11.01.07

It’s windy. Snow snakes across the road in murky strands, and the path my dad cleared to the house begins to drift full of snow. Once on the roof, we’re thankful that the sheathing on the north side is still intact. We bring down the remaining boards on the east side, inadvertently shattering one of the exterior panes in the bay window. The sound is startling, a sharp and immediate crack against the dull thud of boards as they hit the snow below.



In the afternoon, we drill nine apertures into the ceiling of the southwest bedroom. Based on the sun’s path across the site, it seems intuitive to begin in the space that receives the most light for the duration of the day. This particular bedroom (along with one other room and the downstairs living area) was stripped of its plaster and dry-walled in the 1990s, and contains less of the home’s original character features. As a result, we treated it less preciously last semester and performed some preliminary demolition work.

The sky is completely clouded over and we’re unsure if we’ll be able to see anything, but our eyes slowly adjust and dark bands begin to emerge on the floor and walls. In a few minutes, we can identify the structural elements crisscrossing the hardwood; the higher the trusses are away from the ceiling, the smaller the projected image.

11.01.08

It feels easier to start the mornings off with physical labour before returning to the dark rooms inside. We spend an hour ripping shingles off of the roof boards to get warmed up, and break down some panels to use as firewood.

Later, working in the blacked-out bedroom upstairs, we use tape to trace the outlines of the roof structure on the floor and walls. The outlines are then filled in with black spray paint. After the drawing is complete, we do a series of long-exposure photo studies in an attempt to construct space within the drawing both with the body and with loose pieces of material. We’ve begun to imagine that our own occupation within the house might exist as some sort of primitive hut or aedicule (house within a house). In this way, we become active instigators of our own process, rather than existing as passive participants in the deconstruction.







11.01.09

Peeling up the first hardwood board in the bedroom, we discover a layer of building paper between the flooring and the shiplap. Initially, we had thought there would only be paper protecting the perimeter walls, but now there is the possibility of the entire house containing a full-scale record in plan that could be preserved even as the structure disappears.

We’re struggling with the level of disconnect between the studio and the site – work that is so real and tangible becomes flattened and resized to a portfolio page, losing its immediacy when shared with our critics. The opportunity to create drawings that are exactly scaled to the room they originate from seems to hold promise, offering a way out from behind the camera lens.

Turning the edge of the paper up, we uncover an original sticker that has been untouched for almost 100 years:


22/5/18, Return in 30 days The T. Eaton Co Limited, Winnipeg, Canada
To: Mr. A Hoehn, Glenella, Manitoba

Although we had guessed that the house was from the Eaton’s catalogue, we were never completely sure until today.