









































how not to be at home in one’s home: 
adorno’s critique of architectural 
reason

matt waggoner

Adorno wrote prolifically about modernism in 
culture and the arts, but little has been written about 
whether or in what form he might have addressed 
architectural concerns. The project of  exploring 
this potentially fruitful intersection has been helped 
in the last couple of  decades by authors from 
philosophy and critical theory contrasting his ideas 
about dwelling with Heidegger’s and by architectural 
theorists considering the import of  his aesthetic 
theory.1 If  these fall shy of  the more immediate 
connections to architecture that some have hoped 
to uncover, this is because Adorno almost never 
wrote about specific buildings and their designers 
(which is the kind of  specificity that you do find in 
what he wrote about music and literature). Neither 
did he publish any texts dedicated exclusively to 
architecture or dwelling, which is not to say that 
he never wrote about them or that architectural 
concerns are absent from his work. Adorno’s 
writings on dwelling and architecture live here and 
there, emerging and then moving on to surface later, 
if  not often as direct commentary then as a kind of  
architectural gaze his thinking sometimes employs. 
Dwelling and architecture exist like exiles in his 
writings even though the question of  dwelling—
of  what it means to inhabit social and space-time 
worlds as embodied beings—lies as much at the core 
of  Adorno’s philosophy as it did in Heidegger’s. In 
Adorno’s case, the fact that dwelling resides there 
as restlessly as it does is a stylistic impression of  the 
theory itself.  

              the 
question of 

dwelling... lies 
as much at the 

core of Adorno’s 
philosophy as it 
did in Heidegger’s

“

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     I begin by revisiting one of  his instances of  sustained architectural 
specificity. Though it is no more than a couple of  pages, Minima 
Moralia’s (1951) aphorism A18, “Shelter for the Shelterless,” is packed 
with observations about houses and housing that epitomize Adorno’s 
incisive brand of  cultural criticism.2 I suggest the passage should firstly be 
seen in relation to the opening sections of  Le Corbusier’s Towards a New 
Architecture (1927).3 Adorno’s pronouncement at the start of  “Shelter for 
the Shelterless” that “dwelling, in the proper sense, is impossible today” is 
usually set against Heidegger’s desire to recover an original, pure dwelling 
practice. From 1949 (the year Adorno returned to Germany) until 1951, 
they were both working on problems of  dwelling, culminating in the 
publication of  Minima Moralia in the Spring of  1951 and Heidegger’s 
delivery of  the lectures “Building Dwelling Thinking” and “... Poetically 
Man Dwells ...” later that year.4 But the question of  whether they 
consciously responded to one another in these texts and what level 
of  interaction they might have had may well be less significant for the 
purposes of  analysis and interpretation than the fact that Corbusier’s text 
was by all appearances a common touchstone for both of  them. When 
Adorno also writes in “Shelter for the Shelterless” that “the house is past,” 
for instance, he echoes Corbusier’s claim that “the house will fall to dust.”5 

     To acknowledge points of  convergence between Adorno, Heidegger, 
and Corbusier is not to equivocate, and indeed, the fault lines between 
Adorno and Corbusier are conspicuous (just as they are with Heidegger). 
Corbusier identifies housing as the architectural question, a “problem 
for the epoch.” Setting an agenda for architecture in the 20th century, 
Towards a New Architecture sets up the house as one of  modernity’s central 
“problems,” which modern architecture was poised to solve by harnessing 
processes of  mass production. By contrast, “Shelter for the Shelterless” 
insists that dwelling in modern life is a problem without a solution. More 
to the point, and bearing in mind Germany’s “final solution” and Stalin’s 
“Death solves all problems,” Adorno held that what has to be resisted are 
the usually ominous implications of  guarantees of  a wholesale solution. 
Adorno’s anxiety about the problem solving attitude was not simply a 
reaction to the historical events and conditions that shaped his life. It 
was also, for him, a philosophical claim (a counterpoint to the positivistic 
tendencies of  his day) nicely summarized in his early examination of  
Husserl’s philosophy:

The idea that a philosopher must produce a fixed set of  irrefutable findings ... 
presupposes that all the tasks he sets for himself  can be fulfilled, that there can 
be an answer to every question he raises. This assumption, however, is disputable. 



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It is possible that there are philosophical tasks which, 
although arising necessarily in a coherent process of  
thinking, can not be fulfilled; thus, they lead to an 
impasse … which has its roots in inherent antagonisms 
of  the problem itself.6

This is the root of  Adorno’s much-discussed 
negative utopianism. It is why he regarded the 
highest tribute that can be paid to utopia as the 
refusal to entertain premature substitutes or to gloss 
over the persistence of  contradictions forestalling 
its genuine realization. The paradoxical expression 
of  such an act of  fidelity is that in order to be true 
to utopia, one has to resist it. 

     While this could be seen as a manifesto 
for architectural pessimism—an inability to 
countenance Corbusier’s hope for an engineered 
utopia—from Adorno’s standpoint it is about 
safeguarding against the falsification of  utopia. The 
goal was to preserve the real and future possibility of  
a society transformed so that living with others and 
otherness, without doing so at anyone’s expense, is 
both publicly supported and privately possible. In a 
word, the obstacle to such possibilities for Adorno 
is most certainly capitalism, but more precisely it is 
the necessity in market societies to secure shelter 
through exchange and what he calls (for reasons 
discussed below) the “property relation.”

     Adorno’s generation of  intellectuals witnessed 
capitalism at a time when it was rapidly and very 
effectively learning how to manage the internal 
contradictions that Marx suspected would lead to its 
self-incurred demise. To Adorno and his colleagues 
in the 1920s and 1930s (the Frankfurt School’s 
formative years), the hope of  a successful transition 
away from capitalism seemed increasingly fraught 
as the various countermovements protesting the 
liberal model proved themselves to be deformed 
versions of  the same “identitarian” (totalizing, 
universalizing) logic of  equivalence implicit in 
capitalism. As long as the underlying contradictions 

dwelling in 
modern life is a 

problem without 
a solution

“
”



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of  society were going to remain unaltered in any substantial way for the 
foreseeable future, faithfulness to the idea of  the right life was going to 
necessitate refusals to accept its semblance, no matter how well-planned or 
well-intentioned the proposals. His rejections of  the idea of  a “blueprint” 
for utopia suggest that he sensed an affinity between two trends: on the 
one hand, the sweeping programs advanced by political parties claiming 
to once-and-for-all solve the problems of  modern society (interpreted as 
cultural degradation in Germany and inequality and alienation in Russia); 
on the other hand, the similarly sweeping proposals advanced by architects 
for master-planned communities and cities (Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse 
in 1930, Wright’s Broadacre City in 1932). One of  Adorno’s concerns 
about architectural blueprints for utopia was that they failed to account 
for the persistence of  fundamental contradictions like those inherent in 
the property relation. His other concern about this penchant for master 
plans was that they seemed to harbor the same totalitarian tendencies as 
the parties. 

     Still, Corbusier’s criticisms of  the “cult of  home” and his insistence 
that the problem of  housing remained unsolved resonates with part of  the 
argument of  “Shelter for the Shelterless,” whose title, it is worth noting, is 
borrowed from a chapter of  Siegfried Kracauer’s The Salaried Masses (1930). 
Kracauer tutored Adorno in philosophy during the latter’s precocious teen 
years, poring over such onerous texts as Kant’s Critique of  Pure Reason. 
Kracauer was a trained and practicing architect in those days and The 
Salaried Masses would become one of  the first critical examinations of  the 
birth of  middle class labor environs like the office space.7 It interrogates 
the fin de siècle social fantasy that cubicle life provided respite and greater 
self-determination than the oppressive drudgery of  the factory space, an 
assumption Kracauer challenges by stressing the mechanization of  office 
work, Kafkaesque means of  control implemented by office planners and 
new managerial systems, and the onset of  an even more paralyzing work-
incited ennui. 

     Similarly, “Shelter for the Shelterless” insists that shelter fantasies 
cannot be abstracted from the material conditions that make optimistic 
programs of  escape, refuge, or shelter-based “problem solving” acts of  
wishful thinking. The conditions informing Adorno’s spatial-architectural 
pessimism in “Shelter for the Shelterless” include the wartime decimation 
of  the housing stock (Germans, including Heidegger, called it a “housing 
shortage,” which Adorno thought was specious, a way of  ignoring the 
past); the exclusions and the violence of  state-sponsored nativism 
(promoting authentic ties to home and homeland); the mechanizing 



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effects of  technology and mass production on 
all forms of  interiority (including the invasion of  
the factory model, with its compulsory discipline 
and injunction to produce and be useful, into the 
private sphere); and the inescapable means-end 
logic of  the property relation. Adorno’s adamance 
about the underlying conditions of  dwelling and 
the impossibility of  extricating oneself  from their 
contradictions responds as much to Heidegger 
as to Corbusier, despite the obvious tension 
between Heidegger’s concerns about technological 
reason and Corbusier’s technophilia. Adorno’s 
disagreement in both instances is not with the claim 
that we were not building right, but with the claim 
that we have the capacity to definitively resolve 
housing’s problems here and now as if  they had 
only to do with misguided conceptions of  genuine 
or optimally efficient dwelling and not with the 
economic foundations of  society.

     “Shelter for the Shelterless” illustrates the 
unresolved nature of  dwelling’s problems by 
throwing a spotlight on some of  the attempts to 
evade them and how they fail. German post-war 
“traditional residences” are contaminated by the 
“musty pact of  family interests.” Regardless of  one’s 
relation to what took place in them, one cannot live 
in them free of  guilt. “Functional modern houses” 
like Corbusier’s machines for living in facilitate 
the “straying of  the factory model into the private 
sphere.” “Period-style houses” that have been 
restored and then purchased as historical novelties 
are mausoleums embalming their inhabitants alive. 
“Hotels and furnished rooms” sought after in some 
avant-garde attempt to sidestep the trappings of  
bourgeois ownership make a mockery of  those 
who really have been driven into homelessness 
or provisional housing situations. Bombed-out 
cities and the abandoned structures of  what had 
recently been labor and concentration camps, but 
are now too politically toxic to repurpose, have 
become omens of  the fate of  all housing. Like 

architectural 
blueprints for 

utopia...failed 
to account for 

the persistence 
of fundamental 

contradictions

“

”



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the job that one needs in order to avoid homelessness in a society that 
commodifies shelter, these neglected structures serve as concrete symbols 
of  the disposable nature of  everyone and everything in late modernism 
after they no longer prove useful. And finally, Adorno cites the Bauhaus-
inspired craft movement in architecture, furniture, and design that had 
set out to eschew form in favor of  function but eventually backslid into 
stylized, curvilinear ornamentation, which is precisely what Corbusier, 
Loos, Gropius, and others indicted as bourgeois pretension.8

     Adorno offers the reader a compendium of  what are still contemporary 
tactics for evading the contradictions of  dwelling. We could read these 
six pseudo-solutions as descriptions of  various chic-urban attempts today 
on the part of  city planners, private developers, architects, and shelter 
consumers to make dwelling strategies seem like solutions to bigger 
problems. The argument of  “Shelter for the Shelterless” is that none of  
them resolves anything because the underlying issues remain unchanged. 
Nothing escapes the predicament of  dwelling in modern life and our 
attempts, clever and noble though they may be, are shabby conceits and 
naively complicit. 

     He credits the inadequacy of  these solutions to the structural constraints 
of  the property relation, which is of  course something most architects 
admit and have experienced first-hand. There are two explanations for 
Adorno’s preference for the term “property relation.” First, when the 
Institute for Social Research relocated to Columbia University in the 
1930s (because it was forced to shutter when National Socialism rose to 
power), it began avoiding anything that could have been perceived in the 
U.S. context as overtly Marxist terminology. They self-censored terms 
like communism and revolution, even substituting seemingly innocuous 
terms such as “market society” and “capitalism” for a variety of  more 
generic designations like “exchange society,” “instrumental reason,” and 
the “property relation.”9 But the second reason Adorno preferred the 
language of  the property relation is because it allowed him to accentuate 
the claim that property is indeed a relation, not a thing, which is to say that 
property is the quintessential example of  what Adorno and his colleagues, 
inspired by Georg Lukacs’ writings on the subject, called reification.10 

    Heidegger opens his remarks in “Building Dwelling Thinking” by 
saying that dwelling is about belonging. The difference between Adorno’s 
philosophy of  dwelling and Heidegger’s has, in a nutshell, to do with 
Adorno’s suggestion that belonging in communitarian and contractual 
models of  inclusion and ownership is an extension of  the logic of  
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to belong in those ways is to be incorporated—to 
“rest in the preserve of  Being” (Heidegger) or to be 
assimilated as an appendage of  the self  (Locke)—
thereby nullifying the otherness and particularity 
(the “non-identity,” in Adorno’s phraseology) of  
the thing or person that belongs. To insist on the 
word “relation” when speaking of  the system of  
private property is to recognize that everything that 
belongs (a home or a homeland, for instance) is 
only naively and ideologically the exclusive domain 
of  those whose claims of  belonging are deemed 
legitimate. All property, including every home 
and every homeland, exists in relation to what lies 
beyond it, which our ways of  speaking and thinking 
about them disavow.   

     Adorno’s reflections on the nature and scope of  
the property relation go beyond architecture’s often 
complacent recognition of  the constraints of  client 
expectations and market demands. The deepest 
problem of  housing in a capitalist society is that 
it is a basic need that can only be purchased as a 
commodity (by most) with wages—money earned 
by finding purchasers for another commodity, 
labor—in a market that will not always need to 
increase production to full employment levels and 
is sometimes economically compelled to decrease 
it by shrinking the labor force.11 This is the double 
bind of  a market-based shelter economy. In addition 
to the basic economic contradiction that makes 
dwelling, in the proper sense, impossible, Adorno 
unpacks the moral facets of  its conundrum as well, 
insisting that regardless of  one’s relation to it (as 
property owners, renters, or participants in one 
of  shelter’s sub-economies—squatting, camping, 
living in rehabilitated refuse) every relation to home 
(and to homeland) is implicated in a system that 
entails one kind of  unsheltering or another. 

     He argues, for instance, that there is no morally 
responsible way to own because ownership is 
inherently exclusive, always taking something from 



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someone somewhere in the social ensemble (contrary to Locke’s claim in 
the Second Treatise that it does not); that the application of  techniques of  
mass production to housing strips them, as it does all commodities, of  a 
singular relation to the owner, negating the claims of  genuine belonging; 
that there is no way out of  entanglement since to try and extricate oneself  
from the system of  shelter and shelter impropriety would leave one 
intolerably exposed; that the interiors of  houses have become scenes of  
pseudo-autonomy from an external world that has, nonetheless, thoroughly 
intruded upon interiority. “Wrong life,” Adorno concluded, “cannot be 
lived rightly.”12 Economically, morally, and in many cases physically, we are 
all somehow unhoused. 

     It was perhaps too hasty, though, to have suggested that Adorno 
rejects all forms of  problem solving. He does offer something, but as 
one should expect from a consummate dialectician, it takes the form of  
a paradox. In “Shelter for the Shelterless,” he holds that the solution to 
the predicaments of  housing will consist in living in one’s home in full 
knowledge that if  one owns (for instance), one does not singularly own 
anything, and that in some sense it is owners who are objectified and who 
become possessions. Looking beyond its effects on owners, ownership 
participates in the unsheltering of  others (a claim that can be illustrated 
in many ways, one of  which is the well-studied regional correlation today 
between increases in property values and subsequent increases in eviction 
rates). 

    There is no way out of  these kinds of  entanglement, so the only 
responsible course of  action, Adorno claims (to the consternation of  
many of  his Left-wing peers and readers, still today), is to participate in 
an “uncommitted, suspended way,” and “not to attach weight to it.”13 This 
would be hardly different than the knee-jerk architectural shrug were it 
not for an astonishing additional claim he makes: one must “learn how 
not to be at home in one’s home.”14 A good deal can be said about this 
deceptively compact formulation: it appears to have originated from 
Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way (1845), which Adorno quotes in his 
first post-habilitation book-length study of  Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard: 
Construction of  the Aesthetic, 1933); Walter Benjamin includes it in his Arcades 
Project (finally published in 1999 but written in the 1930s), not citing the 
original but Adorno’s rendition of  it; Adorno revisits it in Minima Moralia 
(in “Shelter for the Shelterless”) two decades later, ostensibly as a way of  
responding to Nietzsche’s pride at having never been a homeowner, but 
more broadly in response to the aforementioned pseudo-solutions to the 
moral conundrums of  housing in post-war Germany; and it resembles 



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Freud’s concept of  das unheimliche, the uncanny, 
which is to say not homelike, strangely familiar, or 
not at home with oneself  (many of  the Frankfurt 
School’s members, including Adorno, were greatly 
influenced by Freud, who in a 1919 essay describes 
the uncanny as an experience of  strangeness in the 
ordinary).15 

     I think we have to read Adorno’s dictum as 
an entreaty to take up relations to homes and 
homelands—to how we “construct” them 
geographically and architecturally, as well as to 
how we inhabit them—in ways that are not just 
open to neighbors, strangers, and other kinds of  
visitors, including those who have been excluded 
or rendered obsolete by various incarnations of  the 
property relation. Even more radically than that, it 
means that we will need to see ourselves as visitors 
in our own homes, guests of  a sort with no more 
exclusive claim to them than others. His is an ethic 
of  displacement and a politics of  unbelonging that 
starkly contrasts with communitarian and contractual 
traditions of  right, where moral responsibility is 
predicated either on a sense of  belonging within 
a community of  shared norms and identity or on 
the abstract logic of  an equivalent exchange of  
possessions. Adorno’s argument is that in both 
cases, communities and contracts are constituted 
on the model of  the property relation, where the 
good is dependent on claiming sovereignty over 
this place, this identity, this property, claims that 
rely on necessary exclusions. 

      What would be the outcome of  such a dramatically 
reconstituted understanding of  property, home, 
belonging and dwelling? The ethic of  displacement 
points, I suggest, toward the formation of  anti-
communities, ad hoc and provisional aggregations 
of  those who are commonly displaced and for 
which the foundational value that binds people 
together is not identity but non-identity, living with 
difference. Like the uncanny, it would make the 

ownership 
participates in 

the unsheltering 
of others

“
”



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ordinary strange and the stranger at home. 

     This idea of  informal, ad hoc communities and alternative kinships 
appears throughout Adorno’s writings, including his reflections on 
American exile after returning to Germany (in which he wrote warmly 
about the reception he received and about the spirit of  collaboration he 
experienced, despite arriving with a very different methodological and 
theoretical orientation than what was practiced in the U.S. at that time).16 
The question he leads us to ask is how we might live (and design living 
arrangements) in ways that subvert the logic of  exclusive possession, even 
though there is no way to escape it under present conditions. Since choosing 
not to dwell is not an option, and since there is no dwelling in modern life 
that escapes the property relation, how can we “be at home,” how can we 
rethink its meaning and practice—but also how can we develop, design, 
and build housing that installs some new practice of  being at home so that 
home is not a possession that excludes but a relation that invites intimacy 
amid environs of  otherness? How can new paradigms of  constructing 
dwelling systems, structures, and arrangements allow for the mobilization 
of  reciprocal styles of  residence, where residents are visitors and visitors 
are welcomed. To do so would be to address the “problem of  the epoch” 
by modeling housing on the precarity of  the unsheltered exile rather than 
on the security of  the native/owner with so-called authentic ties to place 
and property. 

     Are there pathways from Adorno’s post-war philosophy of  housing 
to the present? I will not labor over the obvious associations with 
contemporary social and political movements like sanctuary cities, the right 
to the city, and the right to housing, except to affirm that these are certainly 
benefactors of  the kind of  reasoning that one finds in Adorno’s writings 
on housing, hospitality, and dwelling. I can think of  other examples as 
well. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of  Law (2017) includes a section near 
the end of  the book in which he permits himself  to speculate on how 
housing segregation could be rectified if  there was political determination 
to do so. He imagines policies aimed at incentivized means of  rolling back 
local zoning practices and federal tax benefits that promote segregated 
housing patterns. This could be accomplished by making tax subsidies 
conditional on the inclusion in wealthy areas of  a sizable percentage of  
affordable housing stock and by mandating aggressive measures to attract 
racially diverse tenants. 

     Rothstein argues that, although the Supreme Court does not currently 
recognize it, the legal justification for such assertive measures is based 
on the fact that it was de jure policies backed by federal and local 



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governments that for decades created and sustained 
housing segregation, and thus government has a 
14th-amendment obligation 
to rectify the consequences 
of  its New Deal-, Civil 
Rights-, and even post-Civil 
Rights-era illegalities. The 
intergenerational effects of  
inclusive housing (through 
access to better-funded 
schools and community 
resources for the children 
of  relocated tenants, 
for instance) would be 
enormously impactful.17 To 
be sure, even this does not 
escape entanglement since it 
involves displacing families 
from neighborhoods in 
which they may have deep 
roots in the community, 
but it also requires wealthy 
neighborhoods to open 
themselves to changes that would fundamentally 
alter the makeup of  those communities as 
well. Measures that make dwelling inclusive 
(particularly in middle and upper-middle class white 
neighborhoods) by dismantling and repairing the 
harms of  housing segregation would be consistent, 
I think, with what it could mean in a practical, 
present-day sense to learn how not to be at home 
in one’s home. 

    In the period between 1964 and 1968, prominent 
voices in the civil rights movement, including 
President Johnson himself, became intensely vocal 
about the incapacity of  the new civil rights laws—
outlawing discrimination in public accommodations 
and extending the right to vote—to overcome 
segregation and its direct effect on income and 
opportunity inequality.18 Martin Luther King, Jr. 
argued that expanding the quantity, access, and 

        king’s 
rhetoric 

routinely 
employed 

architectural 
metaphors

“

”

Figure 1:  Martin Luther 
King Jr. Memorial, 
Washington, D. C. 



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location of  low income housing in the U.S. was a necessary step toward 
racial and economic justice. Usually known for its theological imagery, 
King’s rhetoric routinely employed architectural metaphors as well, such 
as when he said that “true compassion is more than flinging a coin to 
a beggar ... It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs 
restructuring”19; and when he lamented to Harry Belafonte that after all 
of  their efforts and the eventual passage of  the civil rights laws in the 
1960s, he realized that economic inequality linked to housing segregation 
would continue unabated. He worried that they had done little more than 
integrate into a “burning house.” (Figure 1).

     In 1967, King adopted the image of  a “world house” which informed 
an essay of  the same name: 

A famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of  suggested plots 
for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: “A widely 
separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.” This is 
the great new problem of  mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great 
“world house” in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and 
Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant,  Moslem and Hindu—a 
family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never 
again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.20

The image of  a world house asks us to see human beings as common 
inhabitants of  the earth who are mutually affected by one another’s 
suffering and insecurity. It is an image of  living with difference, which is 
not only suggestive of  welcoming and responding to the other. Implicit in 
its concept is the idea that I can lay no exclusive claim to a singular instance 
of  housing, homeland, social belonging, or citizenship since there is but 
one planetary mesh of  interconnected housings. King tries to reimagine 
the shelter of  physical residence, political recognition, and economic well-
being that white society assured for itself  at others’ expense as a site of  
ordinariness that has to become uncanny, defamiliarized. As a radically 
exteriorized conception of  what it means to be housed, this image is 
reminiscent of  what Adorno tries to accomplish with a seemingly very 
different kind of  spatial-architectural metaphor. 

     Adorno’s “no man’s lands” are playful in their discourse with the 
meaning of  utopia, which is another kind of  no-place. To impute utopian 
significance to places whose historical references include dumping 
grounds and the space between two fronts in trench warfare (where the 
carnage of  bombed buildings and disfigured bodies abound) is tongue-in-
cheek, a conscious attempt on Adorno’s part to insist that utopias will not 
yet come in the form of  successfully implemented solutions to sweeping 



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problems. For now, they will appear in the rubble 
of  failed solutions, the refuse of  damaged life. “The 
resurrection of  the dead,” Adorno wrote, “will take 
place in the auto-graveyards.”21 But no man’s lands 
are not only scenes of  destruction and obsolescence. 
They are also sites of  contiguity, non-spaces of  in 
betweenness that lie beyond the boundaries of  
regions of  exclusive possession and control. To 
inhabit the no man’s land is thus to exteriorize the 
self, to abandon the security of  the carapace for the 
vulnerability and precarity of  border regions. No 
man’s lands are deconstructive zones of  contact 
and cross-contamination where binarily conceived 
relations no longer hold, relations between subject/
object, self/other, mind/body, resident/stranger, 
life/death, reason/affect, utopia/dystopia, home/
exile.  

Adorno’s no man’s lands acknowledge that our 
materiality is an inescapably shared feature of  our 
existence as embodied beings, making us both 
dependent on and responsive to that which is 
outside us. This is true because of  our need to seek 
food and shelter amid external environs and social 
arrangements and because of  historically specific 
intrusions into interiority—mental, affective, and 
aesthetic interiority through the culture industry, 
architectural interiority through the mass production 
of  houses and the penetration of  the spaces of  work 
and life by new forms of  influence and control, and 
the interiority of  social and political belonging, 
when in the name of  authentic ties to home and 
homeland one is dislocated, either into exile or to 
the concentration camp. This is why, rather than 
Kierkegaard’s constructions of  selfhood through 
images of  interiority (his touchstones tended to be 
the accoutrements of  the 19th-century bourgeois 
apartment), Adorno preferred Kafka, whose 
characters could not find refuge. They were instead 
expelled onto barren surfaces, exoskeletal and 
exposed. In reference to Kafka, Adorno once called 
upon the image of  no man’s lands to describe the 

           The image 
of a world 

house asks us 
to see human 

beings as common 
inhabitants of 

the earth who 
are mutually 

affected by 
one another’s 
suffering and 

insecurity

“

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unlocatable position of  characters who suffered an “unsuccessful death,” 
having been so thoroughly depleted and made obsolete that, though not 
physically dead, they exist in a kind of  socially dead/undead state.22 

     But like the unsuccessful deaths in Kafka’s stories, Adorno sees 
promise in the precarity and dislocation of  no man’s lands. He sees 
them, for one thing, as scenes that expose us, and for that reason they 
also expose the real nature of  embodied life. The shared frailty of  bodies 
and of  the environs upon which they depend is a reminder that to be an 
embodied being is to be something that lives outside itself  (this is another 
sense in which Adorno used the phrase no man’s land, to describe the 
experience of  exteriorization). In other words, embodied life contains 
within its phenomenology a template of  what we mean by dwelling. The 
necessity of  corporeal beings to seek housing in a place, in relations of  
both physical and social geography, is never purely subjective and cannot 
be individualized. The sensorium of  embodied subjectivity is not even 
something that happens on its own; it is enlivened by contact with 
and exposure to other bodies and bodily states. Embodiment bears an 
essential relation to dwelling because to inhabit a body is to inhabit bodies 
as such, a common corporeality stitched together by the reflexivity of  the 
touch and by collective modes of  meeting shared needs and responding 
to shared vulnerability. The human experience of  dwelling begins with 
embodiment, with the fact that consciousness is inseparable from the 
somatic and the sensorial, which are, like everything physical, inherently 
responsive to, dependent upon, and passively and actively bound up with 
that which is external to consciousness. Modes of  dwelling in bodies and 
in space are not those of  enclosure and sovereignty but of  cohabitation 
and an ethically enlivening non-sovereignty.

      No one ever singularly inhabits a body because embodiment is not, as 
we like to imagine it, a state of  being a self-sufficient thing. Its existence 
is inseparable from and can only be constituted as such within a matrix of  
contact and connectivity that can either prove sustaining or detrimental, 
depending on the quality of  the bonds. What we should add to this is that 
the scope of  that which stitches me into the world is not exclusively the 
interfacing of  organic bodies. It includes the kind of  tethering that binds 
bodies together by housing them in time and space. There are other ways 
that I come to exist as a place-holding being in the world and that I am 
delivered into and hopefully preserved in such constitutive contact with it 
and with others. For if, as Judith Butler argues in Senses of  the Subject, it is 
not the case that there is already a pre-existent “I” prior to being touched, 
but that the touch instead enlivens me as a feeling, sensing self, then we must 



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also maintain that there is no way to conceive of  the 
human being apart from the kind of  tethering and 
contiguous relations that enable me to inhabit the 
external world.23 We are fastened to one another by 
virtue of  our common embodiment, but our bodies 
are also intertwined with one another and with the 
world inside a global tissue of  connected environs 
that includes such things as streets, neighborhoods, 
cities, infrastructures, and coverings, the matrix 
of  shelters and shelter arrangements in which we 
dwell. It is within these structures that we reside 
with varying degrees of  satiety and security, some 
more enlivening than others. Just as the body does 
not enclose us from others, shelter does not enclose 
us from that which surrounds us and in relation to 
which we are only ostensibly distant and distinct. 
Rather, dwelling is the activity and shelter the fabric 
with which the self  is extended into and implicated 
in worlds of  being and belonging, which I take to be 
what King envisioned when he adopted the image 
of  a world house and what Adorno envisioned 
when he upheld no man’s lands as potentially 
fruitful shared experiences of  propulsion into 
scenes that exteriorize us, over which none of  us 
can claim exclusive nativity or possession. 

     This brings me, finally, to the other architecturally 
compelling feature of  no man’s lands in Adorno’s 
works. It is that Adorno’s models of  living with 
difference—aggregations of  the commonly 
dislocated and the kinds of  alternative bonds that 
crystallize among them—invite redefinition of  the 
meaning of  housing and home, of  the designed 
character of  dwelling and the social arrangements 
it facilitates. Repositioning exilic states as the 
foundation for ethical responsibility, Adorno inverts 
the relation between home and exile such that our 
model of  home is fashioned after the non-exclusive 
relations that characterize communities of  shared 
displacement. This aspect of  Adorno’s philosophy 
of  dwelling is just as consistent with King’s interest 
in an expanded and exteriorized conception of  the 

          utopias...
will appear in the 

rubble of failed 
solutions,  the 

refuse of 
damaged life

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house as it is with different models of  family and kinship (which were also 
present in King’s reflections on the world house). For it is on the basis of  a 
traditional concept of  kinship that homes and homelands have historically 
acquired their meaning as scenes of  common identity and exclusive claims 
of  the right of  belonging and possession. Learning how not to be at 
home in one’s home will necessitate, then, learning how to forge bonds of  
belonging that are predicated on intimacy and proximity between aliens 
and strangers rather than kin and countrymen. Reimagining houses and 
housing as no man’s lands enlists us in the project of  reconstituting the 
social arrangements that have traditionally organized and orchestrated 
shelter, and it includes risking their contamination with conceptually 
promiscuous alternative cohabitation structures. These would no longer be 
arrangements whose bonds are rooted in exclusive claims of  cultural and 
genetic belonging, nor the claims of  contractually legitimized, inherited or 
purchased belonging. 

    It is difficult, for obvious reasons, for us to imagine dwelling and 
housing apart from the logic of  possessive exclusion rooted in relations 
of  the family and private property. We know that under the circumstances, 
when territorial sovereignty, patriarchal vestiges, and the property relation 
circumscribe every form of  dwelling, we would intolerably expose ourselves 
to insecure states if  we did not participate in the shelter-based economy 
according to its rules. This is why Adorno’s “solution” cannot take the 
form of  a master-planned blueprint for utopian dwelling. What he offers 
us instead is an architectural counter-image to the blueprint by comparing 
the task of  reimagining dwelling and housing to images from land surveys. 
The blueprint is an abstraction, a rationalization of  reality, whereas aerial 
photographs of  the surface of  the earth capture the materiality of  the 
terrain. In “Notes on Kafka,” having likened the unsuccessful death to a 
no man’s land, Adorno argues that Kafka’s stories function like wartime 
aerial photographs of  demolished cities, neighborhoods, buildings, and 
homes. He describes this function as the production of  an impossible 
view from the standpoint of  an as yet unforeseeable utopia, “hell seen 
from the perspective of  salvation.” His writing “feigns a standpoint from 
which the creation appears as lacerated and mutilated as it conceives hell 
to be.” Recalling Jews in the middle ages who were tortured, executed, 
and hung head down, Adorno tells us that “Kafka, the land-surveyor, 
photographs the earth’s surface just as it must have appeared to these 
victims during the endless hours of  their dying.”24 When Adorno describes 
these views of  the extremes of  exposure, suffering, and insecurity as 
the standpoint of  salvation, he is suggesting that we need to invert our 
notions of  pessimism and optimism. Genuine optimism does not conceal 



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realities beneath abstractions and pseudo-solutions. 
Its conception of  utopia is not that of  the blueprint 
but of  the preservation, if  only in thought 
(whose focal point is like an image from afar), 
of  an as yet unforeseeable transformation of  the 
material conditions for dwelling and cohabitation. 
“To include [Kafka] among the pessimists, the 
existentialists of  despair, is as misguided as to make 
him a prophet of  salvation” since “the light-source 
which shows the world’s crevices to be infernal is 
the optimal one.”25

     Ever since the ideal cities of  Corbusier and 
Wright, the “optimal solutions” of  architecture 
to the problems of  housing have not captured 
the depth of  the damages incurred by dwelling 
because of  its enmeshment in the property 
relation. Rothstein and others remind us how those 
blueprints, once approximated in the development 
of  New Deal housing programs and postwar 
suburbs, led to the even deeper entrenchment 
of  racially exclusive property relations. With the 
aid of  federal support and local zoning practices, 
the approaches they inspired contributed to the 
intransigence of  segregated housing patterns 
and the intergenerational economic debilitation 
of  African Americans that resulted from those 
patterns. In no small part, ideological notions of  
the proper family model played a role in justifying 
the exclusions of  housing as well, both because 
of  racially coded discrimination against single 
parent families and because of  the inviolable status 
accorded the nuclear family and individual property, 
effectively shielding them against government’s 
ability to prevent or police the segregationist 
practices of  developers, real estate agents, banks, 
and neighborhood associations.    

    Adorno’s critique of  architectural reason 
is an immanent critique that thinks through 
the categories and concepts of  architectural 
perspectives and practices. What is architecture to 

 adorno’s 
‘solution’ cannot 
take the form of  

a master-
planned 

blueprint for 
utopian dwelling  

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do when its entire task is beset by the ineluctable contradictions of  the 
property relation? Adorno’s answer is that architecture must do what art 
did during the period of  high modernism and what artists at its periphery 
(such as Gordon Matta-Clark) have intimated in their works. Architecture 
must become anti-architectural, not in the sense that it no longer plans, 
designs, and builds dwellings and dwelling arrangements, but that it does 
so in ways that feign an impossible standpoint (rather than blueprinting 
false solutions) by reimagining dwelling as no man’s lands of  exteriorized 
contiguity and dwelling’s ideal social arrangements as alternative kinships. 
It has to learn how not to be at home in its traditional mandate to build 
spaces that reinforce our preconceptions of  proper social space. Dwelling 
in the proper sense may be impossible today, but its future may be what is, 
til then, deemed improper. 

Endnotes

1.  Samir Gandesha, “Leaving Home: On Adorno and Heidegger” in 
Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Redwood City, CA: Stanford 
University Press, 2007, pp. 101-28); Hilde Heynen, Architecture and 
Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

2.  Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (New 
York: Verso, 1974). I use “Shelter for the Shelterless” to translate “Asyl 
für Obdachlose” rather than Jephcott’s “Refuge for the Homeless.” For 
an extended investigation into “Shelter for the Shelterless,” see Waggoner, 
Unhoused: Adorno and the Problem of  Dwelling (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 2018).

3.  Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, Frederick Etchells, trans. 
(New York: Dover, 1986). Most readers will be familiar with the history 
of  the text and its title. Originally published in French in 1923 as Vers 
Une Architecture, the first English translation by Etchells appeared in 1927, 
in which the title was interpreted as Towards a New Architecture. In 2007, 
Getty published a new English translation returning Corbusier’s title to 
the original Toward an Architecture. When referring to the book’s title in 
what follows, I follow the Etchells translation since it remains the most 
widely used version of  the text in English.

4.  Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. Albert Hofstadter, trans. 
(New York: Harper Collins, 1977, pp. 141-160, 209-227).

5.  Heidegger questions the role of  the house in a far less pointed and 
pithy way in “Building Dwelling Thinking”: “Today’s houses may even be 
well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, 



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but do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee 
that dwelling occurs in them?” (p. 144).

6.  Theodor Adorno, “Husserl and the Problem 
of  Idealism,” Journal of  Philosophy (Vol. 37, no. 1, 
January 4, 1940: pp. 5–18).

7.  Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and 
Distraction in Weimar. Quintin Hoare, trans. (New 
York: Verso, 1998).

8.  Adorno, 1974: pp. 38-39. 

9. The Institute for Social Research was the 
institution, founded in Frankfurt under the auspices 
of  its University, that gave birth to the group of  
scholars known as the Frankfurt School, some of  
whom were less directly connected to the Institute 
than others. See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: 
A History of  the Frankfurt School and the Institute for 
Social Research, 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of  
California Press, 1973).

10.  Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: 
Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 
1971).

11.  Marx, of  course, goes one step further when he 
argues that even labor shrinkages are economically 
strategic for capital. They create what he calls 
an industrial reserve army: unemployed (often 
homeless or insecurely sheltered) workers who are 
ready at a moment’s notice to report to the factory 
or the office as soon as their labor is again required.

12.  Adorno, 1974, p. 39.

13.  Ibid.

14.  Ibid.

15. Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of  the 
Aesthetic. Robert Hullot-Kentor, trans. (Minneapolis: 
University of  Minneapolis Press, 1989); Walter 
Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Howard Eiland 
and Kevin McLaughlin, trans. (Cambridge, MA: 
Belknap Press of  Harvard University Press, 1999); 
Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” in The Standard 
Edition of  the Complete Psychological Works of  Sigmund 



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Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, pp. 
217-256.  I suspect there are still more reference points for the quote that 
I am not yet aware of.

16. Theodor Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of  a European Scholar 
in America” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: 
Columbia University Press, 1998, pp. 215-242); Adorno, “Foreword” in 
Prisms. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, trans. (Cambridge, 
MA: MIT Press, 1967, pp. 7-8).

17.  Richard Rothstein, The Color of  Law: A Forgotten History of  How Our 
Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017).

18.  See Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold 
History of  Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. 
Norton and Company, 2006).

19.  Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the 
Color of  Disaster (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007).

20.  Martin Luther King, Jr., “The World House” in Where Do We Go From 
Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968, p. 177)

21.  Adorno 1967, p. 271.

22.  Adorno 1967, pp. 270-271.

23.  Judith Butler, Senses of  the Subject (New York: Fordham University 
Press, 2015).

24.   Adorno 1967, p. 271.

25.  Ibid.


