The homes that we live in shape who we are as a person. As a person grown up in a small town or a small city has a very different and vast cityscape to move through. In this context the boundary of the home is a very important one to shape one's life. Inside those boundaries, the structure of the family determines how walls of the space react. Every person of the structure of the family has a domain of their own inside of the house. Each person going through different spaces have implications that they are put in while entering someone else's domain, and what they are allowed to do there and what they are not allowed to do there, which we will be diving into further.
Our home of six people, where me and my brother share a room, my mother and my father share a room, my grandmother has her own room, and my grandfather sleeps in the hall. We live in a neighborhood which is very planned and also is a mixed-use neighborhood where there is living spaces on higher floors and commercial spaces on the ground floors. It is very orthogonal, and we are on the third floor of a building.
Starting from the hall, it's the first place you enter in a house, which is the domain of the grandfather, which he uses most of the time watching TV most of the time. He also shares that space with my father during dinners and lunch. There is a definite shift in the use of the TV when specific members are using it. My grandfather uses it the most, and during when he's not using it, other members of the house have their own timing of using the TV. So my father and my grandfather share the TV when they are watching having lunch or dinner. My grandmother uses it sometimes because she also has a TV of her own in her bedroom. Although my mother uses it during the night after dinner. There is a definite change of environment of the space during throughout the day.
Moving on to the kitchen, the kitchen is mostly used by the women of the family and the maid throughout the day. The men of the house very rarely visit the kitchen for cooking anything. Thus it is a space mutually exclusive to just cooking and working, which is shared by my mother and grandmother. Power dynamics in that space also change during the time of day, where mostly my grandmother is controlling the kitchen most of the time. My mother has the control during specific days or specific timings like the afternoon.
The other rooms are mostly the private rooms of me and my brother and my parents. These are places which are mostly secluded from the home, which are very private domains of every person, and there is a certain amount of privacy and safety that you get in a household. Although there is also a sense of security and privacy in the room itself.
Also because the hall and the kitchen are so open, there is a power dynamic shift or sharing of these spaces when during the times of the day where the power of the space is with one person but is given up for a certain amount of time to some other person depending on their need. Even if a space is shared, the ownership of the domain still remains with one person and is able to dictate the change of power of the space. This creates a lot of different spaces which have different environments even if they are at the same physical location but at a different time. By just who is occupying the space, you change the sense of the space by who is occupying it and what time they are occupying the space at and what they are doing in the space.
An absence of a person who's gone outside also changes this dynamic, and because my father the most of the day is outside, the dynamic of the bedroom changes or the hall changes. And during different times of the day, the occupation of spaces change too. This creates a constantly changing dynamic of intimate spaces and social spaces which create different environments where things are appropriate to do and not appropriate to do during certain times. Where in which for example, I know when I can't watch the TV because either my mother is using it or my grandfather is using it. But this also creates an environment where space is used by whoever requires it and that can be adjusted through time.