First of all, Apple had no intention of being the new HGTV. While some people love a full tour through a three-bed, two-bath, portico-façade, bourgeois house stripped of its context in a majority white neighborhood by a realtor who sees a sale of a house purely as a means of commission, this show is a complete antithesis to that.
It's about reimagining the role that architecture plays towards social mobility in the face of social issues. Architecture, therefore, is a solution, not merely a product: not something to appreciate and then close the laptop and take a thirty minute shower while all of the lights in the house are still on.
In this way, architecture does not exist in a vacuum. A home is a reflection of those who live in them and around them. You cannot appreciate the significance of a home until you appreciate the people who live in it. I will concede that HOME did put a lot of focus on the homeowners, but maybe there's an argument to be made for that decision. It would be quite boring solely to see a beautiful greenhouse encompassing a home if we were not given insight into how people live in it, how they maintain it, or even why they chose to do so in the first place. We would never know the significance of the plants if we were never told that its placement around the home stimulates Jonatan, a witty and ebullient boy with autism. It would seem insufficient--and unethical--to pick and choose solely what you think is pertinent to a person's life. So, is overcoming adversity not a means to the American dream? Or is that not a thing anymore since recent social reckonings of long-lasting injustices have become more egalitarian? Nevertheless, I find it would be just as boring, if not unfathomably more so, to just watch white people take 30 minutes to buy a house. There is no character development or conflict (maybe that's the point of reality television). And that's how it has been for hundreds of years, but times have changed; it's d**n time architecture does too.
Less discursively, HOME is trying to shift our focus away from the expedient superficiality of modern architecture. To diverge from suburban conformism and, instead, plop a home in the middle of nowhere in Maine, in a beautify heath of Sweden, in the turbulent and divested region of Chicago, in the dense jungle of Indonesia, underneath the corporate-plagued land of Austin, or in the inhumanely disenfranchised region of Mexico. Each home sees its architecture as a means to an end. An end that starts with a beginning, whether it be a couple, an individual, a group of people, artists, craftsmen and craftswomen, activists, or literally anyone, because this is only a glimpse at what urban development could look like.
I will concede that the show is relatively pretentious. As a teenager who has lived in a home without sustainable sewage, waste management, energy or food consumption, water treatment, or heat, this is a very intangible and abstract vision of our potential future. I am sure that most cannot afford to build a home underground (unless we depopulate dense areas and rethink urban development before it's too late--as in an environmental downfall) nor can America (and the rest of the world) just uproot all its infrastructure and redo it all. But that does not and should not undermine the vision that the show proselytizes: ecological sustainability and reusability. It's about saving this f**cking planet. How is that pretentious?
Modernity has taken the contents and "pretentiousness" of this show, bastardized it, and made into a shibboleth of conservatism; thereby dismissing it as naïveté. No dream is too extreme for America. No idea is too complicated for America. (This may be the wrong rhetorical approach, seeing as how the show tried hard to have a more global perspective and not stick to pathetic appeals to American exceptionalism.) Still, the show is a calling card, showing us new modes of architecture, some more sustainable, appreciable, welcoming, beautiful, unique, manageable, and without expediency.
Forget American exceptionalism, it's an American expediency.
It's about reimagining the role that architecture plays towards social mobility in the face of social issues. Architecture, therefore, is a solution, not merely a product: not something to appreciate and then close the laptop and take a thirty minute shower while all of the lights in the house are still on.
In this way, architecture does not exist in a vacuum. A home is a reflection of those who live in them and around them. You cannot appreciate the significance of a home until you appreciate the people who live in it. I will concede that HOME did put a lot of focus on the homeowners, but maybe there's an argument to be made for that decision. It would be quite boring solely to see a beautiful greenhouse encompassing a home if we were not given insight into how people live in it, how they maintain it, or even why they chose to do so in the first place. We would never know the significance of the plants if we were never told that its placement around the home stimulates Jonatan, a witty and ebullient boy with autism. It would seem insufficient--and unethical--to pick and choose solely what you think is pertinent to a person's life. So, is overcoming adversity not a means to the American dream? Or is that not a thing anymore since recent social reckonings of long-lasting injustices have become more egalitarian? Nevertheless, I find it would be just as boring, if not unfathomably more so, to just watch white people take 30 minutes to buy a house. There is no character development or conflict (maybe that's the point of reality television). And that's how it has been for hundreds of years, but times have changed; it's d**n time architecture does too.
Less discursively, HOME is trying to shift our focus away from the expedient superficiality of modern architecture. To diverge from suburban conformism and, instead, plop a home in the middle of nowhere in Maine, in a beautify heath of Sweden, in the turbulent and divested region of Chicago, in the dense jungle of Indonesia, underneath the corporate-plagued land of Austin, or in the inhumanely disenfranchised region of Mexico. Each home sees its architecture as a means to an end. An end that starts with a beginning, whether it be a couple, an individual, a group of people, artists, craftsmen and craftswomen, activists, or literally anyone, because this is only a glimpse at what urban development could look like.
I will concede that the show is relatively pretentious. As a teenager who has lived in a home without sustainable sewage, waste management, energy or food consumption, water treatment, or heat, this is a very intangible and abstract vision of our potential future. I am sure that most cannot afford to build a home underground (unless we depopulate dense areas and rethink urban development before it's too late--as in an environmental downfall) nor can America (and the rest of the world) just uproot all its infrastructure and redo it all. But that does not and should not undermine the vision that the show proselytizes: ecological sustainability and reusability. It's about saving this f**cking planet. How is that pretentious?
Modernity has taken the contents and "pretentiousness" of this show, bastardized it, and made into a shibboleth of conservatism; thereby dismissing it as naïveté. No dream is too extreme for America. No idea is too complicated for America. (This may be the wrong rhetorical approach, seeing as how the show tried hard to have a more global perspective and not stick to pathetic appeals to American exceptionalism.) Still, the show is a calling card, showing us new modes of architecture, some more sustainable, appreciable, welcoming, beautiful, unique, manageable, and without expediency.
Forget American exceptionalism, it's an American expediency.