Ibsen the Architect: as it should now be clear, there is more to that idea than the (sometimes begrudging) admiration of Ibsen's workmanlike play-writing skills or his technical mastery of the stage. Instead, this study has shown how Ibsen transformed the consensus architectural metaphors of his day to unsettle his readers and viewers and to dislodge them from habits of thought. He created a cumulative drama of architectural unease. His unhomely plays depict characters in various stages of detachment from their formerly secure dwellings, some who mourn their loss, some who renovate and rebuild, and others who imagine existence beyond architectural limits. Taken together, however, Ibsen's contemporary prose dramas constitute a sustained and meticulous argument against the notion that domestic comfort and security are the highest human aspirations. The fact that he argues this point so painstakingly should be taken as an indication of both the dominance and pervasive invisibility of that cultural assumption.

Using the house as his main artistic medium, Ibsen turned ideal homes in to “mere homes.” Or to state his accomplishment even more dramatically, he made it possible for his readers and viewers to think of catastrophic fires as “merely catastrophic fires,” and to think of the loss of home as a liberation from the past. “It's just the old house burning down – now turn to the future,” he seems to urge his readers and viewers. As these propositions play out in his entire series of fictional houses, however, he seems to arrive at the impasse that the “old home” – the structures of Ghosts, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder, for instance – is not shaken off so easily. In play after play, those who would liberate themselves from architectural constraint realize most often that the emotional tug of home does not yield un problematically to forward-looking human plans. His dramatic characters might throw open curtains and windows, slam doors, renovate, tear down, or even wish for castastrophe, but somehow the home as a psychosocial structure keeps on returning to them in unheimlich ways.