Unhoused Adorno and the Problem of Dwelling

Unhoused: Adorno and the Problem of Dwelling is the first book-length study of Theodor Adorno as a philosopher of housing. Treating his own experience of exile as emblematic of late modern life, Adorno observed that twentieth-century dwelling had been rendered impossible by nativism, by the decimations of war, and, in the postwar period, by housings increasingly thorough assimilation into private property. Adornos position on the meaning and prospects for adequate dwellinga concept he never wrote about systematically but nevertheless returned to frequentlywas not that some invulnerable state of home or dwelling should be revived. Rather, Adorno believed that the only responsible approach to housing was to cultivate an ethic of displacement, to learn how not to be at home in ones home. Unhoused tracks four figurations of troubled dwelling in Adornos textshomelessness, no mans lands, the nature theater, and the ironic property relationand reads them as timely interventions and challenges for todays architecture, housing, and senses of belonging. Entangled as we are in juridical and financial frameworks that adhere to a very different logic, these figurations ask what it means to organize, design, build, and cohabit in ways that enliven non-exclusive relations to ourselves, others, objects, and place.