Field Diaries

Title: Field Diaries

Authors: Carolyn Butterworth and Prue Chiles

In: Architecture and Field/Work, ed. by Suzanne Ewing, Jeremie Michael McGowan, Chris Speed and Victoria Clare Bernie (London; New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 129-138. ISBN: 978-0-415-59540-7

Year: 2010

Abstract: In the squeaky-clean world of the architectural journals the new house is described by a particular sort of building study giving a critical view of formal, technical and material approaches and setting these within the context of other buildings. The house is presented finished, immaculate and empty.

We are both architects and we have both recently designed and built our own houses. In the day-to-day process of design and construction any thoughts of purity very quickly became subsumed by much more mundane concerns. We may not have had external clients but we had partners and children who came with their own expectations and demands and our relationships with builders and neighbours were complicated. Mistakes and compromises occurred as is invariably the case in all projects, but it was our personal involvement with these particular projects that made the contingencies of site far more acute for us and placed us at the heart of a set of relationships and processes that became an expanded field for us beyond the conventional notion of site.

We have both found the experience of building houses for ourselves vastly different from building anything else. Through building our own houses we have made the very idea of home tangible, simultaneously mapping existing narratives of family, self and home while creating new ones.