In her introduction, Susan Bernstein describes “housing problems” as the “limit to thinking” or “desire and necessity to control and contain” indicated by the “facticity of the house” (14). Central to the challenge of her compelling examination is the diversity of the subject matter these problems involve. This extends from the houses and built interiors authors occupied and designed, “actual,” “empirical” houses (3) since made into museums expected to display a “homology between self and house” (89) (Goethe's house in Weimar, Walpole's Strawberry Hill, and Freud's “analytic chamber” [89] in Vienna before and after being reconstituted in London); to the theoretical implications of housing these authors represented in their fictions (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Elective Affinities, The Castle of Otranto), and speculative writings (Goethe's essays on “German Architecture,” Freud's “On the Uncanny” and personal correspondence, H. D.'s reflections on Berggasse 19 in Tribute to Freud); to Derrida's reminder that the original and “only meaning” of “archive” is that of “a house, a domicile” (99), in remarks delivered at the Freud House, London; and, finally, to Heidegger's interweaving of building, residing, and thinking and definition of language as “the house of Being” (“Letter on Humanism” and elsewhere) and George Oppen's incorporation and intercalation of his readings of Heidegger into his long poem, “Route.”

A grammatically ambiguous phrase used by Arendt in describing the problem of conceptual language (with “‘house’” as example) (133–34), “housing problems” thus refers here to “problems” of “housing,” understood as a genitive noun, as well as to those (ill-)contained by “housing,” understood as a gerundive action, problems in which the physical, fictional, and metaphysical or theoretical (sometimes twin of poiesis) are intertwined. Interspersed with Bernstein's careful disentanglement and interrogation of these distinct functions of architecture in and outside of writing, are unidentified photographs of architectural details, usually appearing alongside their own counter-image or mise-en-abîme, whose stated function is to “work along with the text to critique the desire for containment and stability inherent in the theme of the house” (18).