Dogma

The Longhouse

The installation presents a global survey of the longhouse, a linear, long and narrow type of habitation that exists or has existed in different parts of the world. In many cases, longhouses are monumental structures whose scale and complex spatial organization often transcends the customary difference between temple and house, or public and private. Longhouses could house an expanded family, a kinship group or an entire community under one roof. The most notable examples are those built by cultures such as the Iban in Borneo, the Gogodala in New Guinea, the Vikings in Norway and Denmark and the Iroquois in the Midwest. These longhouses were very different from each other, and reflected the values and customs of each culture, and yet they were all used as communal houses in which production and reproduction happened side by side. Longhouse cultures represent a way of dwelling outside the regime of modern property relations which, starting in the West and then spreading with colonialism, have become the dominant factor of domestic architecture. Although there are studies of specific manifestations of the longhouse, to this date there is not yet a survey that gathers in one study longhouses built in different locations and in different times. This research fills this gap.