Home Making

Pieces from Mary Clara Hutchinson’s ‘House // Hold’ at Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, February 2019. Photo by John Ludlam

Architects have this fantasy about houses. Like so much in our line of work, it descends from superstar designers of the past, dead White men whose ideas about creative control may have reflected more about their authoritarian worldview than we have been willing to admit. Where we see pleasing ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ – a German compound word expressing ‘a unifying totality of design idea within a space’ – people who actually inhabit that space see may feel aesthetic suffocation.

Frank Lloyd Wright, master of the unified aesthetic idea, was a narcissist, a control freak, and an anti-Semite to boot. Mies van der Rohe, designer of the famed glass house for Dr. Edith Farnsworth, disregarded his client’s wishes in designing a ‘living sketch’ she found ‘uninhabitable’. Richard Meier, Mies’ aesthetic heir as a leader of the contemporary Modernist movement unironically called ‘the Whites’, has been publicly exposed for sexually harassing and assaulting women designers in his office.

It is not coincidental that these oppressive designers focus their energies ‘where the money is’, on the economic upper classes. As we seek justice through residential architecture, we must question how we design, and who we’re designing for. Design history, taught in architecture schools and in popular design culture, must reflect more than rich people’s design for rich people.

Designers must relinquish our desire to control. Residential architecture, the crafting of spaces in which people live their intimate moments, requires a recognition that people put more of themselves into space than architects are often willing to admit alongside a consciousness of who is allowed, and who isn’t allowed, to shape their own space.

In her recent exhibition ‘House//Hold’ at New Orleans’ Antenna Gallery, Kansas City found object sculptor Mary Clara Hutchinson stitches together the inhabitant and inhabitation, illuminating their ultimate inseparability. In her manipulations of found furniture and other household objects, Hutchinson makes visible the process of decay and regeneration, replacing sheared-off pieces of sofas and chairs with colored string and other materials strongly evocative of human hair.

Drawings of these pieces, displayed alongside the objects themselves in the gallery, underline the ways in which reproduction can distance us from objects’ material realities. The evocation of hair evoked to me a feminine presence, one so often missing from residential design despite women’s often-intimate relationship to residential spaces as ‘homemakers’ and ‘domestics’. Hutchinson’s work reminds me that we shape space, and space shapes us. We inhabit our homes, and our homes inhabit us. We don’t merely float through them, like scale figures Photoshopped into an architectural rendering.

Homes are not static objects of design, divorced from their inhabitants and best appreciated devoid of human inhabitation within the pages of a glossy magazine. Just as cities are not playgrounds through which arbitrarily empowered man-children should ram highways and ‘urban renewal’ projects, homes aren’t spaces in which designers should seek to control existence.

Rather, if we seek a just and equitable practice of residential design, we must consider how people inhabit their intimate spaces. This is as true for high-end single-family homes as for subsidized apartment buildings; people at all income levels deserve dignified design, and must be included in the process of creating the spaces where they live.

We must develop means and methods for engaging the people with whom we design residential spaces which allow us to perceive people’s actual needs, rather than what we think they should be. Hutchinson’s work inspires me to bring a heightened sensitivity in my approach to the design of other people’s residential space, because after my role as the architect is concluded, I know it isn’t mine to live in.