By architect Joanna Griffiths
A full-scale, neon-green knitted replica of a house is not something you see every day. Yet, despite the structure’s uniqueness, there is also something reassuringly familiar about “Grandma’s House.”
What struck me most about the installation were the images that immediately sprang to mind from my own grandparents’ house. Although they died 10 years ago and I haven’t stepped foot in the house since, I can still recall it in vivid detail: the fridge magnets on the fridge, the 60s furniture, the photos of their grandchildren on the stairs, and my granddad’s record collection.
Like Marie’s grandma’s house, my grandparents home was a constant in my life, a safe and comforting place to be. But I had never really thought about it in much detail.
As an architect, I spend my working life designing and building places for people to live and work. The role of an architect is to use knowledge and experience to optimise space: to understand how people move through a building, the flow of living, how we move around a kitchen, where we need storage space, and how the orientation of a house can be used to get the best natural light, minimise overheating in summer, and reduce heat loss in winter. Our job is to make space work.
To this end, an architect might spend weeks or months working out the best layout for a house, but ultimately there is a formula for these things that has basically stayed the same for hundreds of years. As a result, the vast majority of us live in homes that are replicated hundreds if not thousands of times over.
So that feeling of ‘home’ evoked by Marie’s work doesn’t come from the representation of the architecture of the house. Instead, houses turn into homes as they are lived in. As memories are created in them, those little personal touches and interventions in the architecture differentiate the once-identikit structures.
Marie’s grandma’s house is a fairly unremarkable architecturally. It has a mock-Tudor exterior typical of many 80s and 90s mass-built houses; it could have been built anywhere. But by recreating the detail of her grandma’s house with such craft and care, Marie has made the viewer notice those small details that make Grandma’s House a home—the tiny details that hold memories for Marie.
In turn, the viewer can reflect on all of those tiny details visible in their own homes—things we take for granted and walk past most of the time without noticing. It is that detail, and how it intertwines with the people within those spaces and the memories they create, which makes a building feel like a home.