When the United States first shifted to the detached single family home model for living, at the turn of the 20th century, president Herbert Hoover, aligned with local Building and Home Associations, cultivated the American Dream Home as “an anchor tying working families to place and polity through credit obligations” according to Jonathan Massey. The model of the detached single family home was given support by the federal government as a way to create and give form to an indebted, working class, with nationalist tendencies and consumerist habits. While deeply connected to citizenship and the American Dream, single family homes are of course extremely contentious and problematic sites, as they are encumbered with the theft of land from native peoples, and the practice of redlining and racial segregation—practices that are responsible for the largest wealth gap in the country. Part of what makes the socio-political space of the single family home so enigmatic and fraught, is that it is also thoroughly enmeshed in traditions of care, comfort, community, stability, and family. In this vein, Writer and theorist Lauren Berlant described the single family home as a cruel optimism—a socio-political construct that people desire and strive for, but in the process of striving for, encounter harmful consequences and end up further from what they actually desire. What does it mean to live, work in, repair, and sustain these complex spaces? Inspired by Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading practices, how might a rearrangement of common household materials, processes, and positions make room for more nuanced readings of existing home spaces, and also lay the groundwork for thinking through the potential of non-normative formulations of home-space?

Historically, notions of home are inextricably linked to how we understand the needs and desires of human bodies. So much so that the two are often conflated. Frank Lloyd Wright called single family homes the messiest, most complicated part of the human body. Urban planner and Writer Dolores Hayden described the single family home as an image of the human body. Mark Wigley, Professor of Architecture and Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University, described the invention of enclosed rectilinear structures as having caused a two inch decrease in average human height—a literal reshaping of the human body in response to the built environment. Yet, when thinking about a home as a reflection of, or part of, a body it is important to remember that the majority of single family homes in the US were designed and built to specific codes established by, and to appease the Federal Housing Authority. The FHA sought to stabilize the housing market and minimize risk on 30 year mortgages by producing the home as a consistent, reliable product that would retain its value for a set period of time. While the creation of these standards and norms may initially have been strictly practical and economical, Architect and theorist Anna-Maria Meister points out that “As rules [are] exported into material form, architecture [becomes] an accomplice in constructions of governance.” If we can imagine the relationships between home and body to be somewhat analogous to the relationships between rules and materials, how might we understand the possibilities of home–space to be embedded in the way we work with the materials and systems that are used to construct single family homes? 

 As a handyman, thinking through these ideas, I began to wonder how a rigid construction system like tile, emblematic of the rigid construction systems and building codes that govern single family homes, might be tailored to uphold the contours of a softer form, in much the same way we hope the rigid structures of buildings will address and support the softer forms of bodies. Imagining a soft, ephemeral infrastructure of care to be woven into my associations with brown paper lunch bags, I began using them as forms for off cut pieces of tile. The series of tiled bags titled, can we please, was meant to pull at the tension between associations of home, and the often political and fiscally driven material realities they present. The tiled pieces that accompany can we please—a ceramic soap dish that vanishes into a wall cavity; a fountain that runs through a tiled safeway bag, through the floor and out a spigot on a silverware cabinet—are meant to push against a normative alignment between space and material, while offering a way to rethink assumptions about the kind of work a home might do in the 21st century.