Consuming Home SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis Paige Davidson Spring 2022
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Consuming Home
Graduate Thesis 2022
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Thesis Statement America’s Little House Home and Garden Television Learning from Levittown Audience Mediation: Design-a-thon Potential Outlets Intervention 3
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Consuming Home examines the latent programming surrounding North American suburban homes. Taking cues from the observational research of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Yale studio "Learning from Levittown" the research focuses on the actual American suburban landscape as a case study for how architecture is consumed and engaged with by the general public. HGTV, North America's largest network solely dedicated to home design
Consuming Home
Graduate Thesis 2022
5 Aerial View of Levittown
and improvement reaches over 80 million homes in the US alone. Episodic in nature, the single family house is being recorded, renovated and reprogrammed into a new educational form of fashionable models. Disjoint from the realities of economic, environmental and socio political realities a facade of the American home is broadcast as a homogenized approach to human dwelling.
these kinds of improvements, thereby making every house more affordable.15 The 6Little House was supposed to prove that empirical observation offered the best way to reach a consensus about home improvement and management. But consensus could also be the result of established traditions and satisfaction with conventional ways of doing things. For example, the footprint of houses in the United States had become somewhat regularized in the early twentieth century, despite having no formally recognized national standard.16 Although the Better Homes campaign did not call out the traditional elements of the Little House’s plan, the model house’s footprint was illustrative of larger national patterns. Like many American houses, the Little House situated first-floor work spaces at a right angle to living spaces. An L-shaped plan organized the house’s living and dining rooms along the street, with the kitchen, hall, closet, and garage toward the rear (Figures 4 and 5). In addition to these rooms, earlier house plans could have included a music room, parlor, and/or library. But the twentieth-century
Figure 2. Bathroom with view to second-floor bedroom, America’s Little House, 1934. Photograph by Bert Lawson in America’s Little House, 16.
Little House Figure 3. Living room with enclosed staircase to second floor, America’s Little House, 1934. Photograph by Richard Averill Smith in America’s Little House, 9.
krIStIn A BorrmAn, one StAnd Ard Ized Hou Se For AL L
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Kristina Borrman “One Standardized House for All: America’s Little House”
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Looking to America’s Little House from 1934, a marker of nationalized style and thinking of home as renovation, a constantly improving, constantly changing element.
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Beatriz Colomina “The Media House,” 63.
Home & Garden Television
“The way the house occupies the media is directly related to the way the media occupies the house... Television not only brings the public indoors, it also sends the private into the public domain.”
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Stills from HGTV programs, Property Brothers and Fixer Upper
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HGTV Home and Garden Television (HGTV) is a cable network channel that has created content for America and Canada since 1994. Creating a platform for the everyday North American to learn how to renovate upkeep and redesign their home, the pseudo-educational / pseudoentertaining model of home decorating and remodeling. While there are multiple networks and shows on various streaming and network platforms, HGTV has produced some of the largest and most recognizable shows of this kind. Their episodic framework around the house has created a structure for these other programs. Of the 427 shows and specials that the program has produced over the 28 year run, none of them have featured or shown an architect. Instead, the face of home intervention, building and selling is portrayed almost exclusively by interior designers, real estate agents, and carpenters. This continual negation of architectural services is all part of the movie magic of the show’s narrative. Employed behind the scenes to design, draw, and coordinate, there is a network of architect’s supporting the channels that actively work to conceal their job from the public.
While they designate themselves as a reality television network, their frequent focus on tips and tricks, instructional segments and focus on the process of design/construction by default create an atmosphere of housing education. Through is consistent presence in American culture, it has created a landscape of home-based trendsetting set by show runners and advertisers. With a capitalistic need to fill the 24/7 channel with original content, there is a constant push to show the new standard that updated by the half hour. Not only does this give unrealistic and unsustainable expectations in order to keep up with Gaines’ but it also reinforces this historically limiting ideal of American living.
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Terms of Consumption Granite En suite
Traditional Open Concept
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Outdoor Space Farmhouse Double Sink Quartz Home Office Shabby Chic Shiplap
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Carpet Man Cave
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Speculative Relative Frequency Spoken across all Programs
Entertaining
Home Office Outdoor Space Entertaining Open Concept Shiplap En suite Double Sink Quartz Man Cave Traditional Farmhouse Granite Carpet
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By tracking and visualizing key phrases, materials and qualities, a map can be drawn of programmed taste making for viewers to follow.
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Beatriz Colomina, “Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi “Learning from Levittown” at the Yale School of Architecture”
Learning
“Venturi and Scott Brown were treating houses as media, as billboards, in a kind of echo of Las Vegas... Houses were represented in television commercials, home journals, car advertisements, New Yorker cartoons, films, and even soap operas. So the house is a form of media and the media is full of houses.”
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Audience Lived Experience
Home / Dwelling
Work
Cultural Centers
Educational Resources
Television Networks
Social Media
Shopping Centers
Architectural Publications
Online Courses
Mediated Projections
Travel
Cultural Programs
Film and Television Youtube Channels
Podcasts
Video Games
Image-Based Search Engines
Consuming Home
There is no singular route in which a collective body learns about a topic, especially one as broad and tactile as architecture. People learn through their own lived experience and culture and through mediation like film and television, but there are very limited ways in which this discourse is actually discussed. As it is impossible to create a one size fits all approach, the thesis explores a new system of engagement that can be augmented to tailor to the ever changing way in which architecture is being consumed. Graduate Thesis 2022
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Mediation
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Consuming Home
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(CCA), Canadian Centre for Architecture. “Architecture Made for TV.” Canadian Centre for Architecture,
Looking at mediation as a way to both learn from the educational model and outreach to a larger audience, the “Design-a-thon” project is an example of the power of transparency of actual design for a larger audience. Broadcasting the process of the design as well as taking comments and conversations with community members, the projects folds the user into the design process.
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Paula Marantz Cohen “On Granite Countertops and Wolf Ovens,” 135.
“Taste always has a communal dimension… and it is always, in some way, conditioned.”
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Potential Run of Show
The House
Conceptual Provocation
The Programming
Case Study Intervention
The Suburb
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Outlets Show House
Concept Program
Creating a framework to reimagine the single family home through mediation. Suggesting a new, more democratic run of show that educates the public not on products and quick fixes but on deeper more infrastructural changes.
Visualize the impact that this mediated architectural narrative plays on the understanding and bias of the general public.
Concept Suburb Show Program Creating a digital platform that challenges the wiring that these episodic semi-educational shows make. Focusing on how we think about something and how we consume.
Look at the larger condition that this fast fashion trend within architecture produces through an suburban approach.
Intervention House Show Suburb
Reevaluate the modern single family home for today’s standards.
Expanding the platform of the educational show outside of the single family home to talk about the built environment at large. Redefining agency within communities through programmed education.
Intervention Program Playing off the Design-a-thon, Reevaluate the process of design through more immersive and democratic means.
Concept House Acknowledging the inherent trends , fashions and turnover embedded in the domestic realm, the project would project a solution based conceptual visualization that highlights the wasteful aspect of this constant turnover.
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Intervention Suburb Expanding the education of the built environment to focus on something broader than the house, the suburb. Using a hyperbolic suburban town as case study to reimagine the consumer based
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Show / Program Creating a new type of show, either for cable networks or through more democratized avenues like twitch, youtube, etc. to voice and subvert the consistent programming of these shows. Pushing against the lack of architectural representation, the instant gratification, and role of house as fashion to discuss a broader understanding of the built environment.
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Concept / House
Acknowledging the inherent trends , fashions and turnover embedded in the domestic realm, the project would project a solution based conceptual visualization that highlights the wasteful aspect of this constant turnover
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Intervention Leaning into the suburban framework these single family houses are typically massed produced in, the thesis proposes an interactive educational model that merges theme park, overnight stays and housing education. Through engaging and educational reprogramming of the built environment, what was originally thought of as an environment that is lived in becomes self aware and a means of educational discourse.
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Graduate Thesis 2022
Azus, Lee. "Uncanny Home: Considering Race and American Housing Policy in Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead." In From Conflict to Inclusion in Housing: Interaction of Communities, Residents and Activists, edited by Cairns Graham, Artopoulos Georgios, and Day Kirsten, 149-66. London: UCL Press, 2017. Accessed March 8, 2021. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1xhr55k.16.
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Homestead
Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead becomes an example of how the typology of the house can be reimagined for community and social needs. Looking at the project as both service and spectacle, the thesis imagines a similar uncanny nature of out of place-ness as a means of education and interaction.
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Consuming Home
A heterogeneous mixture of housing typologies fill the typically homogenized neighborhood allowing people to experience a multitude of environments. Interactive models of architectural concerns like circulation, daylighting, and environmental standards educate users on a deeper understanding that stylistic concerns. Part playground, part resource, the experience is meant to engage people with playful interaction.
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Audience Through pointed methods of viewer based engagement and subversion, the project explores means of transparency and real time education through smart home features. Open world game based systems are used as the model for creative engagement as the viewer’s watch the original programming. Using the benefit of multiple platforms, the viewer is able to test, reformat and learn from a more engaging and inclusive approach.
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Engagement
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By redesigning the existing structure of architectural education for the general public through educational engagement, inclusive design, and phygital housing models, new modes of learning, sourcing, and homespun design can give this audience greater agency towards shaping their community.
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Graduate Thesis 2022