At Home without a Home

Back to Our Roots: Reconsidering the American Dream    

The typical American suburban home, is an outmoded model. It’s time to build new blueprints for a more sustainable lifestyle blurring the lines between public and private space, and revising the way we view domestic architecture. Our opportunity for prosperity and success become stifled when we tie the ideas of stability and permanence together. Several contemporary artists and architects have used a variety of methods to present innovative perspectives on one of our basic needs, shelter. The commonality that these contemporary practitioners share is an interest in challenging the status quo and presenting new ideas on how we can live. Andrea Zittel, who is most well known for her sculptural and installation-based living units, LOT/EK, who designed mobile living units from repurposed shipping containers and Matthew Weddington, who attempted to live outside in a cardboard refrigerator box for 30 days in downtown Chicago; these ways of working are only three examples of various approaches to exploring these ideas. Their work brings to question what our society considers necessity and success while suggesting mobility as one answer. Zittel, LOT/EK and Weddington all argue that a nomadic lifestyle brings us more freedom, which in turn, brings us closer to the traditional definition of the American Dream. In an increasingly mobile society, where technology is making everything smaller and more compact, we still aim to reside in spacious permanent structures.

Photo: Andrea Zittel http://www.zittel.org/