Dream Houses
Keeping a diary is not an unarchitectural pursuit. What is a record of your most intimate thoughts and feelings if not a monument to how you came together, a blueprint for the construction of your self?
In this spirit, the artist Donna Dennis has chosen to make her diary available for public consumption as though it were one of her sculptures—the forsaken diminutive houses and hotels, say, that she showed at O’Flaherty’s this past spring. One evening in late April, Dennis was at Karma Bookstore, across the street from O’Flaherty’s, for the launch of that published volume, Writing Toward Dawn: Selected Journals 1969–1982 (Bamberger Books). She read aloud a handful of excerpts, though it was the November 12, 1971, entry, in which she examines her youthful obsession with repositories of domesticity, that struck me the most:
What does this house idea mean to me? It’s taken me closer and closer to things important in my childhood. I keep remembering things I forgot. First I thought of the dollhouse, then there’s the treehouse […] there was the snowhouse I always wanted to build, inspired by a photograph of Mother and my brother Harold at the entrance to a snowhouse Harold made, big enough to get inside. All of these houses provided a large part of the great, promising, tantalizing, curious feeling I had throughout my childhood—a kind of vague, mysterious sense of unlimited possibility. I might make almost anything into a house.
Dennis elaborated further during the Q&A. “Recently I had a wonderful dream about little houses, ones brightly, fantastically painted, now faded, but all the more intriguing.… I dreamt I got a Fulbright to Ohio so I could study. I woke up wondering if I shouldn’t have been an architect.”
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud wrote that the virtuous man dreams about doing what the wicked man does in real life. Perhaps architecture is a vice: Architects build the structures that enclose people, shut them away from the world. For bad things to happen behind closed doors, you need doors—walls, too. You can’t enter the houses Donna Dennis builds, and for good reason.