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. What is different about it is its openness. Although there are four walls, a ceiling and a door, most of the walls and door consist of large windows. Although it’s closed off, there is still a sense of openness. Relating back to Foucault’s Spatial Stories, space is a practice of place, the Homestead Unit creates a space in a place by setting defined boundaries. Like he says, “A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables.” Only when there have been set boundaries, can there be a space in a place. However that depends on your definition of space and place. Is it not the other way around where place is a space that has been given an identity?
Here you can see that The Homestead
Unit is designed to be a portable space, which can be setup in any place. It’s made
with a metal-ridged ceiling, which could be seen as a being created with the
mindset of durability; being able to withstand harsh weather like this.
I think your discussion here warrants a more detailed exploration of the "Homestead Units" you discuss. There is a lot of very rich material on her website about the context and the concept of these units that really should be integrated in order to flesh out and ground your response. In the article "Don't Fence Me In" listed under "texts" on her site, the author James Trainor notes the resonance of these units with the old homestead shacks that pepper the land around Joshua Tree (built on land apportioned during a revival of the Federal Homestead act post WWII). He states further that Zittel's Homestead Units "are deliberately designed to be bureaucratically invisible, to circumvent regulations and restrictions and to be compact and nomadic. Intentionally built just short of the dimensions that would require building permits and applicable safety codes, they are modest hermitages that can’t be picked up on the radar of conventional ideas of private property. [. . . ] The units can be disassembled, slid into the bed of a pick-up and reconstructed somewhere else in four hours; theoretically to live in one is to be camping, to slip between the cracks of officialdom and exist independently of codes, taxes and infra structures" (Trainor 91). This seems extremely relevant to a reading of the Units in the context of her other work and the aphorisms I asked you to look at, but also very important to the understanding the spatial stories created by this work: For instance, you might ask questions about how the work displaces conventional spatial codes, creating a spatiality based on mobility and portability. In your responses, work at focusing more on the specifics of the work you are analyzing and making more grounded connections to our texts. Your use of de Certeau doesn't seem well considered, and we should make sure you have a clearer grasp of the the text. De Certeau says "space is a practiced place" (which you misquote above), but I'm not sure that what you say about boundaries being set has to do with the "vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables" that you quote from de Certeau (this has more to do with the notion of space as defined by movement and time than by set boundaries).
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