Michael Ezban, RA Better Homes and Gardens: Cultivating an Aberrant Domesticity “Gardens, in short, are both entities within themselves and a focus of human speculations, propositions and negotiations, concerning what it is to live in the world.” 1 —John Dixon Hunt The gardening section of local newspapers, blogs, and magazines increasingly encourage gardeners to employ household objects to cultivate their land—a misappropriation of the ‘familiar’. As a result, the conventional taxonomy of horticultural tools can be broadened to include coat hangers, salvaged windows, plastic milk jugs, dinner plates and panty hose. Gardening as the ‘domestication of nature’ has never been so literal. But what happens when horticulture invades the design of the domestic realm, and cultivation informs construction? Better Homes and Gardens is an experiment in co-opting gardening techniques to critically examine the domestic realm and subvert domestic architectural conventions. This project problematizes the often passive relationship between homes and gardens, allowing gardening to become a tactical and operational process that constructs dynamic residential spaces. Four distinct gardens types are proposed for an abandoned gas station over the course of ten growing seasons: a phytoremediation garden, a community pumpkin patch, a potager, and a native wildlower garden. During this time, various domestic architectural and programmatic elements will be erected on the site such that they facilitate gardening operations. Roofs, bathrooms, kitchens, doorways, wall framing, windows, crawlspaces and attics will all multifunction; they will serve for years as gardening ‘tools’, all the while expanding modes of dwelling on the site. Cross-pollinating construction with cultivation demands an opportunistic approach to the logics of both practices. In the words of Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis, the goal is to “exacerbate the logic of the given situation to illuminate that which is already strange within it.” 2 When normative domestic practices are supplanted by a multi-year series of open-ended horticultral processes, the result is a spectrum of yields—remediated soils, edible lawns, and productive ecologies. Tending a garden inaugurates an aberrant domesticity that renews the agency of cultivation in the landscapes of suburbia. Iconic gable roofs, complete with dormers and skylights, are inverted to collect and suspend a reserve of water above ongoing horticultural operations at ground level. Bathroom functions are distributed linearly along spiral stairways, serving as drip irrigation systems and connecting roof and ground. Kitchens conform to the logic of the crop row instead of the “eiciency working triangle,” and raised bed planting aligns the soil surface with table-tops, cooking surfaces, and appliances. The door frame is usurped as the primary enabler of circulation; instead, “broadcast” studs create variable frame densities that allow multiple trajectories and slippage between spaces. Windows are deployed horizontally, privileging views to attics and crawlspaces—the marginalized spaces of the house—and trapping heat that extends the typical growing season. 1. Hunt, John Dixon. A World of Gardens. London: Reaktion Books. 2012. pg. 6 2. Lewis, Paul. Pamphlet Architecture 21: Situation Normal.... New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 1998. pg. 4