Sub-Studio Architecture: Transient Homes

NYC Design Firm examines the way migrant farmworkers, vacationers, transients, and other impermanent residents create ‘home’ in Yakima, an agricultural city in rural Washington state:

http://www.sub-studio.com/architecture.html

Plunz, Chapter 6

One supremely interesting aspect of this chapter was the more or less formal establishment of the American International school of architecture post-WWI, headed up more or less formally by Philip Johnson and Henry Wright. Its treatment of housing as a “legitimate architectural problem” only when it involves scales that are significant enough to permit the work to be some kind of conspicuous monograph of the architect or bold political and artistic statement is, I feel, characteristic of the monumentalism of the high Modernism of that period. In laying down a distinction between “architecture” and “building” (something about which I would like to learn more), Johnson and Wright remind me of the first set of readings we had, where Amos Rapoport considered in passing the existence of a “modern vernacular”. Johnson and Wright seem to imply that here; that any structure not designed to be overtly political or idealistic or Functional or “International” in general was quotidian, pedestrian, uninspired, and not worthy of the title of capital-”a” Architecture – in a sense, a kind of vernacular. That is, that architecture that was not as rarefied and intellectualized or academic as what the International style professed, was by default the contemporary vernacular. Housing, in its individual or smaller-scale forms, belonged in this category.

What is even more interesting is the fact that in spite of this rejection of the housing question by the preeminent American school of architecture (and perhaps I’m over-reading the significance of the international style in the narrative of the American built environment, I will acknowledge) is that other architects and spatial thinkers that were or would be very influential in America – Le Corbusier, Breuer, Gropius – interested in the same functionally, economically, and socially progressive ideals in the treatment of space were tackling housing head-on.

Matthew Taylor: Day 1, Home + Dwelling

From our first discussion, my initial characterizations of Home and Dwelling.

DWELLING

• Layout (floorplan)
• Typology (SFH, apartment, etc)
• Location
• Furnishing/Fitting

HOME

• People
• Content (memories, rituals, traditions, etc)
• Feelings/Associations

Other notes I made:

People vs. Family

Occupation vs. Occupants

Structure vs. Use

Colonization? (colonizing space?)

Gabrielle: “We make it in our image, BUT it makes us in its image.”

Matthew Taylor: Reading Response, Week 2

In Heidegger’s “What is home?”, I was particularly struck by the following: “The bridge gathers the earth as a landscape around the stream.” To my understanding of his essay, building is an exercise in dwelling in a place in that it involves a choice – in the case of the bridge, choosing at which points along the stream to create a bridge – that then makes a space which we inhabit. The choice of where to place a bridge thus gives new meaning to everything around it in that now, with the bridge in place as a “location”, we can perceive all the things nearby (and even far) in a manner relative to the location of the bridge. We dwell in spaces by forming and reforming them, and giving them meaning (the bridge crossing, versus any other spot along the stream).

At the same time, the following confuses me: “Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds.” By whom? For what? Perhaps it is my lack of familiarity and thereby ability to grapple with Heidegger’s thinking, but the way he talks about “spaces” and “gathering” and “presencing” and so forth makes the spatial world so intrinsically un-human, as if it exists and operates and we just move around in it. I may very well be reading this wrong, though.

In any case, there is certainly some further exploration necessary for me to wrap my head around Heidegger’s ideas about building, thinking, dwelling and living.

And as far as Banham goes: Satire? I can’t decide…