Zeynep Gül BaĞan

Department of Architecture, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
bagan24@itu.edu.tr

Mimesis as an Escape Route in Architecture: Hilde Heynen’s Perception of Mimesis and its Critique

https://www.doi.org/10.66966/COTAA.2025.18

Since antiquity, the relationship between ownership, gender, and spatial mobility has shaped social roles, particularly through the notion of privacy. In modernity, dichotomies such as privacy/ publicity, female/male, and interior/exterior have imposed rigid spatial boundaries. These oppositions can be critically reexamined through the concept of movement — also a product of modernity — in relation to gender. Hilde Heynen asserts that the concept of house is historically constructed through the domestication of women and that privacy has been transformed int o a spatial condition attached to femininity. The essence lies in the shell, in the architectural boundaries that define and confine. In this context, the house is not a static entity but a dynamic construct open to reinterpretation. This study proposes that mimesis’s dynamic, transformative nature may challenge the fixed oppositions within gendered architecture. The relationship between the house and mimesis — when viewed beyond binaries — reveals contradictions but also new potentials for spatial rethinking. Firstly, Adorno’s concept of subject-object transformation will be explored to understand how architects, as cultural mediators, contribute to the reproduction of modern housing dichotomies. These include distinctions such as feminine/masculine, public/private, and interior/exterior, which structure the built environment. Secondly, it will be argued that the house itself has acquired a mimetic character due to its historical and material contextualization, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. This reading positions the house as a conceptual and physical space where gendered roles, spatial norms, and symbolic meanings are constantly produced, reproduced, and potentially subverted

Keywords: mimesis; domesticity; femininity; mobility; dwelling