Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Playful spaces

A vigilant student (thanks Jeff) brought the Bioscleave House to my attention, and this work, by Madeleine Gins and Arakawa, renegade architects who have "let it be known that they intend not to die" is not only a great illustration of why I'm such an architecture groupie, but serves as a nice segway to a few posts I have planned in which I want to talk about children and design.  I've spent some time trying to read some of the theoretical material at the Gins and Arakawa site and I'll admit it -- there's much to biotopology that I don't get.  But looking at the images of the house they've built (yes -- they built this house -- we're not looking at CGI here) conveys some of the spirit. 

Yes, it's a gigantic Crayola coloured fun house as family home.  The floors undulate in beautiful organic contours that make it physically demanding (but fun) to get from kitchen to bathroom.  Just looking at the image invites the reader to think of all of the wonderful affordances for sitting, lying around, rolling from place to place, swinging from pole to pole. It would be a laugh riot and a great workout to boot.  And I think that this is a part of what Gins and Arakawa are trying to tell us -- they're reminding us to think without preconceptions about the connections between our lived spaces and how our bodies work (or don't!).  The two are in a chronic state of interplay, but we can forget how the shape of space constrains how we move through it.  My ordinary house, filled with level surfaces, conventional-looking chairs, a plethora of glowing computer screens, literally screams at me and my family to sit passively and, in biotopological terms, wait to die.  The space pictured above, filled with odd curves, teetering angles, screaming colours defies that kind of stultifying stasis.  Get up!  Fall down!  Move around!

For most people, this kind of construction serves more as metaphor than serious architecture.  It's a building that is reminding us about the importance influences of the design of space on how we live our lives.  Modern homes, for better or for worse, are about finding ways to create comfort.  This home runs directly against that grain.  It's meant to put you on guard.  To wake you up.  To remind you of your body.   I love the ideas here, and am fascinated to think of what kinds of transformative influences this space would exert on the lives of my family.  I've got an acrobatic 5 year old who would think she'd gone to heaven.  I'm wondering whether my wife and I would continue to have to count calories in a home where the biggest supper time challenge might be getting food to that fantastically strange table without breaking a leg enroute.

There are some wonderful ironies connected with this house.  For one thing -- it's unoccupied.  It was abandoned by the person who commissioned the structure.  For another, though it is sometimes possible to visit this house (in East Hampton, NY), one has to sign a waiver before entering, and children are forbidden! 

If you want to know more, take a tour of the Gins and Arakawa site (prepare to gaze in wonderment at their creations and scratch your head over their pronouncements).  The photo above was lifted from the Inhabitots site, which has a really nice writeup of a family visit to the Bioscleave House.  There's also a nice article in the New York Times about Bioscleave and its creators.

Building to suit: Psychology and vernacular architecture

Considered across the broad sweep of human history, one of the strangest things about modern Western human beings is how few of us build our own dwellings.  Few of us could.  Think about it.  If, somehow, all of our real estate was obliterated overnight and we had to begin again....you had to begin again.....what kind of a dwelling would you build?  For much of human history, that's pretty much how architectural design worked.  There are some incredible examples of how this process worked.  Think of your very first home.  Nope, not that one.  This one: 

So there you were, happily ensconced in warmth, love, nurturance and support.  Isn't that what you want from a house?

The Dogon People of Central Africa certainly thought so:

The house in the picture represents a female form, with the head of the form serving as the kitchen, the main living area being the woman's abdomen surrounded by her embracing arms, and the front door of the house in this scheme would stand in as the vulva.  This is an incredibly graphic illustration of a culture striving to find some way to define what a home means in a way that is deeply biological, natural and sensible.  There's much more to Dogon architecture than this kind of simple body representation.  The organization of living and working spaces communicates a great deal of important information about Dogon perceptions of family structure and gender relationships.  The village is a microcosm of the mind.

Whether we like to think so or not, there are still deep resonances between the spaces where we live and the organization of our minds, but now things look very different.  A large number of us live in places like this:

There are a million interesting reasons for the development of residential areas like these, almost none of which have anything to do with finding a way to enhance our quality of life by shaping our spaces to fit our psychologies. 

The world of our parents is now just a distant shaky image in the rear view mirror.  New models for living lie directly ahead of us.  Hopefully, one part of the discussion could be how to make our lived spaces support these models.

The psychology of home

I'm going to treat myself by spending the last couple of hours of my official work week looking at some data on home design and psychology.  In the RELIVE, we've been doing some really fun experiments in which people are presented with high quality immersive visualizations of a set of residential houses.  They can look, move, wander and explore.  All we ask is that they let us watch, measure, and ask them questions.  We're finding out that people really like well-connected spaces and that the appearance, lighting, colours and textures of the spaces make a difference to how they feel.  To give you some idea of how things look to our participants, here's a video of a virtual walk through one of our house models.

Remember that what our participants see is a full-scale immersive view with stereo-depth and nice wide fields of view -- not much like looking at the house on a monitor.  In fact, one of our participants, a real estate agent friend of mine, told me that she felt so "immersed" in the house that she could feel the warmth of the sun streaming through the windows onto her arms. 

We're really lucky to have captured the interest of one of the most amazing residential architects and cultural critics working today:  Sarah Susanka.  With her series of "Not So Big" books, she's working hard to help people understand that what makes us happy in our homes is not the number of bathrooms or the square footage of the grand foyer but other subtler, simpler and often much less expensive features.  It's a matter of understanding yourself, understanding how space works, and putting the two together.  It isn't necessarily easy to do, but making your house into a home is a key ingredient in the quest for a more fulfilling life.  Here's a video of Sarah from her appearance on the Charlie Rose show.

The world is getting more crowded.  We need to live closer together and closer to the things we need.  It's more important than ever that we understand how to make space work for us.