Donald Judd, Untitled (6 units; 83-1 Ballantine), 1993

Donald Judd, Untitled, Copper, Ten Units, 1969

Cardboard model of 'column of domesticity'

Interior Landscapes

The following are quotes that I found interesting and thought provoking from the book Interior Landscapes.

"... is based on the realization that the designer, or the householder, who wants to think about how a home ought to be made is faced by a particular difficulty today: on the one hand, the multiplicity of models; on the other, the absence of any sort of absolute model in the field of housing." pg. 7

"Ever since the well-known "Weimar Week" at the Bauhaus in 1923, dealing with the problem of the house, and the exhibitions of prototypes for living cells staged by Milan Triennale in ParcoSempione in the thirties, exhibitions on the home have almost always presented the public with a vision of models that could in ideal fashion "become the starting-point for mass production". We say 'ideal' because in reality this did not happen, demonstrating just how difficult it is to treat the home as an industrial product like the motor-car." pg. 7

The house of mankind - Mario Bellini

Walter Benjamin noted that "the original form of any mode of dwelling is that of living, not in a house, but in a shell. This bears the mark of inhabitant. The dwelling turns into a shell." pg. 9

Benjamin - "the 20th century with its porosity, its transparency and it bias towards light and open air put an end to dwelling in the old sense of the word." pg. 21

"Today, exhibitions on the home no longer offer futuristic or speculative metaphors, but the realization - already accomplished - of life in space: private telecommunications, robots and transformation of the two-rooms-and-a-kitchen into an orbital satellite." pg. 15

C.E. Gadda - "the house of today, the reformed house, the transformed house is impotent to preserve and defend its residents and their nerves from the outrageous strain ('of modern life')." pg. 16

Interior Landscapes - Georges Teyssot

Invisible City - John Gilderbloom

It all starts with the home, the quality of one's place.

"It may be easier to argue that investment in social services and education will help such families reach a critical turning point. But housing is a critical, indispensable part of the equation; where people live is immensely important; to ignore the quality of their shelter is to undercut every other possible investment we make in them, for the federal low-income tax credit to local recreational programs." x

The ideal community has a range of housing types and prices available to everyone. Neal Peirce comments on this in his foreword stating:

"But just consider the alternative - the status quo, the fraying of community, the serious American housing dilemma that we've allowed to develop and fester. Reforming it will be challenging and expensive. But inaction, lack of imagination in finding (and funding) new approaches, may prove the most disastrous course of all." xi

To be labeled a great city, it should have the "ability to ensure basic necessities, freedom and creativity". (pg 6) Basic necessities include housing, jobs, schools, health care and transportation. (pg. 2) The spatial location of the necessities also adds to the attractiveness of the city or neighbourhood.

Design Agenda

From Front to Back: a design agenda for urban housing by Sally Lewis

The following design agenda was used as a checklist to study different projects and to highlight the more successful design features.

• Making connections - paths for various types of movement to facilities and amenities
• Providing green areas and corridors
• Treating the street as a place - a friendly neighbourhood
• Layout the built form - active 'fronts' on street for identity and legibility
• Absorbing diversity - using different residential building types
• Defining public and private space
• Creating a relationship between buildings and spaces
• Arranging the building mass - proportion/location to the street and surrounding spaces
• Optimizing solar potential and good aspect - building orientation, relation to other buildings
  
• Managing and integrating parking
• Providing frequent and convenient access - entrances from the street
• Mixing uses/building in flexibility - future adaptability
• Providing spaces around the home - possible extension of the home
• Meeting the ground - thresholds and interfaces - level changes used as boundary controls

Stratifying

Peter Wuthrich - Literary Stratification II 1993 pg. 289

Stratification of the interiors of my house.

Experiential Section

What do the horizontal surfaces inside a home that create spaces, mean to me?

Household and "Living" Art

Daniel Spoerri - Restaurant de la City Galerie 1965 - pg. 257, La Table de la rotonde 1966 - pg. 258

Karsten Bott - One of Each (archival exploration of everyday life) - pg. 83, Shopping Carts 1992 - pg. 230

Images from Deep Storage : collecting, storing, and archiving in art.

Downtown St.Catharines

I went walking the streets on Sunday, November 1st for a couple of hours taking photographs. There are a lot of parking lots, just gravel. The only street lined with buildings continuously is the main drag, St. Paul Street. St. Paul has been the main street since the 1800's. The intersection of St. Paul and Ontario Street was the most important intersection back in the 1800's. Now there are some parking lots and a few buildings. Besides taking potential site photos, I also took photos of some existing houses, most being single detached housing with some semi-detached.