Starting in June 2015, I planned to begin the construction of a house that will end up on a piece of land surrounded by all things natural. This, the landmark venture, the main event, if you will, serves only as the context of what will be my senior project and will also amount to nothing without the foundation of the preliminary work that I am calling Building Home, a process. This project is about preparation and creative freedom through intimacy, flourishment, and failure. This project, not unlike a long-winded performance piece, will be the study and unfolding of the process of art-making as I believe it should be.
It has been a developed belief of mine that no art piece can exist successfully without a period of prior development. This period, in theory, must result in an understanding of the conceptual motivation and foundation as well as the executional knowledge and planning, i.e. the why and the how. The study and test of validity of such through a process of preparatory work is my project. I will not nail even two boards together until this period of prior conceptual and executional development has taken full form.
This is where the iceberg that is this project breaks off into its first aspect: the executional. This will consist of, step one, creating a tremendously complex and aesthetic architectural design for my future home using software learned mostly from hundreds of YouTube videos and from classes of the department of ICAM Visual Arts at UCSD. Such software will include Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, SolidWorks, and AutoCAD (Revit) Architecture. Much time and work will be spent mastering the program Revit Architecture and learning to use it as a marble sculptor would use a chisel. Although, the most challenging step will be the designing a piece of planned, efficient, and aesthetic art. In short, this will not just be some log cabin. The architectural design style will be modern, in general, but also completely innovative in formulating this limited space to be not only my means of shelter but also my creative workspace. Step two will be the construction of these architectural designs into a scaled-down, dog-house-sized version of the house. This smaller-scaled, constructed Doghouse will allow me to interact with, fail with, and intimately understand the materials that will go into the true version of the house.
With the conceptual portion, comes the second half of the process. The timeline of this project, that starts here and ends two-quarter lengths from now, will be littered with unanswered questions begging to be understood and satisfied. What exactly is my will to carry out this rather extreme task? Is the venture an escape or a journey? Peace throughout this entire process will only be possible from the understanding that lies in the answers of these questions. With the answers that will come, I will begin writing a collection of bound pages called the Craftbook. Each page will contain a single note that will be each piece of gained wisdom, understanding, and rational behind this endeavor. It is my core belief that this conceptual work is half, if not more, of the integral steps towards successfully preparing for this venture.
REVIT ARCHITECTURE SOFTWARE
TO CREATE & MODEL THE LIVING / CRAFT SPACE
FIRST ROUND DESIGN
CREATED WITH EARLY-STAGE SAVVY OF
AUTODESK REVIT 2015 & MINIMAL RESEARCH
AND INSPIRATION REFERENCE
INSPIRATION BOARD
PULLED IMAGES FROM VARIOUS ONLINE SOURCES
RESEARCH
TO ASSIST WITH THE KNOW-HOW OF CONSTRUCTING AN
INTELLIGENT, SOUND, WELL-BUILT STRUCTURE AND TO
FAMILIARIZE WITH PAST SIMILAR PROJECTS/MOTIVATIONS
This project of mine has shadows. There are handfuls of artists, from a wide range of times and motivations, whose works are not unlike this one. The most recently relevant from the pile is a documentary filmmaker known for the film TINY: A Story About Living Small named Christopher Smith. The documentary tells the tale of Smith who proceeds to build a small home with little-to-no prior relevant experience. Smith’s piece is a self-imposed challenge to determine if he, with the help of his girlfriend, could build the house with specified time and money constraints. There are some similarities in his project to mine, the search for home and the way in which the house is built on wheels and in a simplified size, although the differences are more notable. There is no element of challenge in my project to “see if I could do it” as there was in TINY, nor is there any documented period of precedence in Smith’s smithing (he simply began construction). Such implementation of a piece, through hastiness and not patience and through desperation and not freedom, is exactly what the process of my piece aims to do without.
A couple notches back on the timeline was a young man name Christopher McCandless who wasted no time upon graduating college to absolve of his previous identity and begin tramping around America in a sort of liberation from his former life. He donated all of his life savings to Oxfam charity, burned his ID, abandoned his car, and reclused into the wild to live a more specified existence and destined his journey to Alaska. There he hunted, berry-picked, read, and lived in solitude for many seasons deep in the heart of the Alaskan wild. Inside of an abandoned bus, he domesticated himself on a fundamental level until he died from starvation. These events were recounted in McCandless' own words and those of author Jon Krakauer in the book Into The Wild. While there are many notable differences between McCandless’s process and my own, there are also several similarities. Both his super-tramping and amidst-nature bus-dwelling and my home-settling on a forest bed consequence a life of encouraged solitude and dependence on only the essential. Although, the journey of focus in my project is that of the work that precedes a new life that is comparable to that of McCandless. Where they differ is with his journey being at the much further end of the extreme as he lived with little-to-no technology besides a few tools and a rifle. My journey’s purpose is not to remove technology but to remove excess and unnecessary elements in order to live fundamentally. Nor is my journey to ‘escape’ society as was McCandless’. His life was challenging from oppressive, dishonest parents to complete dissatisfaction with his surrounds. His solution was to flee where mine is to free. There is no rebellion in my journey.
To close, I’d like to address the most obvious of works when anybody talks about building a house in the woods: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. This American, transcendentalist author, poet, and philosopher, devoted two years, two months, and two days to live simply aside a now-famous pond in a house that he built with his own two hands. While he was there, he enjoyed, farmed, read, and wrote a book entitled Walden (or Life in the Woods) in which Thoreau thoroughly answered each of his fellows’ questions as to why he had chosen this journey. After much hesitation for fear of being robbed of the opportunity to discover things on my own by reading them from another man’s accounts, I have shed of that and taken it upon myself to read this legendary classic. The man is as deliberate as was his intentional way to live in the woods. To my (un)surprised discovery of late, in comparison of his and my works, much of our motivations our similar. As his central thesis goes, he explains, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived (Walden, Thoreau)”. I have to re-address, at this point, while my motivation to live absolutely, fundamentally, and self-fulfillingly is resonant of Thoreau’s words, that is not what my piece is about. As previously stated, my piece is not about the experience of living in the woods, as it was for Thoreau, but rather the experience of preparatory work that precedes a major creation. It is about the essential conceptual and executional building blocks that need to exist primarily with as much tactility as the eventual craft.
NEAR FINAL DESIGNS
CREATED IN AUTODESK REVIT 2015 after further
research and inspiration reference
DESIGN REVISIONS
COMMENTARY FROM ARCHITECT/PROFESSOR KYONG PARK
DOGHOUSE CONSTRUCTION
process
COMPLETED
GALLERY INSTALLATION
Ultimately, the deliverable pieces from the process will make up a gallery installation. It will not be a finished, beautiful house but rather a representational timeline of the process in developing a true understanding of the concept and execution of an unstifled creation. The installation will encompass all of the parts of the process that provide a true foundation to the possible house and illustrate its three major intentions. Firstly, the imagination and manipulation of every stick and brick to be known by weight and worth by my head and hands. Secondly, the elapsed period of encouraged failure, the unavoidable consequent of learning most nutritiously, and it’s allowance of true creative freedom by absolving the presence of desperation in the craft. Thirdly, the formalized conceptual understanding of this journey’s motivation as not to flee but to free.
Specifically the timeline gallery installation with consist of six landmark items. The first will serve as an introduction to the timeline: a doorframe the gallery-go will walk through as a symbol of entering the space filled with all the things that make the house before the house is made. Next will be a brief description of the timeline piece complete with the title, artist name, explanation, and intention. The next piece in the timeline will be a bound collection of conceptual, knowledge gained throughout called the Craftbook. Fourthly, the gallery-goer will traverse a long pile made up of fragmented pieces of material that had failed along the way, called the Trail of Failures, as the embodiment of the necessary failures that have occurred in order to create confidently. Then will be the completed elaborate architectural designs of the house made for thorough executional and architectural understanding. The last piece, to bookend the door at the other end of the timeline, will be the Doghouse: a scaled-down version of the house constructed from materials to also be used in the actual house. Each of these items remark on the preparation and process of executional planning and conceptual understanding of this approaching chapter in my life and the once-and-for-all definition of home.
