self we are at this moment, recorded in walls, in objects, in the air the rooms have made together.

Bachelard called this kind of attention topoanalysis: the study of the spaces we inhabit. Symbiosis is a practical answer to it. The framework rests on two foundations: Bachelard's reading of inhabited space, and Maslow's understanding of human needs. Together they suggest that a home is best read not by its floor plan but by the human work each space is doing. That work groups into six aspects: Storage, Restoration, Kinship, Intimacy, Productivity, Stimulation.

Scent is the instrument we use to work at this level. It belongs to memory and emotion before it belongs to thought. A room is changed in a single breath.

Two ways to begin:

The Six Functional Aspects – six categories that reorganise the home around what it's doing for you.
Emotional Topography of Home – familiar rooms, read for the emotional work each one carries.