ONE WEEK

The foolishness of stubbornly sticking to comfortable rules instead for preparing for a rapidly evident change in domesticity is best represented in Buster Keaton’s 23-minute 1920s movie One Week. A story of a young couple’s tremendous faith in putting up a prefabricated house with all the right parts but the wrong directions only to result in a hopeless series of deconstructive and dynamic forms that are uninhabitable. The caricature of the conventional house represented by Keaton’s outrage persistently attempts to negate any possibly unified or totalizing image. A cruel metaphor of the stagnant nature of the single family house, it begs to question our idea of what a house should look like and of whether we no longer need the “parts and patterns” we prescribe a house should have. The conventional use of each architectural element of the house- a wall, a roof, a floor, a window and a door- is reversed and at times , omitted, thus allowing the space of the house to become a playing field of new possibilities.