In April 1965 the British architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham published an essay A Home is not a House in the magazine Art in America, in which he introduced the concept of the un-house, illustrated in drawings by François Dallegret. As well as being one of the century's most influential architectural writers, Banham was a prime mover in British Pop Art. The un-house was based on the realisation that modern buildings (of which houses are the most numerous type) could be seen as combinations of some kind of increasingly insubstantial enclosure with a correspondingly increasing amount of mechanical and electronic equipment. In the most memorable of Dallegret's drawings, he and Banham sat, naked (or almost, it's difficult to tell), inside a transparent inflatable bubble, at the centre of which hovered a 'transportable standard-of-living package' powered by solar cells, which included lights, heating, tv, radio, stereo, cooker, fridge etc. This assembly offered the opportunity 'to enjoy the spatial freedom of the nomadic campfire without the smoke and mess'

As far as I know, no one has ever realised the un-houses drawn, but within a few years large numbers of young, intelligent, creative people would find themselves living in somewhat similar conditions to squats, warehouses or what came to be known as short life housing. The possibility of living in more or less comfortable conditions in what had not long since been slums depended partly on the fact that the housing was either free or cheap, so that, for example, overcrowding was unusual, but more crucial were things like portable propane heaters and high quality sound systems that could maintain a relatively high level of psychological and physical comfort in otherwise inhospitable conditions.

The most glamorous of these provisional dwellings were rarely houses, but rather disused garages, pubs, self built additions to existing buildings or, famously, riverside warehouses. People were not supposed to live in their warehouse studios, but many in practice did. An artist, after all, might be thought to be at work even when asleep.

The social experimentation of the period was constrained by the tyrennieners houses (unless they ware very big, like the squat in Queens Gate) identified as they are with the nuclear, patriarchal, heterosexual family. A friend of mine recently recalled the consternation of passing riverboat commentators (never known for their emancipated views) when, during the move out of one of the studios at Butler's Wharf, an enormous print of a photograph by Jean-Marc Sauveur, a close up of someone being fisted, was lowered from a loading door facing the river (being too big to be taken out down the stairs).

In London, most of this domestic experimentation is long gone. More recently, we have seen a revival of interest in New Babylon, the Situationist city project of the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhoijs. There were no houses in New Babylon: 'the entire city was a vast, collective home, a palace with a thousand rooms'. Intriguingly described by the writer Brian Hatton as 'the ultimate dutyfree lounge', New Babylon wan the built form suggested by the Situationist concepts of derive drifting and phychogeography.

As depicted in constant drawings and models, New Babylon does indeed somewhat resemble an airport. In its absence, one occasionally notes reports of people who manage to live in airports, but it doesn't sound very agreeable.

Restlessness has been a creative motif in western culture for centuries (see, for instance, Laurence Sterne's sentimental Journey, Thomas De Quincey's English Mail Coach, or Baudelaire's Anywhere out of the World in Paris Spleen), but in the end, one has to live somewhere, especially if one has children. The rich get round this conflict by having several homes, but for the rest of us, dwelling frequently means trouble. It's no accident that media images of houses often appear in contents such as civil war, 'ethnic cleansing', racism and so on.

London's evolution as a creative and artistic center followed the period of experimentation in housing during the 1970's, much of which was itself s feature of the later stages of the public sector housing progress, with its hard-to-let flats and 'short-life' housing. With public-sector housing largely discontinued, and much of it now in private hands, it nay be that the city's creative potential will diminish, an artists, musician and others are gradually displaced by members of wealthier but more time-preanured social group.

Until quite recently, it was beginning to seem as if the dwelling, and domesticity in general, bad become an unfashionable subject in an era characterised by mobility, communication's and the establishment of identity and status through work, only the commercial nation of the 'loft' seemed to challenge thin perception, until one remembered its origin an an artiste studio, a workplace where some of the most fashionable kind of work is carried out. In the last few yearn however, positive image of domestic interior have become more common. Fashionable people proclaim their preference for staying in. The idea of post-modernity epitomised by the condition of being constantly in motion, in constant communication with everyone and everywhere, in passé. Nonetheless, one suspects that just an television programmes about cooking are watched by people too exhausted to cook, the present interest in domes tic architecture might indicate a similar incapacity to achieve the real thing.

In the pant thirty yearn or no, in the 'advanced' economies, the introduction of computer and other new technology ban often led to cheaper, improved good, telecommunications etc. Something similar has happened to house-building in Japan, but in the supply-constrained UK, the effect of new technology seems more likely to be felt me new wealth that drives up prices. Globalisation, rather then neutralising the significance of place, seems to accentuate its value. The UK's housing market is typified by enormous price rises at preferred locations, while elsewhere, sometimes not very far away, houses might be literally unsaleable.

For the UK government, housing still seems to be a relatively low priority compared to, say, health or education. New house-building is left largely to the private sector, which has never been very good at producing housing of any quality. House-building is now at a post-war low, end the idea of replacing old houses has largely disappeared from the UK, even though many are in poor condition and make inefficient use of energy, the current rate of replacement implying that houses in England and Wales will, on average, have to last for 5,610 years. despite a wealth of highly desirable proposals put forward by architects and others during the last century or so, in the UK, the 'house of the future' is now an old house, over-priced, expensive to run and increasingly difficult to maintain.

It nay be, of course, that none of this really matters very much. There's no reason why old houses can't be patched up for ever, assuming people can still be found who are prepared to do the work, perhaps, in an increasingly virtual world, the built environment simply isn't as important as it used to be. The question remains however, why, in one of the wealthiest economies in the world, do so zany of us live in what are so often old, small, badly designed, dilapidated dwellings, and why we pay so dearly for the privilege?