Model Homes

Assistant Professor Sam Schuermann presented “Model Homes” via ZOOM as part of Cornell AAP’s mini lecture series titled “Discussions on Living and Architecture,” curated by Ekin Erar and Jonathan Levine.

“Model Homes,” discussed architecture, housing, type, and the aesthetics of domesticity—particularly that of the modern paradigm. The lecture highlighted various projects that comment on this confluence, including 99 Rooms and A Room in A Room. 99 Rooms explores rooms as individual domestic typologies. By re-reading via re-drawing canonical domestic spaces (all built between 1927 and 1971) as a series of rooms rather than totalizing buildings, certain formal and aesthetic information is revealed across room types. A Room in A Room was an installation completed in Spring 2023, primarily highlighting a large curtain wall and a fabricated furniture object. The form of the furniture object directly implicates the 99 drawings- synthesizing particular repetitive, recognizable geometries into a singular object with distinct readings at each elevation through the use of projective geometry and corresponding “linework” (stitches and seams).