Premise

From “The Practice and Art of the Everyday”

Nicole Thommen Perri Thesis, Clemson University

The Practice and the Art of the Everyday refers to habitual activities of daily life and the meaning and poetry we find in it. The Necessaries are the innermost layer of the everyday. The habitual activities of EATING, SLEEPING, BATHING, GATHERING, and WORK order daily life. The practice of the habitual ensures survival and secures a base for experiencing the unexpected art of life.

The way we experience and interpret our world as a meaningful place is the art of living. The body is our center, and our point of view. We identify with how a thing embodies our character, and how it is seen to rise, or stand. The body also gives us an understanding of proximity and distance, up down, right and left, near and far. Thoreau wrote: “Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat” The wandering spirit desires admittance. The idea of a seat reveals man’s desire to settle into a knowable place, while having the freedom to come and go and to watch. Being human makes us both a settler and a wanderer. We wander as we carve a path, we settle as we repeat it. With each re-tracing of the path, the habitual becomes more deeply carved into the everyday. A seat for both the settler and wanderer must include permanence and possibility.

A container is primitive and “Necessary”; its purpose is to hold and serve. But a Vessel holds more, it embodies what it holds and whom it serves. Its practice is its utility, its art is to represent and celebrate its utility while leaving room for the unexpected. The paradigm of vessel presents a way of reconciling the practice and the art of the everyday.

The Emptiness of a vessel is its true art. This is its aspiration, arid potential. Its simple hollow echoes thrown light. The poet John Hollander describes this intimate embrace as “the way light can know a room even as Adam knew Eve”. Ceramic Artist Mike Vatalaro taught that; “In washing a dish we trace the path of the hand that made it. Fingermarks engage the imaginative hand of the mind in this same way. The wall pulses with the echo of us resulting in an emptiness that is quite full of life.

Because archetypes embody the patterns of humankind they can be seen as architecture's finger marks. Archetypes exist as general motifs but when exploited to fit a certain purpose they become the embodiment of whom they serve. These Finger marks engage us, inviting both imaginative and actual interaction, motion and rest.

House is where we establish our identity, but in this century the traditional house has become merely a pausing place or a seat. A dwelling must accommodate for the dual nature of settler and wanderer. Rooms and walls seen as furniture admit change and fit to contemporary lifestyles. While the habitual can be carved, cast in stone and secured as a permanent base for the everyday.

The compressed lifestyle of dwelling within a city requires that settlement extends out the windows and doorways to the street. The wanderer desires a seat to watch life go by, and to be able to walk the streets looking in windows to the life inside. A city is a collection of wanderers looking for their seat. Most residents in the city of Charlotte have been there less than 5 years and many have settled there temporarily. The importance and spirit of in-town living is its idea of choice. It calls for different densities of housing and incomes with a focus on the Trolley corridor as an identifiable neighborhood of walk-up houses.

These themes of the Necessaries, the Art of living, Vessel, Emptiness, Archetype, and Dwelling have inspired working principles for the making of my architecture. Modest form should reveal its inner purpose, existing as identifiable volumes. When the inner purpose is change, there the volume should be made of open- ended systems. When the function is the habitual unchanging, it should be rendered with permanence. My intent is to design multi-family housing with substance and life by layering in the depths of the everyday. My vision is a building that is all it should be with room left for what it aspires to be.