Much of what constitutes our experience of our immediate environment is quite ordinary and familiar, in particular, where we live. While policymakers and academics are constantly seeking transformations in housing, what we seek from our own housing is stability and lack of change. We seek secure roots to our lives rather than step-changes and radical reform. This book considers this ordinary experience of housing and how we come to depend upon it. The notion of the ordinary is used to argue against the conceits of policymaking and the fetish for domestic design. Using a variety of methods such as critical analysis and film criticism (looking at the work of film-makers as diverse as Bergman, Dreyer, Shyamalan, Tarkovsky, Tati and the Wachowski Brothers), it provides an original, impressionistic view of the role housing plays in our lives.

A survey of the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian film-maker who lived from 1932-1986. It is a critical examination of his films in the light of his own writings and life, his aesthetics of film, his theory of time in cinematography and an attempt to comprehend his vision.