Understanding the Home

"I was born in a house with a courtyard built by my grandfather. After the first grade of primary school, we moved into a staff lodging. By the time I started middle school, I was living in an apartment on the periphery of the city. After passing the university entrance exam, I started living in a dormitory room in Istanbul; I graduated, and my brother and I had a home in Çapa. After five years, I returned to Urfa and started living with my family again in a duplex apartment.”

Zemzem Taşgüzen Polat delves into the vast world of the home, weighing her architectural experience and knowledge of social theory against vivid observations from her own life. She views the home as a space of experience, as a life. She contemplates the boundaries of the home, how it is an "inside" and at the same time how it transforms into a place to open up to the outside.

Understanding the Home is a book about the transformation of the home's architecture, its order, and its conception. Of course, it is also about the transformation of neighborhood relationships, neighborliness, and urbanization…

Zemzem Taşgüzen Polat wanders among the nostalgias of "lost homes" and the dreams of "ideal homes," within real homes, with as much curiosity to know as enthusiasm for life, and at times with a literary sensibility.