Architectural Blend: George Stern
In trying to shoot images for the project I got a flat tire. Surrounded by a suburban neighborhood, I chose to take it as a sign for the project. The cookie cutter neighborhood reimagined to be fresh out of the oven. Like a gingerbread set worth 400,000+ dollars, the fully formed set comes with a white picket fence and hedge. While another set of three have freshly been baked with lawns to match. By taking these houses and exaggerating their origin, I'm also working through the idea of what the houses are built on. The process of quick turnarounds to maximize profits and make money off of an American dream that has been marketed towards us since the 50's. Now entire winding neighborhood spin up in months, removing acres of forest to be replaced with water draining fields of lawns. The movement of cookie cutter houses is one of many steps that incentivizes profit over creativity. A step towards why creative jobs are overworked and underpaid, or art isn't valued in the way it should be.
Images:
House: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Model_of_a_Suburban_House,_V%26A_London.jpg
Lawn :https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boundway,_lawn_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1507628.jpg
Smoke Island: https://texturelabs.org/textures/atmosphere_127
George’s Architectural Blend takes place in the kitchen, pulling freshly baked “cookies” out of the oven. I would assume that these cookies are fresh based on the steam escaping from the oven. There are two different “cookies” being baked, houses and lawns. These cookies are obviously real houses however they are scaled down to the size of a gingerbread house. There's a bowl sitting off to the side as well as a completed house made next to it. All image sources are linked assuming the kitchen is a picture of his own.
ReplyDeleteAt first glance I didn’t quite understand what this work was about but after thinking about it, it made a lot of sense. People use the phrase “cookie cutter house” to describe what some current neighborhoods look like. For example if you go to a newly renovated neighborhood you might notice that all the houses look the same, that is what is referred to as a “cookie cutter house”. These houses are mass-produced in order to “save” money or in other words be cheap. These houses normally aren’t the best and still cost a crazy amount of money to live in. The houses and lawns being placed on a tray and “baked” essentially brings literal meaning to the phrase. Overall, I think this is a very clever way to bring awareness to this issue of mass-produced housing.
While this work doesn’t exactly create a new meaning, I think it creates a new understanding. As stated before, this clever composition gives a literal meaning of a “cookie cutter” neighborhood. Ultimately this gives a new understanding of the phrase and puts it into perspective for other people who might not understand how upsetting this is, especially when it comes to safe and affordable housing. One suggestion would be to add unique houses into a “discard” batch. I only say this because after reading the description I didn't quite get the last bit through the image.
If this image existed in the real world, I think it would be a part of a protest or some sort of campaign that brings awareness to the safety concerns with housing now and how whoever is in charge of building these houses doesn’t seem to care about the safety rather how cheap they can be.
Overall, this is a super clever way to put the phrase “cookie cutter neighborhood” into a visual. I think with some additions to incorporate your last point of your description would further elevate the piece as well as give it an entirely different meaning rather than just a literal meaning. I appreciate your additions such as smoke to make this seem like real life, I wish I could see more of a mess when it comes to the baking part though. Not only do people make a mess when baking, so does construction when building these houses in real life.