ABSTRACT
Reflecting on housing can also be a mirror that presents a distorted image of ourselves. Aspiration turns housing from care into competition. It forces value onto housing and makes it contingent. Policy is made for aspiration, but it can do so only through aggregation and the standardisation of housing. Policy sees only the facade of housing and places an extrinsic value on the exclusivity of the implacable. Housing is an expression of the need for care and is able to then maintain care by its implacability towards the external. It is near and far, open and closed. Housing is the enclosure of care-full complacency. Care is the complacent continuing on within housing enabled by implacability and benign indifference. Housing stands implacably, enabling use and demanding indifference through the hardness of its face. It yields through use, as internal pressure, but without bowing to the external.
