These paintings are made up of scaled-down approximations of real homes that exist on the suburban estates around the town within which I live. The benign uniformity of the architecture found in these well-manicured suburban neighbourhoods engenders an uneasy sense of isolation and conformity.
I have a GA ticket for Troye Sivan’s Friday Nov 2 show in San Francisco at the Masonic and would like to trade for the Thursday show if anyone is interested!!!
My class schedule works better for the thursday show, and if you’re reselling, a friday show might be easier to sell ! :)
During my research for the subject of suburban planning and its social isolation I stumble upon a wonderful specimen of poor urban design in the state of Missouri, where the nefarious housing pods hosting cul de sac and twirly roads is the realm for car culture.
The whole looks like any other American suburban community with the freeway skimming residential areas, the collector defining the neighbors, and then smaller roads extending everywhere until they meet all houses.
I wanted to plot an hypothetical visit of one neighbor to the other and this is the result. It’s a three miles trip by car that will take at least 9 minutes because there are no opening in the shape of a road or pedestrian path to connect the two points.
This is how it appears from top-down view with a series of semi-natural and artificial barriers that separates the cul de sac on the right with the curb on the right. Two worlds apart basically because of arcane and mysterious reasons that impelled urban designers to totally exclude any sort of travelling from one side of the neighbor to the other. Picture if the neighbor’s house is on fire and you want to help them escape death; you won’t probably because you either climb over the two fences and the trees, or you drive your car but that’ll take 9 minutes and who knows if people there are still alive by then.
Highlighted in red it’s the whole barrier of fence and trees that separate the neighbor in two distant sides, where socializing can be as difficult as Berlin in the 1950s between West and East.
To avoid your other neighbor doesn’t get the chance to invade you, the developers built an artificial canal (highlighted in blue) to furthermore make sure people don’t get together and come up with crazy ideas like socializing. In yellow the broken connection that might have been existed with a pedestrian path, but better not take any chance.
Here’s the site from another point of view and you can see how the whole portion doesn’t allow for people to walk or drive to the other side, splitting the pod into three areas.
I zoomed as much as I could and you can see it’s not just a road network issue anymore but a lack of safety feature that could help people stay away from danger. After all these are places where families with young kids live.
In yellow I highlighted the dangerous areas where the lack of fence around the power lines and the canal have allow for free access; anybody can go unrestricted near the pylons and the ditch. Unsupervised kids face the most peril especially when it’s right around their backyard. Coloured in magenta it’s what appears to be a narrow bridge but in fact is a floodgate connected by another fence to the little shack on the right.
Notice also the lack of sidewalks everywhere; this tells us a lot about the urban design of housing communities where the pedestrian was left out of the picture in the first place. People going for a walk have to be in the street increasing the risk of being struck by a vehicle, this shows us the very weak UX design home owners are affected, but also emergency vehicles who might get tangled driving streets which have been badly shaped.
What does this mean?- We live among cities that are the result of zoning laws which manufactured landscapes dictate by cars first and people second. In North America there’s nowhere a car couldn’t go from the driveway to the drive-through of your local burger joint; drive in movies for cars, parking lots eating away downtown portions of many cities, and many other issue which gets in the way of creating healthier places to live.
UX design is not only about websites and phone apps, it extend its dominion onto any other experience the user goes through that can be as simple as opening a pickle jar or driving to work. Both these elements engage people into specific and different behaviors which can result in the success of failure of products and services.
I’ve written about housing problems, solutions, and the need to address the sprawling issue that is affecting North America under many ways. We know there’s a crisis affecting millions of people which are pushing for a way of life which is not fully compatible with the environment.
Tiny homes have been on the feed of many social platforms for the past ten years displaying how cool they are, how cheap they can be made for people to purchase with their minimal requirements.
After a lengthy look through the years of this trend in small homes, we can say that without any effort it’s financially logical to dive into an investment of such dimension: on the wheel, cozy, made of natural elements, cheap, and so on.
I find myself arguing against this type of living for the simple reason that it represents the most essential condensation of individualism. They are no different than renting a single room in a house, except your isolation increases because you have the ability to pull it wherever you like it if you opted for the wheel option.
Some have different shapes, some look like the Sandcrawler from Star Wars.
Tiny homes are here to represent an extreme side of housing solution, yet they claim to resolve the many issues of urban sprawling. Their volume of less than 500 sg/ft -on wheel sometimes- is now a trend among architecture and design platforms, but they represent a phenomena of hyped iconoclastic reality juxtaposing against any other viable solution.
Why do we drift from gargantuan McMansion volumes to micro living spaces?- One of the reason is the hype of existentialism in reducing everything to the bone which has been affecting modern society today. It comes as an almost natural response to the exaggeration. The other bit is the will of people to remove themselves from the consumerism trap of their previous generation: millennials don’t want to repeat their parents mistakes and don’t want to end up living in the suburbs.
Some of these homes have great interiors and for a moment you forget they are the size of a shoe box. So fare this is not the solution to a housing crisis which tends to sprawl and consume so much capital and resources. Tiny homes are a trend and like all trends they tend to stay for a while and then fly away until the next one comes.
It’s a confining space that dehumanizes the persona and removes any sense of hospitality. Reducing the living space to a fancy VR or trailer might sound cool, but it’s far from being a home, it removes the very definition of human space becoming a display of self indulgence under the pretense of environmental caring.
Perhaps the real issue here is the lack of compromise between the 5000sq/ft mansion and the 500 sq/ft tiny home. There’s a lot that can be done to provide affordable homes and it should begin with the improvement of already-existing spaces, abandoned malls that can be turned into townhouses and have enough green space for people to enjoy. Cities have plenty of old sites that can be renewed, it’s just a matter of gearing up the right mentality.
