Fantasy and Architecture
Man, his world view, his home.

Man begins as a child.
The child begins in his surroundings.
This child began in and with nature.
The forms in nature and in the child himself are the material he works with.
He works with it to feel good and to find the first forms of safety.
The dream that was there from before his birth...

The first house was the mother’s womb.

The first house is round.

But in that round space and from it, exploration is continued and given form in play.
Fantasy accumulates matter and develops.
The child’s fantasy never lets go of its hold.
Everything goes step by step, from form to form.

Out of the round develops the square.

In this book Tonny gives many different examples to illustrate the clear connection between a child’s development, the human search for intimacy and adventure, fantasy, and the image that the child receives of the world through its continuous searching and finding. She also shows how all these things are in turn closely connected to the forms of the home that human beings search and find for themselves.

Tonny Zwollo has accomplished this with much fantasy and poetry, but also through an orderly presentation of the subject matter. It is something that stimulates fantasy and encourages architects to return for inspiration to the ‘archetypes’, the primal forms whose presence we find missing so often: our great technological abilities do not mean that we have to be ashamed of dreaming.


In the first chapter of ‘The Savage Mind’ Claude Lévi-Strauss writes:

This need for order underlies all of what we call primitive thinking, but only so far as it is the basis of all thinking: for if we start out from what is common to all thought, we will have easier access to forms of thought that seem very strange to us.

In my view Tonny Zwollo’s book is based on this way of thinking.

Bert Schierbeek