Sinking American Dream

Artist Mike Boucher built a typical American suburban home for the Venice Biennale art exhibition, but when a floating pontoon meant to carry the house failed midstream, the house sunk

Watch on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9Cb9BzQxus

NOTES: Forms

NOTES: Thresholds

NOTES: Vantage Points

SITE SELECTION

negotiating boundaries : 

XL_The Street_ Joining Urban Fabric

M_The Connection_ Between Neighbours

XS_The Room_Between You and Me

east galt, cambridge, ontario

BUILDING

enclosed > single family house + local commercial/church/recreation

ADD-ON

porches + extensions + trailers + garages

ACCESS

physical + visual > car + pedestrian

TERRITORY

marking boundary >

human landscape + intervention

THE PASSAGE

The Passage

More than two decades ago, Robin Evan’s essay “ Figures, Doors and Passages” offered one of the clearest and most compelling arguments about “ the plan and its occupants”. The invention of the corridor as the primary organizational space of the domestic interior; he argues, did not simply mark a shift in architectural styles of conceptions of space. Instead, it indexed the reconfiguration of the family and social organization in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Palladian villa, every room was linked to its neighbours through multiple doors. The occupants and visitors to the house would flow through sitting rooms, bedrooms and so on. The plan is one similar to the Indo-Portuguese houses seen earlier in this text. There was no separation between circulation and room, suggesting that ideas of privacy and intimacy were perhaps not what they are today. Evans demonstrated how the introduction of the corridor did not simply separate circulation from the rooms, but also how each room enjoyed only one access point to its connective spine.  The house, its spatial configuration and connectivity, was a diagram for a different concept of domesticity and intimacy based on moralities, social organisations and regimes of labour. While previously it would have been completely normal o walk through a child’s bedroom on the way to one’s own, the parental bed and the children’s room were now kept strictly apart. It is at this time, that “childhood” was invented as a discrete period in modern life, and bourgeois notions of romantic marriage took hold. Additionally, the corridor also spoke of efficiency. Before, the use of a room might have inhibited access ( through locked doors; now all such tensions are smoothed away via the passage. Moreover, this reading can be extended to suggest that it is not simply the house that responds to different social structures, but that these architectures also train their subjects. Unlike Heidegger’s notion of passive domestic domains, perhaps the house, as Mark Cousins has recently suggested,  is rather, a site of training , discipline and possibly aggression. In other words, one must learn how to live by becoming domesticated. The architectural concept of the corridor and its plan engages a subject who could not exist outside that space.  

         The following is the O House by Hideyuki Nakayama, located in Kyoto, which takes the form of a passage off of the main street. The program of the house is neatly tucked around corners of the large open 'corridor'. It is an experiment that challenges passer-by's to walk in...or walk by...

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. 

METHODS OF REPRESENTATION

Tom Ngo. A toronto-based artist who works on representing the "apsurd" in the house. Common sense and conventional practice prohibits the evolution of architecture. Through reproducing past models for efficiency and economy, routine thinking preserves the flaws of the standard model. Using different frameworks of thought, architects can create new solutions, which rectify the faults of the norm, and distance themselves from making habitual design decisions. “These drawings are created through fracturing rules of concept/design and then obeying them ad absurdum,” says Ngo. “The result is a nutty and whimsical brand of social commentary.”

1. Namby Pamby.“The repetition of word endings in nonsense poetry creates phonetically appealing words to pronounce. Phrases like Humpty Dumpy and Hey Diddle Diddle are examples of this nonsensical operation. Namby Pamby is an attempt to translate the operation into form.”

2. No Other Way. “A dream house for a meat grinder collector. The above building is constructed of four like facades presenting him a new home every time he arrives by balloon. The structure below is a mental retreat from his constantly changing everyday”

3. Ghost Town Precious. “This construction combines the themes of permanence and the ephemeral. Shoddily constructed with hints of integrity, the structure has a ghost-town quality”

4. The Swing Set Houses. “A pair of houses are attached to a large swing-set structure. The houses share a communal circulation core and next door is an individual swing for one person”

All Images and Text: http://www.tomngo.net/

On John Hejduk

"Architects are organically responsible today to have their language run parallel with their structure...I cannot do a building without building a repertoire of characters, of stories, of language, it's all parrallel.
It's not just building per se. It's building worlds." 
 -John Hejduk in 'Conversation between John Hejduk and David Shapiro: The Architect who Drew Angels' 


GOOD NEIGHBOR HOUSE (1975)
"It is about black and white in a philosophical sense. It is about paranoia, distrust, voyeurism... peeping over the wall"






Between the houses stands a high wall that the occupants can watch each other through a spyhole and a periscope. What is most fascinating about this project is that the facade , which is most often used as tool to enclose and to conceal, is the only instrument which is used to create maximum tension between private and public.  The occupants of the Good Neighbor House lives a very visible life. Hejduk's anticipatory approach to architecture is meant to cause astonishment, to amuse. 




All pictures copyright © Liao Yusheng : http://figure-ground.com/wallhouse/

On Corbusier

ERGONOMIC SYSTEM.Researching the ergonomic system addresses the interface between the human body and its domestic environment. It begins with Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation. The ergonomic positions of the human body linked to specific activities challenge the conventional living space sections through their continuous deformation of typically orthogonal floor and ceiling systems. 

NON-INTEGRATED/ ULTRA TRANSFORMABLE  vs. ULTRA-INTEGRATED UN TRANSFORMABLE

Two radical extremes in Le Corbusier's approach toward furniture and its performance- his chaise lounge vs. the bathing area at Villa Savoye. Although formally similar, one of these is totally integrated and fixed within the architecture, while the other is kinetic and remains isolated. 

Performative aspect by Le Corbusier: 

mapping of activities in a typical double unit of Unite d' Habitation

Image Sources:

1. Portrait of Charlotte Perriand on Corbusier's Chaise Lounge. Image provided by Mary McLeod.

2. Villa Savoye's bathing Area

3. As described

4. http://spacecollective.org/florianv/564/Unit-dhabitation

TERRITORIALISING SYSTEM

There are no " mute" walls in the Unite system; almost all internal wall divisions become vertical teritorialising devices , which are either transformable or hybrid assemblies of structure, storage, services, working surfaces etc. ( For example: the kitchen area is defined towards the lounge area only by its furniture; sleeping zones are identified by sliding partitions)

Canadian Case studies: which focus on complex internal combinations of slip-knot dwelling units.  

Europa 6, Montreal

As a result of the bridges, all the 56 cooperative apartments are through-units opening both into the courtyard and onto the street. "This means," Boutros maintains, "better cross ventilation, more and time-varied light penetration and a stronger sense of community intimacy for the residents." Second-level units also have access to their own individual garden terraces, delineated by hedges and each centred on a large tree planted in a deep soil trough.Two compact, crisply minimalist lobbies off McGill provide elevator and stair access to the west-side units reached by traversing the suspended bridges. Owners are thus provided with striking views of the harbour and the city on the way to and from their units. At the same time, says Boutros, from surrounding streets and the park (now being redeveloped), residents also become part of an animated tableau as they cross behind the screen of the north walkways.

Unity 2, Montreal

1. Unit: Unite d'Habitation, Corbusier

2. Europa 6, Les Architectes Boutros Et Pratte: Canadian Architect

3. Unity 2, Atelier Big City, Montreal : Canadian Architect

PEEKING THROUGH THE KEYHOLE

Makeshift FAMILIES
single divorced widowed single parent couple married children teenagers university-students seniors
parents live at home/ growing up/ not growing away


Defining HOUSEHOLDS
Over 110 million households in USA + Canada ( growing at 1 million per year)
1/5 of all 23 year olds live at home
1/2 families are categorized as " non-families"
1/4 households are made up of married couples with children ( half of 1960 statistics)
1/10 households have more than 5 people living together
2 kids per average
1/4 homes belong to a single occupant ( tripled from 1940s statistics)
1/3 women remain unwed by her thirties (1/10 in the 1960s)
1/4 of all children under 18 live with one parent ( double the 1970s rate)
4/10 do not live with their biological fathers
3/10 children live with a divorced parent/ or never got married (1/10 is the 1960s statistic)
1/3 babies born to unwed couples ( 1/20 is the 1960s statistics)
7/10 mothers work for pay
1/4 of preschool children are in day care


4-5 hours a day is spent interacting in a house


Domestic arrangements become challenging and complex. 
Yet we haven't changed the structure of our living environments. 
A house still looks like a house.


sources: 
www. cmhc-schl.gc.ca
www.nahb.com
www.prb.org
www.statcan.ca