CUBBY HOUSES MALLEY this life.docx

MEMORIAMEDIA Review , 2020

Figure 1: A bathtub luxury © Vita Yakovlyeva (Edition Memória Imaterial) As an investigation of memory, this visual essay seeks to create a connection between an individual experience of childhood and its social setting through engaging a narrative as a form of representation. The autoethnographic narrative constructed here revolves around a paper doll house created in the interior space of a common file-folder by the author in her own childhood. Looking thirty years back, the author attempts to decipher the meaning of her paper doll house within a larger context of childhood as a social construct, available to her largely through her recollections, claiming that an embodied narrative is as much a reflection of self as it is of its context, and vice versa.

Following the austerity of war, Australians in the 1950s were keen to pursue their inter-related ambitions of building families and homes. Architectural design was heavily influenced by modernism and focused particularly on the perceived needs of mothers and children, imagined to be ever-present in the home. Architects recommended modernising and centralising the kitchen so that the mother could efficiently complete chores while supervising her children. They advised designing children’s bedrooms to provide privacy and stimulate creativity, as well as incorporating indoor and outdoor play areas. While these ideals were promoted in housing magazines, analysis of other sources reveals that the reality of 1950s housing was more complex. Many Australians lived in dwellings representing the design conventions of previous eras. For those building new houses in the 1950s, postwar shortages and personal finances often constrained aspirations. Others disliked the fact that modernism challenged traditional spatial and social precepts. Even for that minority residing in newly constructed, architecturally designed housing, families did not always inhabit domestic spaces in the manner anticipated by architects. Attention to a range of historical sources allows a fuller understanding of the broad spectrum of postwar housing and the diverse ways in which 1950s Australian families dwelt in their homes.

ANUAC. Open Access journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology (SIAC), 2021

This introductory essay proposes a reflection that discusses, reframes, and presents the thematic section hosted in this volume, that investigates houses at the intersection between recent trends in the anthropology of the house, the study of material culture, and the investigation of contemporary socio-cultural transformations. In the first paragraph, we contextualize the growing contemporary interest in houses. In the second, following Carsten, we sustain the idea that houses themselves should be placed at the heart of a research agenda, we present the approach proposed in this thematic section, we clarify what are houses and what distinguishes them in relation to homes and households and how, in the history of anthropology, these “objects” have been investigated. In the third paragraph, reviewing the main approaches to the theme, we delve into the notion of société à maisons elaborated by Lévi-Strauss. The fourth paragraph places the concreteness of houses back at the centre of the analysis, where normative and material forms are mediated, reproduced, and even contested or negotiated. In the last, we present the three articles hosted in this thematic section – and the afterword discussing them – that explore how houses and their materiality modify the world and deal with its transformations.

2019

This research project enquires into relations between sculpture practice, adjustments of space by inhabitants of dwellings and the siting of artworks as installation and intervention. It examines how acts of dwelling and making correspond as habitation procedures; as everyday processes of amending space and objects. Understood as a female will-to-identity they suggest new ways of constructing the experience of encountered sculpture and the passage of the domestic into public discourse. The research takes place through domestic sites and related exhibition activity, embodying experiences that overlay places of living and working, home and studio, residency and gallery. These include a Caravan mobile home in Narooma, NSW; a 1960s mud-brick residence, Birrarung House in Eltham, Victoria and a gallery residency in Bendigo, Victoria. Habitation procedures are practices of the dialogical; an interchange of voices that constitute new and compound meanings (Mikhail Bakhtin,1982), of in-betweeness and dialectical experience (Jane Rendell, 2006), of change through the experience of time and space (Massey, 2005) and of mediation. The communities of practice informing the project include the Womanhouse Project (1971), Lygia Clark, Andrea Zittel and Heide Bucher. Keywords sculpture; domestic; habitation; dialectic

Studies in the Decorative Arts , 2008

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A|Z ITU Journal of Faculty of Architecture, 2022

Radical changes have taken place on housing under the influence of modernism. These changes drove the writers, sociologists, philosophers, artists, architects, and designers of the period. Today, urban growth and narrowing housing spaces have increased the research on houses again. Upon closer inspection, contemporary houses show that the effects of modernism still last. Therefore, it is essential to examine the productions and discourses on housing to produce new, practical, and realistic spaces. This study examines modern dwelling through the illustrated book How to Live in a Flat by William Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne in 1936. As critiques of modernism, the satirical images in this illustrated book are still valid today to understand modernism's effects on the dwelling. This paper deals with the development, symbols, interior features, and furniture of modern houses. The identity of the modernist house was questioned through this book by using phenomenological research as a qualitative research method. The paper examines modernist interiors with a comprehensive literature review. Subsequently, a discussion was held on future predictions by using inductive reasoning. These images offer a considerable amount of data on modern dwellings and decrescent living spaces from modernism until today. As a result, the study argues that examining the previous works will prepare a practical ground for future productions instead of predicting or defining a new residential life. In light of the data obtained, the study concludes that designing by evaluating the data of everyday life should be accepted as a prerequisite.

Impact Journal , 2020

In Visualizing home in Australia, I describe my studio research and how I develop my artworks in relation to my experience of migration, displacement and my idea of home. Being an Iranian in Australia, my experience of displacement does not cause me to think of returning to my homeland in the future. Instead, being a migrant here evokes the idea of home, and brings my attention to my everyday life and how repetition in daily household tasks can bring the idea of home into practice. I refer to the use of handwriting and screen-printing in my artworks to reflect my idea of the physical impact of displacement on my ideas and personality. Through analyzing my artworks, I explain that my engagement with the process of screen- printing and handwriting reminds me of the early days of settling into life in Australia and learning English, and how these two expressive tools brought my attention to something still, a personal silence, determination and satisfaction in exploring and finding my ideas. In this article, I aim is to suggest that physical engagement with the process of screen-printing can be likely a metaphor for repetition in everyday domestic household tasks.

In the foreword to Gaston Bachelard’s 1964 landmark study, The Poetics of Space, John R. Stilgoe asked the following question: 'If the house is the first universe for its young children, the first cosmos, how does its space shape all subsequent knowledge of other space, of any larger cosmos? Is that house a ‘group of organic habits’ or even something deeper, the shelter of imagination itself?’ To date, research into child psychology has identified a relationship between the development of the conscious identity and the experiences of the immediate environment of the child. While psychology is responsible for informing the populist view of childhood, the field of psychology alone does not account for the significance of the developing relationship between an individual and their environment. This dissertation therefore aims to explore, according to the question raised by Stilgoe, the recurring significance of the childhood house in the development of an individual’s identity. The adoption of this question as the framework for research is based on a personal interest in the intimate spaces of childhood and the manner in which these experiences are either consciously or subliminally manifest in the experiences of adulthood. The acknowledgment of the role of the individual as the centre of experience has lead to an exploration of the field of research known as phenomenology. Hence, the majority of the research conducted in the formation of this dissertation is based on the discussion of this relationship by phenomenologists. The findings put forward in phenomenologist theory are bolstered by a variety of other sources found in the fields of psychology, literature, art and architecture. The research has suggested that although the significance of place is discounted in the mainstream understanding of childhood development, the childhood house as the first known place of life plays a fundamental role in the development of the conscious identity of the individual. This relationship is not only significant in the formative years of childhood, but remains integral through memory, to an individual’s future patterns of perception and behaviour in later life. The significance of the findings of this dissertation in an architectural sense lies not only in an understanding of the role of the material qualities of the childhood house to an individual’s identity, but also in an observation of the way in which these childhood experiences become translated in the creation of future environments.

2012

The objective of this thesis is to explore the relationship between the self and the house. In approaching the subject, my assumptions were that the basic condition of the house-self relationship is of tension and animosity and that architectural design, following a psychoanalytical tendency to reduce tension, is used to improve this condition. When great amounts of energy and care are invested in this process, the narrative of tension and its resolution is brought to the surface through architectural drawings. Based on these assumptions I developed a methodology of analyzing architectural process drawings. In applying this methodology, the process of tension reduction through design is uncovered. Similarly to psychoanalysis, this methodology privileges process and the observation of change over time. In order to test these assumptions, I chose three case studies of house designed by architects either for themselves, or for a close family relation. I focused on cases where process d...

Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2010

The Rural Studio, an outreach program of Auburn University, designs innovative houses for poor people living in Alabama’s Hale County by using “junk” such as car windshields, carpet tiles, baled cardboard, and old license plates. The article theorizes this particular architecture in terms of Critical Regionalism developed by Tzonis/Lefaivre and Frampton and by reflecting on aesthetic problems of junk-architecture. Further, the article evaluates the achievements of the Rural Studio by discussing cultural problems arising through participatory design as well as Third World architecture and the cultural and social obstacles that architects and architecture students need to overcome. As students become members of the community, patterns of Third World architecture are transgressed. I conclude by saying that no vernacular architecture should be politically instrumentalized; architecture like that of the Rural Studio can only thrive within a self-sufficient niche, that is, within the space of an absolute vernacular, disconnected from the context of globalization.