A House Deconstructed: An Uncertainty Manifesto
Name
thld_a_00730.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
6.44 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
3cee77c971a5783614a45a2793599b36
Author(s)
Jarzombek, Mark
Prakash, Vikram
Date Issued
April 1, 2021
Journal
Thresholds
Publisher
MIT Press - Journals
Citation
Mark Jarzombek, Vikram Prakash; A House Deconstructed: An Uncertainty Manifesto. Thresholds 2021; (49): 71–78.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
A house is like a black hole. It sucks a huge amount of energy, creativity, materials, labor, and molecules into its orbit. But in the end what does it tell us? The decisiveness of the final building, its gravitational hold on the earth, belies the tangled web of realities that made it happen. For that reason, we need to remind ourselves of the strange inversion that is in play when we take on the study of the history of a building, even one as small as a house. While the very idea of architectural “research” promises the possibility of intelligibility, a house—as a signifier of architecture—seeks to preserve the secret that is at the discipline’s core and indeed at the core of modernity: the violence of the productivity that makes this house possible.
O(U)R: Office of (Un)certainty Research focused on a single house located at 1119 25th Avenue East, Seattle, Washington 98112. It is a modest modernist house constructed in 2018.
What is the backstory of this house? Most architects will think they know the answer, but they may be just as ignorant as the general population. The house serves as an agent of modernism, which seeks its affirmation in the upper registers of abstraction. Its clean lines signify rationality, professionalism and transparency. But these same clean lines suppress information and complications regarding the history of the materials before they arrived onsite. That is, the history of the house’s modernity is also the history of modernity’s coverup of unsightly realities.
Our research used the house as a portal to better locate, describe, and understand this building’s unstable place on the earth. After all, a single modern house reaches around the world in dimensions that are social, economic, ecological, political, and planetary, stretching even into the domain of the history of the universe. But the house, like all buildings, is designed to be mute about all of this, its normative silence a barrier to a fuller epistemological and disciplinary critique.
We researched the house along four registers, each a type of consciousness that is silenced once the owners get the keys to the front door:
- Atomic Consciousness, dating back to the Big Bang and the earliest supernovas.
- Production Consciousness, combining a vast array of ingredients to make architectural products.
- Labor Consciousness, multilayered and global in reach.
- Source Consciousness, digging and cutting into the earth and chopping the forests.
Each of these registers has powerful stories to tell.
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Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00730
