Year: 2018
Status: Completed
Location: Cleveland, OH
Suburban domestic architecture is often portrayed as the backdrop for a fictitious american dream. Home ownership can tether us to space in deeply gratifying ways; however it can also become a heavy burden. Throughout the 20th-Century suburban domestic architecture became homogenized; refined into a consistent product for easy consumption. In the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, the facade of a secure housing market was revealed to be highly speculative. Despite this, the pitched roof, pastel sided tract housing made ubiquitous by Levittown and documented in Dan Graham’s Homes for America has remained the image of aspirational and possessable homeownership for the working classes. Hedge House asks visitors to consider the fragility of homeownership and the American housing market. Situated on the roof of Hedge Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio, a miniaturized model home is constructed of wood framing and, rather ironically, a recycled vinyl billboard. Depending on the location from which it is viewed, the house appears as either an opaque, solid, and complete structure or an unfinished framework. Like the model home, Hedge House is nothing more than artifice; it is an incomplete image, existing somewhere between a tent and a home, a garage and a room. A structure on the edge of completion and foreclosure.
Status: Completed
Location: Cleveland, OH
Suburban domestic architecture is often portrayed as the backdrop for a fictitious american dream. Home ownership can tether us to space in deeply gratifying ways; however it can also become a heavy burden. Throughout the 20th-Century suburban domestic architecture became homogenized; refined into a consistent product for easy consumption. In the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, the facade of a secure housing market was revealed to be highly speculative. Despite this, the pitched roof, pastel sided tract housing made ubiquitous by Levittown and documented in Dan Graham’s Homes for America has remained the image of aspirational and possessable homeownership for the working classes. Hedge House asks visitors to consider the fragility of homeownership and the American housing market. Situated on the roof of Hedge Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio, a miniaturized model home is constructed of wood framing and, rather ironically, a recycled vinyl billboard. Depending on the location from which it is viewed, the house appears as either an opaque, solid, and complete structure or an unfinished framework. Like the model home, Hedge House is nothing more than artifice; it is an incomplete image, existing somewhere between a tent and a home, a garage and a room. A structure on the edge of completion and foreclosure.