PLEASE NOTE THAT THESE THOUGHTS ARE STILL BEING FORMULATED... any feed back would be greatful
Sometimes what seem like the most trivial of tragedies are the most poignant. In Nicholas Barker’s television series, Signs of the Times (1992), television cameras entered ‘ordinary’ people’s living spaces and asked them to talk about their lives. One woman, married to an architect for whom white walls, minimal décor and Venetian blinds were de rigueur, explained how she sometimes went into the children’s bedroom- the only room in which curtains were ‘permitted’- and softly wept. A middle-class woman shedding tears for curtains in her domestic space may seem absurd in today’s society in which tragedies of enormous global and personal significance are beamed into out living-rooms. And yet it was a televisual moment which moved a considerable number of people, especially women. It hit a nerve.
“As Long As It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste” Penny Sparke
Sanctuary of The Architect’s Wife
Penny Sparke wrote of the desperate predicament of the architect’s wife in her book “As Long As It’s Pink” released in 1995. In the chapter entitled The Architect’s Wife, she outlined the position of the modern housewife and her freedom or lack of it to express her aesthetic desires through the ownership of objects that in the eyes of the modernised male surroundings would be considered unsuitable, due to there decorative, embellished, colourful un-functional qualities. The desire to own objects that cry to international style of design (in a similar way to how main stream land mark architecture now prescribes to the international style) has slowly moved to the norm, invading our final place of retirement, the home. The home, which would act as retreat, now has to fight off the demand to become the most dominant place of display.
Where does this leave the architect’s wife, a women who was driven to tears by her inability to own a set of figurines, decorative curtains, or embellished flatware?
Sanctuary of The Architect’s Wife is an installation that will look at how a home can begin to cope with the demands of being a multiple dwelling space for people with different demands, desires and tastes. Here the concept of environment, furniture and object aim to challenge the requirements of space in relation to the stagnant, stationary and standard expectation of the room.
Week1&2: Mobile Home, Living Out of the Suitcase.
Design and make a series of objects that enable me to live out of a suitcase for 7 days.Week3-Design a series of objects that seek to generate an environment for temporary habitation, using archetypal objects as a means to disguise the objects true intentions.
FINAL SHOW 2007
SIMONE BREWSTER