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Abstract
Stay-at-home Stress is a spatial survey narrating the pandemic stories of sixteen households in Houston, Texas. By translating lockdown experiences of sixteen participants into comparative annotated plans, the project tests a new graphical method for interview transcriptions and surveying-by-storytelling, shifting the relentless statistical gaze of COVID-19 toward the granular scale of the domestic body, and lending nuance and voice to oft-invisible, unequal spaces of the pandemic.
Notes
Notes
1 See “COVID Research Fund,” Rice University, https://coronavirus.rice.edu/research/covid-research-fund, accessed May 18, 2021.
2 Olena Hankivsky, “Quantitative and Qualitative Methodologies,” in S. Gadbois et al., Qualitative Methodology: Two Examples in Feminist Research (London and Ontario: Centre for Research on Violence against Women and Children, 1999), 1–2.
3 Elizabeth R. Cole and Abigail J. Stewart, “Narratives and Numbers: Feminist Multiple Methods Research,” in Sharlene Nage Hesse-Biber, Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012), 368–387.
4 Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association Publications, 2011), 56–57. Originally published in Architectural Design 48, no. 4 (1978): 267–78.
5 See Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till, “Table Manners,” in The Everyday and Architecture (Wiley, August 1998), 31–32; Diego Ramirez-Lovering, Opportunistic Urbanism (Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2008; and AD–WO, “Two Markets,” 2019, http://ad-wo.com/projects/two-markets.
6 See, for example, Design and Disaster: Kon Wajiro’s Modernologio, exhibition, Parsons The New School for Design, New York City, March 13–27, 2014; Architectural Ethnography: Atelier Bow-Wow, exhibition, Harvard GSD, Cambridge MA, January 17–March 5, 2017; and From Architectural Ethnography to Planning: Kon Wajiro and Nishiyama Uzo’s participatory research of everyday space in Japan from the 1910s to 1970s, exhibition, TU Delft, Delft, NL, March 16–April 18, 2018.
7 See “How to Be an Architectural Detective,” article 6 of 14, Canadian Centre for Architecture, May 2016, https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/issues/12/what-you-can-do-with-the-city/38537/how-to-be-an-architectural-detective, May 18, 2021. Material related to the Architectural Detective Agency was included in The Other Architect, exhibition, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, October 2015–April 2016.
8 See Made in Tokyo (Tokyo: Kajima Publishing, 2001); Pet Architecture Guide Book (Tokyo: World Photo Press, 2002); Graphic Anatomy (Tokyo: Toto Publishing, 2007); and Behaviorology (New York: Rizzoli, 2010).
9 “Besides being simply instructions for coming buildings, [architectural drawings] are an ideal instrument to document, discuss, and evaluate architecture. …[T]he exhibition proposes ‘architectural ethnography’ as a new methodology of social engagement.” See “Japan: Architectural Ethnography,” curatorial statement, La Biennale di Venezia: Freespace, Venice, May 26–November 25, 2018, https://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2018/national-participations/japan.
10 See, for example, Owen Jones, “Coronavirus Is Not Some Great Leveller: It Is Exacerbating Inequality Right Now,” The Guardian, April 9, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/09/coronavirus-inequality-managers-zoom-cleaners-offices. In a New York Times Magazine piece: “The pandemic and resulting lockdowns have exposed every type and gradation of difference: who has a backyard and who does not; who has to continue to work under dangerous conditions and who can work from their dens; who, as a result of racial difference, gets immediate medical attention and who does not.” See Jay Kaspian Kang, “Inequality Has Been Laid Bare by the Outbreak. Now What?,” The New York Times Magazine, May 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/20/magazine/covid-quarantine-inequality.html.
11 Harris County’s stay-at-home order officially began on March 24, 2020. Its initial expiry date of May 1 was extended four times to June 10, 2020. On June 11, Harris County issued a COVID-19 Threat Level system, a color-coded dial indicating current COVID-19 risk levels and actions from 1 (Severe: Stay Home Work Safe) to 4 (Minimal: Resume Normal Contacts). At the time of writing, the needle remains pointed toward 1. See “COVID-19 County Judge Orders,” Harris County Commissioners Court Agenda, https://agenda.harriscountytx.gov/COVID19Orders.aspx, and “COVID-19 Data Dashboards,” Harris County Public Health, 2021, https://publichealth.harriscountytx.gov/Resources/2019-Novel-Coronavirus/COVID-19-Data-Dashboards, accessed May 18, 2021.
12 See, for example, Alisha Haridasani Gupta and Aviva Stahl, “For Abused Women, a Pandemic Lockdown Holds Dangers of Its Own,” New York Times, March 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/us/coronavirus-lockdown-domestic-violence.html; Sara Aridi, “How the Pandemic Has Transformed the Idea of Home,” New York Times, March 13, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/13/at-home/pandemic-home.html; Boano Prišmontas, “My Room in the Garden,” Divisare, 2020, https://divisare.com/projects/430224-boano-prismontas-my-room-in-the-garden; and Richard Sennett, “How Should We Live? Density in Post-pandemic Cities,” Domus, May 9, 2020, https://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2020/05/09/how-should-we-live-density-in-post-pandemic-cities.html.
13 See “Context Maps,” Stay-at-home Stress project website, https://stayathomestress.com/Context-Maps, January 2021.
14 As non-local researchers engaging Fifth Ward issues “from the outside,” the importance of working in tandem with a local organization embedded in the community cannot be understated. For more details, see “Methodology,” Stay-at-home Stress project website, and the Center for Urban Transformation, https://www.fwtransformation.com/, accessed May 18, 2021.
15 To organize the research and interview questions, potential sources of stress were defined by three broad categories: Site and Demographics (including street orientation, access to essential services, neighborhood noise and safety); Environmental Factors (including physical building conditions, repair and maintenance status, summer indoor temperature, weatherproofing, and access to private outdoor space); and Social Factors (including overcrowding, temporary furniture setups, childcare or homeschool accommodations, and social distancing requirements at home).
16 After an initial face-to-face conversation, most participants seemed willing to flip their cellphone camera and point out aspects of the house that had not even been considered in the initial set of interview questions: from black fabric stretched around the porch to create a cooler outdoor room, to a large self-patched hole in the ceiling from hurricane damage, to vacant adjacent properties affecting perceptions of backyard safety. Each participant interview page includes direct quotes in the plan drawings, interspersed alongside paraphrased annotations. For example, see “Interview 06: Paul” and “Interview 16: Charlie,” Stay-at-Home Stress project website.
17 In my follow-up video call with Nicole, I walked her through the draft drawings just to confirm that we had correctly interpreted her household’s experiences and overall spatial organization. Smiling when she recognized her own family in the plans, she called her child over to have a look, and remarked that this was the first time they had seen a plan of their own house.
18 See Forensic Architecture, https://forensic-architecture.org/, accessed May 18, 2021.
19 Direct quote from Jane’s interview. See “Interview 01: Jane,” Stay-at-home Stress project website.
20 For example, Nicole coached her daughter all through remote summer school at the kitchen table, while Rachel set up a printer at the dining table and removed a television from her high school daughter’s line of sight for undistracted learning through the lockdown. See “Interview 15: Nicole” and “Interview 03: Rachel,” Stay-at-home Stress project website.
21 Direct quote from Lydia’s interview (translated from Spanish). See “Interview 09: Lydia,” Stay-at-home Stress project website.
22 “Interview 09: Lydia,” Stay-at-home Stress project website.
23 See HipoTesis, “CAD Blocks for the Present of Drawing,” in Laura Allen and Luke Caspar Pearson, eds., Drawing Futures: Speculations in Contemporary Drawing for Art and Architecture (London: Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, 2016), 53. Spelling updated to US English.
24 On the influence of type and racial thought in the discipline of architecture, see Irene Cheng, “Structural Racialism in Modern Architectural Theory,” in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II and Mabel O. Wilson, eds. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 134–152.
25 For example, consider Rachel, an essential health worker who formed a social pod with her frequently tested essential worker relatives for family nights; Tess, who used her porch for family barbeques and could work from home by converting her living room into a salon; and Joy, a new mother who had additional childcare support from her mother throughout the lockdown. These are stories of resiliency, joy, and comparatively lower reports of stress that are included in the drawings, rather than omitted because they are not stress factors per se. See “Interview 03: Rachel,” “Interview 05: Tess,” and “Interview 14: Joy,” Stay-at-home Stress project website.
26 A contemporary reference might be cartoonist Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012). Ware’s Building Stories literally uses cutaway axonometrics or elevations of buildings as the graphic novel’s narrative structure. By extracting individual characters and domestic objects out of the main image, Ware constructs a web of relations between a building, inhabitants, and possessions, in what might otherwise be lost in a Where’s Waldo-esque graphic clutter. See Chris Ware, Building Stories (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012).
27 In follow-up video calls, participants were able to point directly to areas in the drawings that had been misrepresented with greater ease. Even in draft stages, the plan acted as a communication device of sorts.
28 Framed by the immediacy of the COVID-19 research mandate and its limited project timeline, the documentation did not focus on building assemblies or comprehensive material inventories (“drawing everything”), but rather on typological arrangements, site orientation, and tactics of interior occupation.
29 US Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Measuring Overcrowding in Housing,” ResearchWorks 5, no. 3 (March 2008), https://archives.huduser.gov/periodicals/researchworks/march_08/RW_vol5num3t4.html.
30 See “Rooms,” in American Housing Survey for the United States, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Census Bureau, 2019, Appendix A-42, https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/2019/2019%20AHS%20Definitions.pdf, accessed May 18, 2021; US Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Measuring Overcrowding in Housing.”
31 See “Interview 16: Charlie,” Stay-at-home Stress project website.
32 HipoTesis, “CAD Blocks for the Present,” 53, and Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit. Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 95–96.
33 Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” 89.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Amelyn Ng
Amelyn Ng is an Australian architect, cartoonist, and assistant professor-in residence at the Rhode Island School of Design. She was a 2019-2021 Wortham Fellow at Rice Architecture and graduate of the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices program at Columbia GSAPP. Ng’s work seeks to untype architectural formats, systems, representations, and practices. Her work can be found in e-flux Architecture, VOLUME, PLAT, Cite Digital, Critical Planning Journal, and the Journal of Architectural Education, among others.