Summerhouse Dialogues between Mobilier and Immobilier

Abstract

Abstract Addressing processes of cultural memory and mental appropriation in leisure architecture, this study relies on the fact that, in Denmark, summerhouses are often sold with furniture and objects representing the former owners and their ways of life. The theoretical starting point is formed by a discussion of Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “childhood home.” A menaced phenomenon in today’s urbanized reality, the childhood home and its mental values may indirectly be cultivated and reinterpreted by way of summerhouses. Buying a partly furnished summerhouse involves a joint encounter with immobilier (real estate) and mobilier (movables). In this way, a dialogue between the actual residents and a larger cultural history comes about. Built 1960/1971, the summerhouse studied here belongs to the author and his family. Archival and photographic experiments carried out after the acquisition in 1998 support reflections on space and life, now and in the previous history of the house.