With the house in our possession (see photo in the last entry) but no clear understanding of what it could become, we spent the first semester trying to uncover the latent potential embedded in the site.


Interior photographs of the house.

Typically in our program, students spend the first term pursuing a line of research that leads to a set of theoretical inquiries about the nature of a specific architectural condition. A site is then selected that in some way embodies or furthers this condition, and an intervention is proposed.

In many ways, we were working backwards, searching for something already existing that we could take hold of. Although the symbolic weight of the site’s history instilled a certain reverence, an intrinsic desire for preservation was countered by the knowledge that within the next year, the building has to come down.

We found ourselves returning again and again to the same questions: How do you bring a house to its death? How is that death enacted?

In the beginning, we pursued an interest in the body and breath of the house. We made a series of study models wherein different elements or rooms were transformed into bellows, which could then be used to move air through the furnace. In this way, a dying house would regain its breath, while simultaneously keeping us warm during deconstruction.


In this study model, the floor of a closet was imagined as an operable box bellow.

The validity of these early studies – which in retrospect only acknowledged the potential to structurally manipulate the building – were called into question as we became more aware of the house as a collection of symbols, images, and lived experiences.

The following text offers a brief summary of the research that followed and our final thesis abstract, which was written for a presentation panel that’s been posted at the university. Other student projects can be viewed here.

Abstract:

Sited within a decaying, 1920s-era Eaton’s Catalogue Home on a farmstead 200 kilometers northwest of Winnipeg, the thesis dwells in the duality of domestic space as symbolic image and constructed interior. As the final occupants of a building that must be deconstructed, our work strives to inhabit the instant between waking and dreaming, “the moment where the subject is not sure of the distinction between a representation and a spatial condition” (Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 50).

In order to occupy this world of half-dreams, the latent energy embedded in the building’s domestic memory will be incited to fuel the deconstruction. Through this awakening, assumed understandings of the site can be called into question, replaced by an unknown territory where the weight of historic context, past lives, and our own ongoing narrative all become implicated in the projection of how the death of the house should be lived.


An attempt to enter the"world of half-dreams" by drawing in space with a lighter.

With the sun arcing across the sky and a fire burning in the basement, work will be dictated by the cycles of the day and by the basic necessities of occupation, primarily the need to stay warm through four months of intense winter. Light becomes the mediator between sun and flame, construction and combustion, inhabitation and representation. Where heat from the furnace supports our efforts to dismantle the house, light from the sun can be used to create a camera obscura that will help determine the ways in which this disassembly could occur.

By blacking out all of the windows in the house and only allowing pinholes of light into each room, known spatial and representational conditions are cast in shadow, overlaid by a projected image of the outside world. Through the use of long exposure photography, small lights attached to our own bodies register our movements in the space of the image. As the day progresses and as deconstruction moves inward, this image will shift temporally and spatially, from east to west, from nature to structure. In this way, the house becomes an active witness to its own death, one that is foreshadowed by the drawing out of our inhabitation.


Through the use of long exposure photography, a small light driven by our movement registers our bodies in the space of the image.