Angel's Castle

liminal space - the physical space between one destination and the next.

Home is such a strange concept because it is simply a space you claim, to be yours. Whether outwardly or inwardly expressed, you feel attachment towards it due to the memories or prospective moments to be made. And I find this the strangest - that homes can materialise as many forms to different people, not restricted in any way of size, domain, or even physicality. Home can be a villa by the sea, or a school, or your family. Nothing regulates the definition of a home to someone, and yet everyone can come to a shared consensus that home means safety, comfort and security.

To me, the opposite of a home is an airport. A reason to go home is hardly necessitated, and in fact most people think of it as returning home instead of simply travelling, implicating some sense of belonging. In contrast, the airport is a curious place, with people standing and sitting and most importantly waiting, everyone is waiting for something - the opening of boarding gates, a loved one to come back, or a solitary vacation by the ocean. The most curious part about the airport is that no one is meant to stay in it. It was built for the very sole purpose of people moving away, back, forwards. And if an airport filled with people seems strange , think about an airport without people. The silence hangs stale in the air, and nothing, not even the fluorescent signs or the moving travellators can come close to restoring the lack of… humanity.

One could apply to this any location, a school, a house, a museum, and they would realise the same thing. Places were made to hold people. Man-made places, that is. If we take a moment to look around us, our world is an amalgamation of architecture and nature. Nearly every area humans covered is built upon; footpaths adorned with street lamps leading to houses. And those that aren’t remained swallowed by the environment, sprawling foliage and ancient trees resting on beds of toasted leaves. It is rare that we see a large void left out by the culmination of these two forces that have painstakingly carved their territories out on Earth

We have so much space, yet so little. What would happen if we were to just tear down everything within a hundred-meter radius? It would be an expanse of crumbly soil, a shell of a field of full-bloomed flowers, and yet it doesn’t even make a dot on the amount of land we’ve managed to sequester from Nature. We have so much space we are able to build skyscrapers and mansions, and we are still left with paths to walk and seas to travel and air to breathe. The physical dimensions of the Earth are almost limitless for humankind and all other species to live on based on the rate of population growth. We could always built higher and further, and faster. So why don’t we, you may ask? We are. Everyday, governments are reclaiming land and countries are competing to build the tallest towers, but the question I would like to pose is,

Is there more meaning to the space we are attempting to claim?

From an economical perspective, our action of occupying it gives it a meaning. With boundless space for air to float around, why not create more buildings for humans to be able to use them as office places? We associate an area with its function, and when it does not have one, then we barely think of it as a space of its own except in the case of, what can we put here to make it useful? In a way, it feels like an endless pursuit of attempting to identify potential and make use of everything, which some people highly believe in.

Conversely, minimalism is the counter argument to such an action. Why does the best use of a space necessitate squeezing as many amenities into it as possible? As a concept that originates from art, minimalism is the concept of simplicity - to strip something down to its essential quality and fill the rest of the space with clean, abstract invisibility. Minimalists find the idea of emptiness and space attractive in its own right, and this does not necessarily mean minimum effort is put in, but rather a single centrepiece is highlighted in the midst of a decluttered surrounding.

Returning to the concept of a home, one can furnish it as sparsely or as extensively as they want to. Whether they sprinkle sentimental trinkets all over, or there’s nothing but four white walls and a chair; home is defined by one’s attachment and comfort in the environment. It is for this reason that home can manifest in many forms, even people, specific objects or a place that you have only visited once but felt like you belonged to your whole life. A place is defined by sentiment and intellect ironically, as we build places to accommodate us, but ironically our hearts and minds grow to accommodate it.

We can thus also conclude that no one’s ideal of a home should be disparaged, even if they have the gaudiest taste in interior design. Like preferences and dislikes, our opinions all differ and despite the societal convention of a home being warm, loving and full of family, we can all create our own definition of home and carve out our own castles. Home is also a space before the next destination, but we can make it much more than that.