/sə’bərbēə/
noun: the suburbs or their inhabitants viewed collectively.
//SUB-urbia attempts to rearticulate the banality of made-to-order residential homes by misquoting, re-interpreting and a-skewing the architectural ready-mades that compose our everyday homes. Taking a position against the post-war homes of Levittown, Plainview and other New York suburbs; the deconstruction of the architecture to individual elements: door, window, casement, shutter, gutter, drainpipe, siding, etc. and the subsequent re-articulation on a perverse framework; allows for unusual misalignments between these two formal systems to emerge. However, it was important to not scale and shift these ready-mades in drastic ways.; but rather to allow for the subtle shifts in position, adjacencies and use to generate the new visual typology of SUB-urbia.
//These misalignments, mis-quotations and mis-representations speak to the slight differences that already existed in the original suburbs of New York. The personal choice of siding, the odd door color, the change of bricks texture, etc. These amalgamations of materials and choices generateds a fuzziness/irresoluteness to the edges of the suburbs that results in the bleeding of one suburb into the other. A comforting quality that reduces architecture to the background allowing for the lives and quality of the residents to bleed through.
//Likewise, the collaging of the homes and their respective elements together collapses the irresoluteness of the urban sprawl down into a singular image. The façade aligns and frames these ready-mades against the formal system of the interior with its own expressed language. Unlike the homes of Levittown and Plainview which express their exteriors through a formal interior; the separation between interior and exterior in SUB-urbia generates more misalignments and a-skewed relationships that subverts our traditional understanding of the interior and the exterior.
//Encompassing, the project aims to generate a subversive suburbia by collapsing our understanding of the individual-community (typology) and the object-urban (readymade) to generate new images and aesthetic possibilities of at-cost living, construction techniques, readymades uses and the middle-class lifestyle. A brave new world for SUB-urbia.
