how our house resembles us as a person

This is my house. It's a 6 bedroom shared student house. I think that our houses do reflect who we are as a person. for example, what things we choose to have on display and what things we choose to keep out of view, how tidy we are and the things that se have. It reflects a bit on our own individual personality to how we style the house and our bedrooms.

My Home

I've spent my whole life living under the same roof, and although the interior and exterior has changed slightly throughout the years it is my home. A place I feel secure and safe in my surroundings, with my family I share the space with.
My home is a place I enjoy being in, an escape from the outside world into my own world where I can relax in comfort. It is a place I have grown up in and have lots of memories from both the outside, in. This makes it a special dwelling for me to spend my time within. Although there are some empty rooms in my house, and unfurnished rooms it still to me is a space I look forward to entering and shutting the door behind me to relax with the ones close to me where everywhere I go theres a personal touch from my family to comfort me.
My room is a seperate area just for me, my own retreat thats personal to myself. Although I've spent 20 years/ all my life in this house, I've had various different bedrooms however I've alwats made it into my space. My newly decorated bedroom is a comfort zone for me, everything situated in my bedroom is what I have chosen for myself, striking wallpaper and bold black wardrobes reflects my interior interest and has created statemement pieces.
Not only is the interior of my home important to me but also the exterior garden creating a sense of place and freedom where I can also enjoy my time, weather permitting! Living behind a cricket field it brings a lot of activity during the summer months and then during the winter months I can view the snow on the moors from a window upstairs, all this together creates a beautiful surrounding to call home.

..and why not?...

Technology, Politics and Culture:

The link connects to a blog post listing earlier concepts and attitudes to advertising standards in the media c. 1950s/60s.  Warning, some of them quite shocking and not all related to the lecture today.  Representation of gender and identity being referred to here, but there are other examples from a range of contexts...

This is home to me, although this is more of the house/building that I grew up in. My home, a place of refuge/ a place where I can rest, is more the image below, which is the view outside of Number 4, and I think of home as the flavor of the air when I return to Plympton, the taste of Plympton water, the freedom to do whatever I want. The wood itself still has similar attributes to a home, a roof - "shelter" (the canopy of leaves, branches etc), walls - "defence" (the trunks, bushes, ivy etc), and windows and doors - "seeing" & "entrance" (areas of the wood which is less dense which you can gain entrance through and look out from).

Bedroom/Office/Lounge

Currently living out of a bedroom, every aspect of my life is compiled into one space. On one side of the room, my bed. The other side, everything else.

Theres an unused 4:3 LCD TV which is slightly obscured from view due to the build up of paint brushes, boxes, paper, mail - still to be sorted. These objects sit upon a vivarium for a lizard.

On the wall a clock which displays the incorrect time - must replace the batteries soon. The notice board to the left of the clock is full of ideas for photographs, blog posts and reminders - the usual lists reminding me to write ‘to do lists’ are also present.

Below a desk, a computer - which is home to more notes. Film scanner. More paper. Above the canvas boards on the floor is a red shelving unit. This holds CDs, DVDs, pens, change, cameras, electrical tape, undeveloped film shot decades ago.

Ideally I’d have a minimalistic room with neatly framed prints hung upon the wall. A distinct lack of notes stuck to things. The floor wouldn’t be used as a make-do storage device however, this space is functional, not an idealist one. Whilst this room does show an element of myself, my personality, it is not perhaps the one I’d choose to publicly display (but now have).

Michael

Home

Home for me is much like having a split personality, mainly due to the fact that I see myself as having two homes. There is my 6 bedroom student house which holds my temporary lifestyle where I socialise, drink and fend for myself as I venture through my uni life. Whereas 20 minutes away there is my childhood household where I have grown up feeling safe, well looked after and knowing I have a sheltered life to fall back on.

I love my home

My house says a lot about me, there are cracks in the walls, it could do with a coat of paint and some repair. The inside looks a bit in need of TLC, but it reliably keeps the rain out and the foundations are good.

My home

Home is important part of life for me. Because I spend most of the time in my home and that's why I choosed my department "Spatial Design". I am living in a small but new flat. It has 2 bedrooms and a living room with open plan kitchen.
The living room was decoreted modest anf familiar. It has beige walls and lignt brown carpet, a green sofabed and a blue recliner sofa, a plasma tv. I don't want to live with too much furniture because, they restricts my living area. I always want to be free, easy to rich something, ready for any unusual things. I should see my all around. The seaters were located as to be able to see tv. It shows that tv is one of part of our life. I like to watch film and documentery and I like to hear a voice in my environment. I feel safer like that.
One of my its wall full of my families photos. I enjoy to see my daughter photos from birth to present. Thus, I don't forget all her ages. I like to spent time with my family.
I like to be busy and in rush. There are too much things to do in the life. Spending time with familiy, friends, travelling all around the word, having hobies like designing something new, playing an ensturment, reading magazine or book, surfing on the net, improving ideas for new jobs, cooking etc...
I think my home simple and comfortable. It is enough to live in comfy, tidy, warm and familiar.

He calls himself mustardcuffins....I don't know why

Home from mustardcuffins on Vimeo.

Martha Rosler: Semiotics of the Kitchen

Gosh! ... really wish I'd found this in time for the lecture on Phenomenology and Semiotics of the House...oh, well...maybe next year...



Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen - 1975

From A to Z, Rosler "shows and tells" the ingredients of the housewife's day, giving us a tour that names and mimics the ordinary with movements more samurai than suburban. Rosler's slashing gesture as she forms the letters of the alphabet in the air with a knife and fork, is a rebel gesture, punching through the "system of harnessed subjectivity" from the inside out.  "I was concerned with something like the notion of Ôlanguage speaking the subject,' and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity."

—Martha Rosler

...and Semiotics of the Art Student



'This film is a new twist on the classic pice of video art, "Semiotics of the Kitchen" by Martha Rosler. This film pokes fun at life as an art student, and all that is expected from us.'

[This and other videos that are not specifically related to my place/space seminars can be found on my new Youtube Channel Fathomspace.  I set this up so that I could 'store' other videos for various lectures to other groups.]

Marilena Skavara: Adaptive Fa[CA]de

A type of '[Un]Walling' is possibly happening here:
Source: Interactive Architecture.

'Here’s a great project that came out of the Adapative Architecture and Computation programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture. ‘Adaptive Fa[ca]de’ by Marilena Skavara explores the functional possibilities and performative characteristics of cellular automata (CA). In addition to the unique emergent behaviour of CA, a neural network enables a further computational layer to evolve CA behaviour to the context of its surrounding environment.'


Adaptive fa[CA]de from marilena on Vimeo.


Marilena Skavara's Adaptive fa[CA]de at Digital Hinterlands exhibition, London from marilena on Vimeo.

'Building upon the early work of Conway’s ‘Game of life’ and Stephen Wolfram’s extensive research on the wider implementation of CA, ‘Adaptive Fa[ca]de’ becomes a living adapting skin, constantly training itself from the history of its own errors and achievements. For a more detailed description of the project, read Marilena’s article for Vague Terrain.'

Moment: Yukihiro Taguchi

Performing Space:  Floor becomes wall becomes obstacle becomes seating becomes art object becomes function..... Taguchi spontaneously shifts and documents the contexts of space over time.  There is an accompanying text if you follow the link.

More on Unwalling

Source: Boiteaoutils
Baptiste Debombourg

"In this installation series, the wall seems to come into the room, to attack the observer. The deformation of the surface is creating a tension between the solid and the void, and it blurs the limit of the the inner space envelope. The broken surface gives a very strong materiality to the traditional clean walls of the "white cube" and the pieces of wood appearing under the white coating are like scars."

More On Unwalling

Source: Boiteaoutils
Erika Hock: http://www.erikahock.de/Seiten/Earb06.html

More On Unwalling

Source: Boiteaoutils
Posting this as the blog seems to be thematically interested in the idea of walls and their un/walling which is a nice tie-in with house theme.  However, some of these examples exist within the context of the gallery [as opposed to domestic context] and exists partly as a critique of the 'white cube' ideology.

More On Matta Clark and Walls

Source: Boiteaoutils

Yeah...couldn't have said it better myself....

"By undoing a building there are many aspects of the social conditions against which I am gesturing: first, to open a state of enclosure which had been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the industry that profligates suburban and urban boxes as a context for insuring a passive, isolated consumer-a virtually captive audience. The fact that some of the buildings I have dealt with are in Black ghettos reinforces some of this thinking, although I would not make a total distinction between the imprisonment of the poor and the remarkably subtle self-containerization of higher socio-economic neighborhoods. The question is a reaction to an ever less viable state of privacy, private property, and isolation."

Gordon Matta Clark. Interview by Donald Wall for Arts Magazine. May 1976

As I have been observing before on boiteaoutils, a wall is at first nothing more than a line drawn on a piece of paper. This line then acquires a materiality and thus own a violence that prevents bodies a freedom of movement (the climax of this violence is obviously achieved in prisons where four walls surround the body). A wall here is not necessarily to be understood only as a vertical panel but also every kind of built surface that prevents the body from a freedom of movement (floors, walls, fences etc.) Any process of “unwallization” is therefore a resistance to this violence. It is difficult to find architecture that succeeds in applying these kinds of processes; nevertheless, several artists did work on that issue and produced various propositions in that regard. Gordon Matta Clark’s work is both the precursor and the quintessence of them, piercing, sawing, digging, rending, rotating, splitting, tearing apart, Matta Clark mistreats the wall as much as he can and the latter almost loses the totality of its violence in this way.

The wall is a separation device but not necessarily as a surface needing more energy to be penetrated than a human owns, can also be seen in the example of rows of sheets on clothes lines. The wall thus looses its violent status while conserving most of its other characteristics.

All the following pictures come from the book. Gordon Matta Clark. Phaidon 2003.

[Please note:  I have two copies of Matta-Clark's books if anyone would like to look at them - Sally]

Four Yorkshire Men

Following on from Wednesday’s lecture and how we regard the home and it’s meaning. Have a look at the video below to see what these four Yorkshire men regard as being home.

Homefront Dissolve

Source: BLDGBLOG

Keiichi Matsuda, a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, produced this fantastic short video in the final year of his M.Arch. It was, he writes, "part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality."  The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.  The bewildering groundlessness of surfaces within surfaces is beautifully captured by this video, and its portrayal of drop-down menus and the future hand gestures needed to access them is also pretty great. Augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow.  Now how do we use all that home-jamming ad space for something other than Coke and Tesco? What other subscription-content feeds can be plugged into this vertiginous interface?

Take a look—and you can find more thoughts, and another video, on Matsuda's own blog. http://keiichimatsuda.tumblr.com/

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Phenomenology & Semiotics of House Video Clips

This and the following posts relate to the lecture this morning and couldn't be shown, please check it out here:

Michael Landy on Breakdown


Tornado: The Solid and the Ephemeral


Jean Cocteau: La Belle et la Bette [Beauty and the Beast], 1946


MTV Cribs Episode: Akon
Can't embed this, so here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7T7np6HetU&feature=related