The project investigated Atlanta’s housings stock viewed through the lens of AIRBNB.com, a website that offers an alternative to hotels, and features posts of local residents providing tourists with bed and breakfast accommodations. Along the way, the scope of the research grew to also include other homes that have been in some way publicized: Atlanta historic homes featured in “AIA Guidebook to Atlanta,” as well as contemporary houses that over the years, were a part of the Modern Atlanta Home Tour.
The project utilizes methodology of various ways of averaging data, where the site, the client, the sense of domesticity, and the collective image of home become “averaged out” to create vignettes featuring reinterpretation of Atlanta’s idea of domestic life. The site, located at the east entry to Piedmont Park, is an arithmetic mean of latitude and longitude of all homes of the scope of research. The client, Jennifer Washington, a 32-year-old African American homosexual high school English teacher, was created as a statistical mode of Atlanta’s demographics research. The AIRBNB posts became a survey of Atlanta’s the sense of domesticity. The featured drawings cross-references the various search categories on AIRBNB.com and lists the titles of the posts that are a concise statement of how Atlanta’s residents view their homes and domestic life, as well as present most commonly appearing phases in the posts referring to spaces, objects, activities, and spacial qualities.
The notion of collage became the means for “averaging out” the aesthetics of Atlanta’s residential architecture. The collages are both architectural and generative of architecture. With their transparent qualities, the collages became three-dimensional, creating new spaces that can be inhabitable.
Press:
Archinect: What is the Image of Home in the Dirty South? >>
Archinect: The Dirty South | Master's Studio with Jennifer Bonner >>