Invisible Space

The Homestead Unit is just a room; a unit of space, divided space, closed off space, private space. That’s what it does. It creates a boundary between things. But boundaries can sometimes be invisible to the eye. Invisible boundaries although unseen, are still boundaries, limitations nonetheless. The personal space or personal bubble some call is an invisible boundary. It is the space around a person he or she needs to feel comfortable.  This volume of space cannot be seen or even touched. Its boundaries can grow or shrink yet whatever changes to it is still hidden to us. The personal space or personal bubble is a boundary; an invisible one conjured by the mind.

In the case of The Homestead Unit, there are walls, a door, and a ceiling. All of it is tangible yet there is still a sense of openness. The occupant is enclosed but what’s the difference?

Wall may be walls, but what happens when they are transparent? The majority of the front and left façade of The Homestead Unit is made up of glass walls. Looking back at De Certeau’s “Spatial Stories”, place is seen as the partition of space. That is what gives it structure. Only when there is something to refer back to is place possible. The openness one might feel from being in The Homestead Unite is created from most of the so-called walls being mostly transparent. Or rather is it the sense of place not being created from the boundaries set by The Homestead Unit? Glass is transparent aside from the glare it might give off from reflecting light. But something that cannot be easily spotted could just be counted as invisible. It’s different from being camouflaged though. The sense that the walls of The Homestead Unit may not be there is different from them blending into the background. Something invisible can also be seen as nonexistent. After all you have to see it to believe it right?

                          A tour is a description and a map is the details. A space is like that of a tour. Space is vast and invisible but only observable through the correlation of other objects within the space. Imagine you were walking through a blizzard up on Mt. Everest. The intensity of the storm obscures your vision and in turn changes your perception of space. Your depth perception could even be affected. The point is, even space can vary from person to person because perception is not a constant. These units of enclosure she creates changes the perception of space by giving the observer a set place to reference the surrounding to. This task of creating reference points for space is much easier with architecture rather than some of her other projects like clothing and carpentry; architecture is generally on a bigger scale. Although we live on a rather small planet, space is still vast and is immeasurable just with the vision of your eyes. But people have a hard time understanding the concept of how small they really are.  Just take a stroll in the Great Plains, a large stretch of flat land where the ground and sky meet undisturbed by man-made. From that you can sort of grasp the immense amount of space there is.

             The Homestead Unit also has the ability to be placed almost anywhere; it was probably designed that way. As you can see from the pictures, in one it is placed in the comfort of the indoors and in the other it is placed in the harsh environment of the dry land. It can be counted as the reference point of space. In the gigantic openness of such outdoor regions, The Homestead Unit makes judgment of space just a little bit more true to reality.