In The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre invites his readers to ‘consider a house’:

Lefebvre's ‘critical analysis’ is instructive, for it helps defamiliarise this most ubiquitous and unassuming of sites. His account vividly demonstrates that domestic space is in fact not as solid and inert as it so often seems. Rather, houses are complexes of forces and flows, and are connected to the wider world in myriad ways. Crucially, dispelling the illusion of a house's discreteness and immobility helps to combat the widespread and profoundly ideological conceptualisation of space as a neutral container whose only purpose is to receive and maintain whatever has been placed within it. (Such a view, of course, makes impossible an understanding of space as socially produced, and works against an appreciation of the ways spatial forms engender social relations.) On the other hand, Lefebvre acknowledges that the mode of analysis he has exemplified risks substituting a place's practical character with a fetishised abstraction in which ‘users’ cannot recognise themselves, and against which it is impossible to ‘conceive of adopting a critical stance’. Indeed, Lefebvre contends that most forms of representation, and visual modes in particular, trade in the same kinds of abstraction, which entail the detachment of ‘pure form from its impure content– from lived time, everyday time’.