venturi's vanna venturi house
ettore sottsass drawing
the pitched roof single storey house set back from a street with a front yard and a back- the model for the american suburban home has somehow become a universal symbol of domesticity all around the world. no matter where you go versions of this seem to be being built with strange variations to account for local tastes. from the outskirts of new delhi to the suburbs of washington- the form is now archetypical of the desires of domesticity- and the claustrophobia of its heteronormative, middle class, two parent, two children, two car and dog nature .children draw in in their scribbles when asked to draw their houses – even though they may live in a seven storied building in goregaon. the family unit and its urge to keep itself safe from any possible challenge makes nature and other people seem like threats to be kept away or tamed. the other factor that makes the typology of these houses so powerful in shaping our imagination must be the nostalgia for a better time somewhere in an imagined past where children played unthreatened in gardens; and where neighbors were all friends whom we knew from childhood. a sweetness in soft focus green and pink, behind which lurk often the unresolved misshapen real desires of people, decapitated and turning into mutant forms the more they are curtailed. i am reminded of innumerable movies from edward scissorhands to american beauty where the rigorous moral codes and physical form of the suburb makes monsters out of men.
rachel whiteread's house
so much art and architectural work tries to address this in a new book i am browsing through – a compendium of work from an exhibition on art and architecture of the last century. There is such a variety in the approaches. there is robert venturi’s play on the icon of the suburban american home- affectionate yet critical in the house he built for his own mother, john hejduks crazy poetic houses, eric fishcls paintings of the interiors of the houses with the sleazy sexuality within, gordon matta clarks methodical dissections of the house revealing new dimensions kept hidden, rachel whiteread cast of an old town house, erwin wurms melting and inverted houses, david oppenheims digging house. the house type is a theme upon which experiments are carried out destabilizing it, destroying it, giving it new meaning, and at the same time curiously reinforcing its mythical nature as a locus for the unfulfilled desires for calm and quiet in a world turning upside down in the throes of constant change.
david oppenheim
erwin wurm
erwin wurm
kausik and mohua
gordon matta clark
eric fischl
toba khedoori's house
1 comment:
Beautiful post.
say book name na!
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