simonsilvio: October 2007

It's the 1939 World's Fair in New York and the Town of Tomorrow previews the House of Vistas, a conceptual design of how people can live outside of the crowded cities. The industrial boom continuing after World War II along with prefab homes offered by Popular Mechanics all came together with models such as the House of Vistas and compromised with the typical Ranch style house we associate with the 1950s. That's the jist of an exhibit offered by a local Portland museum, and it's where I come into the picture.

Of the friends I've Jedi-mindtricked into moving to Portland before we arrived, Rebecca works for an architecture firm downtown tasked by the museum to build six models showcasing this transition into suburban life. As it was an open invitation, she asked me to participate. PSU students took charge of the other four models as assigned by Michael, the firm's contact with the Museum.

Being out of town the week they handed out blueprints kept me in the dark about the actual scope of the project, and upon my return, being the person with the most free time, I elected to take the most complex of the designs: the only two-story house. After my initial meeting with Michael where I collected the blueprints and discussed the focus of the exhibit, another week passed before I collected the materials I'd requested based on the scale of the model (1/4" = 1', or 1:48), and to top it all off our trip to Japan began a week before the due date for the models. To sum it up: I was the only person without an architecture background working on the most complex of the models with the least amount of time to complete the project.

First I converted the cartoony blueprints into a single drawing at a single scale, so I could better understand the scope of the project and get a good idea of how much material to request. Here I ran into many inconsistencies.

The changes to the garage geometry between the different views drove me crazy the most. Some showed an awning while some showed no awning but rather the entire garage extended out beyond where the awning should have ended. One drawing placed windows on one wall of the garage while another revealed the entire surface as lattice work for growing ivy plants. I ran into the most trouble with the fact that the house had a sunken living room and each exterior door exited onto a patio at a different height. This made every door a seemingly different size and with a different number of steps leading across each threshold. In the end I decided to ignore the multilevel first floor and keep it at a single level.

To help solve all these issues, I created a model out paper based on printouts from my electronic plans at 1/8" scale. I even humorously threatened Rebecca that unless I received my materials soon this pop-up book of a model would be my submission.