There is a man who lives on the streets of London and each week he visits St. Martin's crypt on Trafalgar Square to eat and talk. He relates how he knows Queen Elizabeth very well and they do many things together. When asked how he came to know her, and whether she was in fact the Queen of England, he answered that he knew she was the Queen because she showed him where she kept the crown. It was placed on top of the wardrobe in her bedroom, he said. The story told by this man has had a lasting effect upon the rationale behind the making of the Appliance House. For his tale has become the benchmark of the House's credibility. The story nudges the poetic, but somehow falls just short of conviction. It is the hollow substantiation that lingers beyond the storyteller's first hunch that makes the story falter.

The Appliance House is a project which shifts the mildly incredible into something which is difficult to discount. By assembling frail and barely recognizable traits of urban existence into firm gestures, The Appliance House is formed into a Sub-Urban Home. Anonymous mundane details of livelihood are rescued from careless anonymity by successive coaxing and polishing. Hunches about the Appliance House and its components are given names. These names are then reinforced by drawing and collage to permit the proposal to abandon the realm of shadowed idiocy that haunts an initial idea. The idiot shadow, and the figure that throws it, are fused into a single entity capable of shedding its form to reveal a house.

Once the intention of making a house has been confirmed, the conditions of everyday life are investigated. The persuasiveness of mechanical objects and appliances that apparently nurture homeliness are taken at face value. To make a house, a house for appliances, it makes sense to absorb pictures and images of fridges, can openers and bread tags. Two fat catalogues were chosen as the raw material for the synthesis of an appliance and a suburban home: the Sears Catalogue and the Sweets Catalogue. The American institution for store bought articles and the encyclopedic collection of brochures aimed at the building industry were delved into, cut up, reconstituted and congenitally united with the help of the collagist's knife. The resultant collages are then ordained with the names of house parts.

Giving a drawing a name that is not necessarily, nor even typically, associated with things being depicted in it can be jarring. Yet the act of naming is a kind of ordination and helps to make an unfamiliar thing or event more familiar and more plausible. By being called something, an object can be somewhat tamed. For example, when a collage is named "Side panel of Appliance House," the collage (made of scraps of paper) can be considered a representation of the wall, however difficult it may be to believe. Once the hunches, catalyzed by collages, have been given names, they are then spurred on to be confirmed by drawing and building.
 

APPLIANCE ETYMOLOGY

The Appliance House is the direct heir to the house endangered by scores of big and little devices scattered throughout. The appliance is examined for its potential self-worth and its unquantifiable values are installed into its construction.

Sears Roebuck, a business synonymous with appliances, has a sign in one of its machine repair centers describing the mythological impact Sears has upon the modern home: "Over 50,000,000 times a day someone depends on a Kenmore. During the last 50 years Kenmore appliances have built quite a reputation for reliability. So much so, in fact, that today more people depend on Kenmore than any other brand in America. Of course, its partly because we always insist that our products be as close to immortality as human hands can make them." It is this claim to immortality that is of interest. Surely, any object that is immortal must be worth incorporating into a home, particularly if its immortality is put to the test 50,000,000 times each and every day.

Despite the omnipotence of the manufacturer implied by this claim, the appliance has peculiar characteristics that simultaneously promote and defy its immortality. A skin is stretched around device that intentionally obfuscates the inner workings of the appliance. This skin is vital to the mythical credibility of the object for it separates two modes of comprehension: from without and from within.

When an appliance fails, we tap and jiggle it, expecting the mechanism to correct itself. This is done without any knowledge of what actually occurs. Yet the owner often knows how to nurse a much-loved appliance back to life: a well placed jolt from the right direction invariably sets it in motion once again. The owner's skills are similar to those of the chiropractor who mysteriously bends and manipulates the body whilst the addicted (or skeptical) patient smiles in the aggravating knowledge that the charm is working.

An appliance repairman views a malfunction quite differently. He sees a mechanism without its veil. Because he has extensive knowledge of what really goes on beneath the surface, he does not invoke the genie, but simply replaces a worn lever. Thus, on the one hand, a machine is fixed by its owner using semi-divine interventions, and, on the other hand, there is the plain-truth mechanic who attends to the appliance without prejudice or romance.

The owner dares not remove the panel to inspect its innards for fear of being struck down by the voodoo wisdom held over the appliance by the manufacturer. Because the manufacturer and the mechanic retain the secret rites of the appliance, the uninitiated user will always use the device out of harmony with what drives the activity from the underside of the panel. The comprehension of methods of repair are thus separated by the opacity of the sheet of steel or plastic: the methods are incongruous, leading to a tearing of the two ways of thinking about an appliance which in turn leads to the separation of the senses. It is seemingly irrelevant events such as these that surround the intangible panel which gives rise to the life of the Telamon Cupboard, is one of the components of the Appliance House.

The panels covering the chaotic mechanisms of an appliance have a mystique of their own. Because they are skin they reflect our current obsessions: the wish for a perpetually youthful look and an eternally flawless complexion. The materials used to cover appliances are immensely vulnerable to mishandling. They are chosen to age ungracefully, to deteriorate as soon as they are made. It is worth noting how porcelain enamel and plastic age. Porcelain enamel either scratches or chips and is impossible to fill or repair. Plastic scuffs with ease or melts into horrible disfigurement. Neither material has an inkling of patina, permitting the material to get better with wear rather than worse. Marble, metal, wood and fabric thrive when they are continually touched. Their pores and fibers absorb sweat oil and they glow when handled. Enamel and plastic fare better when they are kept in pristine condition and deteriorate rapidly once they are handled. The immortality of appliances described by Sears Roebuck seems more than ever to require shoring up by the rhetorical wizardry of the copywriter's pen.
 

HALF-LIVES

A blind act of faith has permitted the Appliance House to be drawn up and built. Its stated purpose, a nagging doubt, exists only as a name. During the construction, its name has been allowed to mull around in the head, and it has become more defined at each fresh pass of drawing or making. Parallel to its assembly, the Appliance House has undergone a series of programmatic half-lives. Each time its program changes, its life is split, reconfigured. The measurements of each half-life are shortened with ever increasing speed until the length of the half-life is shorter than the spoken word that describes it. When this moment arrives, rather than operating for inertia, the program of the building is decided upon by using a name that is reinforced by the constructed material enclosing it.

The most recent half-life of the Kleptoman Cell, one of the chambers of the Appliance House, called for a place to store orphaned objects possessing beauty that had been discarded through senselessness. Its current, but always penultimate, half-life suggests that it hold objects that refuse to reveal their contents: a clock case, a well-loved traveling bundle, a sealed funerary vase or a black garbage bag.

Thus the drawing and manufacture of the House slide forward with the same hesitancy as does the incremental half-life of the building's purpose. The entirety of the project remains in a constant frenzy. The drawing, the making and the refinement of its program meet a common point where the work sheds its chimera of making and thinking and has the chance of standing on its own two feet. As the half-life of the program accelerates towards an irrevocable solution of what the House might become, decisions are made to determine how each wall and floor of the House is to appear when built. The structure of the House will require every part to be of intrinsic value, exposing the dwelling to extraordinary consequences when a component is subjected to stress. Its workings will be candidly exposed, but designed so as to frustrate minute scrutiny from self-pronounced aestheticians.

The Appliance House extends itself beyond the immediate confines of the actual structure and substance of the six chambers that compose it. The half-lives that prompted successive descriptions of what the chambers enclose pivot out of the immediacy of the House and migrate towards the city. During the first period of half-lives the project exists in the drawings and construction of the Shelter for Sub-Urbanity. In the second period, the half-lives vacate the shelter and run for the city. At this point the musing Appliance House leaves its corner and confronts architectural certainty, testing its viability on the street.