Thursday Salute to Originals: Fabric Homes That Prove You’re Not in Kansas Anymore
For many, the concept of home evokes feelings of solidity and permanence (remember how uprooted Dorothy felt after the tornado took her farmhouse away?). This connection manifests itself physically in the heavy building materials such as brick, wood, and concrete found in traditional home construction. Today we explore how a Korean artist plays on those deep-seated emotions by recreating the image of home in a new material.
Do-Ho Suh makes full scale models of residences from translucent fabric. The replicas of his apartments and homes are suspended in air, connoting a fragile dreamlike state. His structures include a recreation of a New York apartment and a historical home in Seoul, Korea.
We salute Do-Ho Suh for using a simple material change to point out the fleeting nature of space and our emotional relationship to it. After all, if Aunty Em’s house had been made out of lightweight fabric, The Wizard of Oz might have been set in a land somewhere even further over the rainbow and the Wicked Witch of the East would still be wreaking havoc on the munchkins. Proof that when it comes to materiality, emotional connection to space, and movie plots, there simply is no place like home.
Source: FastCo Design, Architizer