Grand Opening

Not very grand at all, admittedly, just putting something here to make this empty space a little less lonely. A manifesto, maybe, to show where I'm going with this, or liable to go with it.

Part of my interest concerning your typical dwelling in a North American suburb is this horrible surfeit of space, in that houses have grown dramatically larger since the sixties while the average family is smaller. There's a lot of books I'd like to be reading about this, perhaps the most enticing being Elizabeth Farrelly's Blubberland. Her take on it appears to be from an environmental or economic perspective.

My reaction to what I guess we could call McMansions involves those matters, but it's also a gut reaction, this sense of having too much space. I grew up in a pretty modest bungalow in rural New Brunswick, but we had these kitchen cabinets that were just cavernous- we'd fill them with food that we would probably never eat, but something has to go in there.

I think a lot of people in the affluent Western world have gotten good at inventing uses for frivolous spaces, but the fact remains that we are carving more out of the world than we know what to do with. We're burying ourselves in space, or drowning in it. When I think of home there is usually some element of cozyness, intimacy, and I suspect that we begin to lose that as our private spaces expand.

Is this a North American thing, a counter-cultural reaction? White middle-class guilt? I'm friends with a Filipino who is always puzzled by my fixation on making things smaller, closer, etc. There are corners of the world where people are desperately short of personal space and I guess my rejection of the luxury of big homes and low-density development might seem crazy to them.

- Jeff