Nov 1

Nov 1 Catriona Shine discusses the shifting architectures of HABITAT

Catriona Shine grew up in Ireland and now works as an architect in Oslo. She is a recipient of an Arts Council Literature Bursary Award 2023 and her writing has appeared in The Dublin Review, Channel, Southword, and elsewhere.

She was awarded the Penfro First Chapter Prize in 2016 and IAFOR Vladimir DevidŽ Haiku Award in 2017. She was shortlisted for the Se‡n OÕFaol‡in Short Story Prize 2022 and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2023 among others. Habitat was longlisted for the McKitterick Prize 2022.

Interview by Nirica Srinivasan

How did your experience and work as an architect contribute to writing Habitat, apart from an interest in the spaces we live in? Were there specific projects or ideas you’ve encountered in your architectural work that influenced Habitat in some way?

When I started writing Habitat, I worked for a couple of years on a pilot project for reuse and circular architecture. This meant that I was constantly thinking about the lifetime of materials, the availability of resources, and the sometimes peculiar ways we value certain buildings and building components over others.

I was particularly conscious of the idea of fashion and retro-fashion in architecture: The building I was renovating was from the fifties, which is now deemed a modern era worth preserving, whereas, as I was trying to source reusable materials, I was often going to buildings from the eighties and later which were being demolished because they were neither up-to-date nor old enough to be given heritage-based approval. This seemed short-sighted to me, so the consideration of buildings and materials over time fed quite directly into Habitat.

Parallel to this, I noticed that few of my architectural colleagues seemed to be interested in living in the apartments they designed – though they did the best they could within current, mainly economic, constraints. Much more popular amongst architects were buildings from the modernist era, given the pet name funkis in Norwegian. There was huge ambition in the design of these buildings with regard to daylight, modernity, and structural advancement. This was an architecture that strove to serve the everyday lives of its inhabitants best, to achieve its beauty within the essential parts of a building. I wanted to set my novel in a building from this era, partly because, as something that is valued, its loss or degradation would be keenly felt.

Working in architecture, one is continually zooming in and out on scale, from city plans to construction details. I employed a similar attitude to scale in Habitat. Zooming out, the novel examines the difficulty of accepting or dealing with problems on a scale so large they become abstract or illegible. Simultaneously, the novel zooms in on the minute details of everyday domestic life, giving space to the texture of plaster, the void between sheets of glass in windows, and the gaps between floorboards. The novel is full of voids and gaps.

A lot of architectural thought goes into minimums, like how contained does a room need to be for it to be considered a room. If there are no corners, will the floating walls still suggest the space of a room? How much of the wall between two rooms must you take away for the two spaces to flow into each other? There’s a lot of this kind of tentative subtraction going on behind Habitat.

The structure of an apartment block is so interesting, especially in how class plays out in the placement of people. I was reminded of other stories that use space to explore social structures — like Snowpiercer! The only characters who are renting their home live in the basement; Knut sends his elderly mother to a ground-floor apartment, displacing her from her original apartment. I’d love to hear more about the space of the apartment as this very interesting and rich place to explore these larger social divisions and ideas.

Firstly, I was careful in choosing the type and era of apartment building to set the novel. It’s a mid-century, modernist building, which, as I mentioned, is a typology that is generally valued highly here in Oslo. Just as important a consideration was the demographic range of the inhabitants. I was eager to explore a building or neighborhood where the inhabitants were demographically varied, a microcosm of society, and this is mainly the case in places that have been around a while. In my experience, there is also a special moment in the lifetime of an apartment building when its residents have aged and changed slowly over the years, while some of the inhabitants have lived there since it was built. These original occupants are a wonderful link to the past, to all the lives that have been lived there, to the children that have grown up there, and they perhaps feel a greater compulsion to tell the story of the building. This imbues a place with a sense of history and purpose, and so I have a couple elderly characters like this who are quite essential to the novel.

The problems that evolve for each inhabitant are directly linked to their physical position within the building, whether they live under the roof or over the foundations, against a troublesome party wall or an external wall. Other factors affect how they react: social standing, ownership, who they know, who has something against them. There is an inherent unfairness in how the destruction impacts the residents and to what extent help and understanding is available to them.

For example, who they live with and their family status are quite instrumental in their reaction. Sonja lives alone, so she is perhaps the person who most strongly seeks to engage her neighbors in her problem. Fritjof and Frida, a well-off, childless couple, act as a duo, plotting together. It’s even visible in the amount of white space on the pages about them: They have much more dialogue; their thoughts don’t spiral inwards like Sonja’s. Raj and his flatmates are on a more equal footing with each other than the families we observe, so they take a much more rational, hands-on approach to their problems, discussing all aspects with each other. Knut’s family are very supportive of each other, but this causes them to want to protect each other, and so they conceal a lot. They can’t manage to have the open discussion that Raj and his flatmates have. This would be in the flatmates’ favor, except that they are hindered by the lack of power in their rental situation.

An apartment block like this is quite a web of co-dependencies and social barriers. One quite physical example that Sonja and Linda note is how your relationship to a neighbour you can see from your apartment can be more distant than that with a neighbour who lives above or below you. You don’t see the latter using their homes, but you meet them in the stairwell, which is more conducive to acquaintance.

The board of residents creates an interesting social structure. It’s a democracy in miniature but can also be a debilitating safety net. Problems can be reported rather than addressing them directly yourself, and all questions can be deferred to Friday’s AGM.

Habitat has a lot in common with classic haunted house tropes — the space where you live turning against you in some way. A character comments at one point, “It’s a lovely thing, a haunted house.” Did you consciously borrow from and riff on those tropes, adapting them to an apartment building and the specific environmental focus that Habitat takes?

Haunted house stories were not a starting point for the novel, which grew more from my fascination with the situation of being a neighbor and developed through a close examination of our interaction with the built environment, but there is a lot of relevance there. The haunted house mentioned in that quote is a Lego set, and yes, I did specifically put that in there as a sort of microcosm within a microcosm. I was writing this very specific story about this particular group of people in a defined place, but, scaling up, it can also be read as a story of the destruction of our global habitat. Between those two, there are also the levels of the wider neighborhood, the city, the country and geographical region, and I believe that there is a logic that can be transposed from one to the other. We can use one scale to understand a problem at another scale.

Haunted house stories are interesting in that there is usually a logic behind what’s happening, some horror that has been shoved under the carpet and needs to be brought to light. That kind of story begs us to look closer, to figure out what’s going on, and I think that’s an inclination a reader will feel in Habitat too. There is a sense that the inhabitants do not sufficiently understand what’s going on and that this will be to their detriment. The reader understands more than any individual resident, as they know what’s going on with a range of neighbours, but the solution is not as clear cut as in a ghost story. The reader’s experience is closer to the bafflement of the residents, and this brings its own kind of horror.

In moments like that with the aforementioned toy haunted house, the mindset of the inhabitants seeps out in their comments, unconsciously. They’re trying to hint to each other, but afraid to come right out and say it, especially because they don’t really believe it and it’s hard to give expression to something you don’t understand.

In small sections, the novels also gives voice to the various elements of the building and this also destabilizes things, perhaps turning haunted-house expectations on their head in terms of who is the reasonable one: the haunted or the haunting one.

Relatedly, the specific ways in which the space evolves and changes are very, very sensory — walls are thin enough for sound to reverberate, a pervasive smell permeates the basement, and very tactile things are happening in the top-floor apartments. What was it like to plan out how the outside world is permeating the interior and the different vivid ways in which barriers are breaking down?

There’s a timeline for the breaking down of each barrier, and this does not run parallel to our lived experience of time and dilapidation. This is something that baffles the characters as they try to solve problems on one timeline with solutions from another, and that just doesn’t work, but what else can they do? There’s a sense of escalation, of things getting out of hand very quickly.

It is, of course, also significant that everyone is grappling with a different aspect of the same problem. This results in neighbors pitting against each other. People are very skilled at finding ways to differentiate between themselves and others, even though their problems are similar.

Everything happens overwhelmingly quickly, but what happens is huge to those who experience it, so they don’t sit back and let it happen. They are compelled to surge forward, trying to find explanations or solutions, and in a short time, they have to react to their positions, develop, and change quite a lot. This was important for me when writing Habitat. Different neighbors are subjected to different problems, and they react in their own individual manners, as influenced by their social standing, marital status, wealth, skills, etc., but each of their problems, even taken alone, are too extensive to allow them to remain in their initial state of mind, so we see them develop and adapt and strive repeatedly and ever more desperately to somehow stop this, to somehow survive.

So, yes, it did take a lot of work to orchestrate all this. Some parts of writing, such as a well-turned phrase or a vivid image, have an almost one-to-one relationship between writing and reading. Other parts of the craft, such as the planning of the interlinked changes in the building, required enormous amounts of charts, spreadsheets and drawings, and a huge amount of editing. It was a huge puzzle to solve and if I did it well the process will be invisible.

Habitat is about the slow breakdown of an apartment complex, but it is also about a kind of breakdown of communication, or community, in the face of crisis. Each apartment — sometimes each individual inhabitant! — seems to be going through something unique and unreal, entirely alone. Even in moments where they try to seek community, there’s often a barrier there, whether on their own part or from the person who can actually help. In this context the end of the book is so striking. Did you always know you wanted it to end in that particular way? Do you think there’s a way we can achieve community in the face of overwhelming and incomprehensible collapse?

Yes, the community and the individual are concepts that can only exist in relation to each other. Even someone living by themselves in the middle of nowhere will inevitably think about the distance between them and everyone else; they will feel isolated or safe; they will fear or hope for the arrival of someone else. In cities, and in apartment blocks like this one, the lines between the individual, the family (if there is one) and their neighbors, these are lines that are carefully defined and clear.

There is a level of artifice to apartment living. As one character says, He was not used to having people stacked all around him, like goods on a shelf. We know there are people living their lives on the other side of the wall or above our ceiling, but we manage to forget about them when we’re inside our own self-styled cocoon. In Habitat, when physical barriers break down or malperform, social barriers are strengthened in their stead.

So, yes, at one level there’s this forced social distancing between neighbors, but on the other hand there’s the residents’ committee, the gardening group, annual meetings, seasonal pitching-in to tidy up the shared garden. These formalized links do have value.

I think if the problems the neighbors faced were more straightforward, they would manage to cooperate better, but there’s a line, a limit, beyond which a problem is so unfathomable that you can’t even name it directly, and this makes it difficult to coordinate and solve it together. We need to get our heads around an issue before we can fix it, and this is where we seem to be failing with our most enormous crises. I would, however, warn against fatalism. We’ll never know if something is possible if we don’t even try. This is exactly what was happening with the circular architecture I mentioned earlier. The building industry was hesitant to try it out because it was untried. When we went ahead with a pilot project we found some barriers, yes, but mainly we discovered enormous possibility. One could just go ahead and do it. We could have been doing it all along.

In the world of Habitat and in any other world or community, it’s not a choice between perfection and letting it all burn. We must save what we can, who we can; we must try, and we must try our best, and we must do it straight away.

There’s a lovely moment in Habitat where Sonja, an illustrator, sees insects fly by and looks for her drawings of those same insects. She reflects: “Her representation noted only a fraction of what this creature was … The remainder, the majority of its essence, went undocumented.” I wonder what you think of language, or art in general, in capturing the world. Are there some things we will just never be able to capture in words or images? (Is that a good thing?)

Almost nothing in life can be captured fully in art, but I’m not sure that capturing is what we’re aiming to do. Art does something other than replicate: it evokes, suggests, and can bring enormous clarity and a sense of discovery. Even considering the word capture in the sense of captured animals, it seems limited. You can put the animal in a pen, but you won’t be able to watch it hunt or forage or migrate, so what you have inside the fence will teach you less than you might have learned observing the creature from a distance over time.

I think this is why the best art is open-ended, allowing the reader/viewer/listener space to approach the art in their own manner and demanding that they take part and interpret it for themselves. This is the only art. While I say this, I’m still a total perfectionist, and I will revisit a sentence and a scene and a whole novel as many times as needed to bring it as close as possible to that elusive state, which is how it should be.

If something feels real to someone, it often happens in little jolts, flashes of something tangibly familiar, minor revelations.

I also think that one of the main things writing has going for it as an artform is length. It allows a thought, a series of thoughts to be spread out and expanded over a whole book, over the many perspectives of its characters, over the timespan of the novel and, wider still, over the time remembered by each narrator. It’s colossal.

Habitat features a number of interludes where parts of the building or its surroundings speak to the reader directly — the doors, the stairs, and the birds. What were those like to write, and were there any of these that you particularly liked writing?

I had written quite a way into the first draft of the novel before I went back and started to intersperse these voices. A friend from my writing group suggested it because I spoke quite a lot to them about the building and my thoughts around it while never straying beyond the perspectives of my set of characters. The effect was immediately tangible. It gave the draft weight, so the characters could initially be relatively dismissive. They could cast blame around lightly, yet the story as a whole cast disdain on their levity.

It also gave a new angle to whose side the reader might be on. The neighbors are not bad or evil; most of them are not even directly negligent. They don’t bring this fate upon themselves directly. They have genuine everyday problems (money, loneliness, trauma), and they come to have these physical problems with their homes. I wanted to look closely at how they would react when the source of their problems is elusive, with no obvious solution: denial, bafflement, blame. They don’t give up. They try to figure it out, but their efforts are repeatedly insufficient. There are misunderstandings; they feel compelled to withhold details.

Alongside all this, we have the building components and materials which give their own take on being used for the purposes of these people. Their voices existed before the building and will survive beyond its disappearance. They can look beyond their own destruction without panic. So, there’s a dissonance there between this longer timeline and a human life, the week the story spans, and the length of time one lives in one’s home.

I was surprised at first by the diversity of voices that the various building components claimed for themselves. The wooden doors, for example, are quite angry. They hate being flat; they long back to the curve of trunk, and in the absence of this possibility they long to slam.

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Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.

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