houses and housing STEPHANIE WHITE There are a few house images, years old, lodged in the back of my mind, that have become touchstones for how I think about houses. They are part of a photographic and drawing archive: not quite present unless I decide to examine them, which I have, for this essay on remembering and interpretation.
reduction multiplication agency
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2 Cloud’s Hill, a cottage in Dorset that T E Lawrence lived in in the 1930s before he died in a motorcycle accident in 1938. Because of his archaeological interests and political contacts throughout Arabia, Mesopotamia and Syria, Lawrence was involved in the 1921-22 peace conference in Cairo, whereby post-Great War victors, mainly France and Britain, mapped, seemingly at random, the region into new entities leading to a state of ongoing war that continues today, including the long-standing displacement of the Palestinian peoples. After all this high-powered political manoeuvring, Lawrence joined the RAF in 1922 under an assumed name, was outed in 1923, joined the Tank Corps in Bovington, Dorset, took this nearby cottage, left the army and rejoined the RAF in 1925, eventually buying the cottage and renovating it to suit, which was ascetic in the extreme. 1 He appears in none of the images of this cottage, introverted extrovert that he was. His life here was measured in material things: in 1933 he wrote to a friend, ‘I have lavished money these last . . . months upon the cottage, adding a water-supply, a bath, a boiler, bookshelves, a bathing pool (a tiny one, but splashable into): all the luxuries of the earth. Also I have thrown out of it the bed, the cooking range: and ignored the lack of drains. Give me the luxuries and I will do without the essentials.’ It was quite small, this cottage: two rooms up and two down. Upstairs, the book room, was opened into one room completely lined with bookshelves. The downstairs became the music room. He was delighted by its austerity and self-sufficiency: ‘...books and gramophone records and tools for ever and ever. No food, no bed, no kitchen, no drains, no light or power. Just a two-roomed cottage and five acres of rhododendron scrub. Perfection, I fancy, of its sort.’ Perfection, but also a kind of punishment, but perhaps he had lived too much and needed something elemental out of life and house. It is curious, one’s house should not be one’s life, yet it inevitably is.
1 A 1929 500 ft 2 CPR worker’s house in Calgary next to the CPR mainline. There are dozens of these same houses in the neighbourhood: a gabled box with a covered porch on the front and steps to the ground at the back, 4’ foundation wall, chimney on the original back wall serving the back kitchen and the rest of the house. Mine was renovated in 1964 by Bruno and Maria, part of the 1960s exodus from Italy to Canada, who excavated a basement by hand, Bruno shovelling and Maria carrying the sandy silt out with buckets. They walled in the front porch, extending the front room and put in a picture window. They added a bedroom on the back. It became 865 ft 2 . They had five children. I bought this house in 1981 and spent the first year removing layers and layers of carpet, thick paint, v/a tiles, linoleum, wallpaper and flimsy drywall walls and closets, doors, the entire kitchen, plywood rooms in the basement, and went back to the foundation wall, the original floors, stripped old fir trim. It became very light . At their best, houses are eternally additive and reductive, they can be changed, and will be, something that rarely factors in the design of houses or housing today where the house is less of a skeleton in which to build a life, and more a financial commodity to be produced, bought and sold, a particularly first world twenty- first century luxury. With my sixty cents on the dollar career in architecture (my era not a particularly kind or equitable one for women) I did not aspire to build (expensive), but to remove (cheap). The startling economies of vernacular architecture taught me much. Not just economy of means, but how much can be done with hand tools, ordinary materials and years of time.
site: England: rural
site: Canada: medium city, old neigbourhood, near downtown.
1 https://telsociety.org.uk/about-lawrence/
16 on site review 45: houses + housing
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