Thin Lies

BRICK ASPHALT VENEER

9 Brick Houses

A series of 9 erasure drawings of brick houses and the accompanying narratives reveal various aspects of the house over time. Each narrative unpacks the visual clues as to the false image of the house. Brick asphalt veneer masquerades as structural brick, but is caught in its lie through variously explored gaps, holes, and seams in appearance and logic, including bending, twisting, and anti gravity.

9 House Narratives

It was the capitalistic ventures, mass manufacturing, that both developed and changed the image of Detroit. This city and image have always gone hand in hand, a place of vanity, and exporter of image and lifestyle. As the industrial revolution took hold, the middle class and early capitalism were created. In Detroit, Henry Ford perfected the automobile and assembly line, while other manufacturing enterprises gained momentum and power. An economy based on mass production and the efficiency of the copy, Detroit helped change the process of making, while also creating the image and products of the American lifestyle. The emergence of a new stratification of society and the purchasing power of a new class, led people to mimic the lifestyle and image of the elite upper echelon.

Yet, contemporarily, the conditions of neglect have revealed these thin lies. Materials have often masqueraded as others. The mass manufacturing wrappings of vanity are decaying. Brick veneers of stamped asphalt and fiber now split at the seams, their blemished surface the only indication of a lie. These working class and middle class houses had once adopted the symbolic nature of the older brick and stone mansions of the region’s elite. Yet, through time and neglect, they now passively bend and twist, crumble, and fall.

The veneer is unique in possessing two strange conditions, that of the trick and that of absolute thinness. Historically made viable through mass manufacturing, the veneer may serve as an element of interest in a shifting economy towards precision fabrication. The veneer is capable of exploring and experimenting in and with a range of issues such as: social class and power, image and perception, materiality, performance form and space. The very vision of their decay, may provide inspiration for their use in generating new domestic architectures. The veneer may become an active tool for exploring custom strangeness, providing a system for new explorations and critiques based on old logics.

ABOUT THE WORK

VENEER POSSESSES GREAT DEPTH

The veneer, while physically thin, has great conceptual depth. Veneers provide an array of potential conceptual possibilities and physical precedents, while also containing deep latent historical and timely issues. The work documents existing issues in Detroit, showcasing how the lie of the veneer has been revealed with time and neglect. Photographs, drawings, and narratives begin to analyze the strange surface mutations and spatial-ized physical attributes of the veneer, from curling and bending, to strange gaps and seams, to punctures and missing units; the veneer has revealed itself in novel and highly articulated ways. In addition, the veneer serves as a means to capture power, by mimicking and distorting image or material, the veneer can harness social and cultural power and status, allowing or even bar participation, and engage or distance itself from the environment.

For the thesis, nine houses were found, each specimen demonstrating various manifestations of the brick asphalt veneer. Each house was examined, and analyzed and documented in the ways in which the presence of the veneer was revealed through various physical clues. The brick veneer splits at seams, curls, bends and twists. The veneer crumbles and provides holes to black caves. The veneer portrays brick in non structural and impossible configurations. These houses were not brick houses, their image fake, a series of false narratives in the landscape.

Narratives were constructed to accompany each house, using a metes and bounds style prose. Metes and bounds traditionally provide the description of the boundaries of a property by using distinct physical markers in a simplified drawing and narrative starting at a unique point or marker. Within the metes and bounds narratives of this thesis, the veneer is revealed over time. Starting with the house number, a unique identifier, a marker of sorts, each narrative travels around the facade. As ones encounters physical attributes of a domestic space, one begins to encounter oddities, warping and bending of brick, strange gaps, holes, and seams, and so on. The veneer is revealed in time.

The domestic components of the narrative described were kept in the accompanying drawings, while other information was erased. The act of erasure simultaneously defined the boundaries of the facade, while framing the view the audience should take in regards to the veneer, and simultaneously flattening the images to emphasize thinness of material. Each narrative begins to describe a different attribute of the veneer, be it thinness, non structural capacities, bending, mimicry, low thermal performance.

This method of erasing information is utilized as a means to isolate critical points from the research for exploratory drawings and the construction of the partial installation. This mimics the process of translating from brick to brick veneer, a process of copying, averaging, and flattening critical aspects.

Next, the nine drawings were overlaid and flattened digitally. This copy-flatten process created a series of ephemeral drawings. These overlapping, distorted, shifted specters mimicked earlier questions generated in the research while demonstrating new possibilities for the veneer.

Some houses had veneered over multiple material and cladding systems, had bricked over windows, and distorted additions. What happens when the skin and the frame don’t match, when the outside and inside do not align at 1:1? How can the veneer reconcile exterior and interior, beginning to bend and warp to generate new sectional possibilities?

Selected attributes of the nine houses are explored in a partial installation piece. This tenth house, an imaginary averaged house, magnifies and explores these documented decaying aspects of the veneer. Taking the cues from the original veneers and distorting this work to bend and twist with more depth in some spaces, while maintaining thinness and low resolution copy in others; a spatialized instillation plays with the opportunities of the veneer. This fragment of a larger whole and larger idea serves as a foil to traditional flat lamination domestic construction. In this piece the improbable or the impossible is explored while also highlighting the conceptual depth of the veneer.

Asphalt was used as a roofing material and as veneer cladding for the facade, a universally wrapped house. The material was bent around corners in a way that is impossible for brick. The material invaded areas of the house where brick did not traditionally exist. The installation uses these tactics in an exaggerated manner to call attention to the odd nature of the house, to focus on a small aspect of the domestic to re-examine the past, understand the present, and question the future.

The copy or replication is key, as brick veneers copied, averaged, and flattened an existing module. The installation utilizes vacuum forming and manipulation of existing architectural elements using .01” thick HIPS Polystyrene. The universality of the material, the datum point of the frame or plinth from forming, and the suspension of selected elements (much like the erasure drawings) speaks to the strange realities and logics of the veneer.