Greetings from rainy, warm Maryland. A special welcome to new subscribers! I’m grateful for your interest.
We had a day of perfect snow last Friday. I was able to go for a lovely ski around my neighborhood. I honestly can’t remember the last time I did that. I’ve always been enchanted by snow’s effortless remodeling of paved surfaces into softness and cars into plump sculptures. A temporary reclaiming of the “civilized” back into wildness. A reminder of who’s really in charge.
If you missed last week’s cross-post with ’s marvelous Substack , you can find it here.
Today is a bit of a departure from my usual essays. I’m sharing the first of a series of three short slide talks about ideas of dwelling that I recorded for my grad architecture students. Our first project this semester is to design an apartment building in a historic neighborhood in Baltimore called Mount Vernon (home to the U.S.’s first Washington Monument!). Teaching housing is great fun — it’s something we’re all familiar with, you have to work at several different scales, and think about things like whether your powder room opens into the dining room (never a good idea).
Each talk is between 10 and 20 minutes. They play well at 1.25 speed (just saying). This one is a bit of an art history talk — looking at paintings of interiors for clues to how the domestic life is housed.1
Thanks for reading (and viewing). I’d love to hear about your ideas of home in the comments. Next week, we’ll look at the mythic aspects of home, from history, imagination, and personal and cultural memory.
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Painters shown, in order: Pieter Janssens Elinga; Hubertus van Hove; Johannes Vermeer; Leslie Graff; Pierre Bonnard; Njideka Akunyili Crosby; David Hockney; Henri Matisse; Edward Hopper
I love this. So fascinating to see these paintings most of which I was unfamiliar with. Thanks for providing a free pass to your architecture class.
What a treat to be able to bring paintings to architecture class. I like to think of how our interiors have changed with technologies, family roles, and other historical developments. Fireplaces, window sizes, storage spaces all have changed. Love those warm Dutch interiors.