ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on making as a practice of performing home. It focuses on two projects in which artists made, or collaborated in the making of, a domestic dwelling intended for habitation. Firstly, Ai Weiwei’s Studio-House (1999) in Caochangdi, a village on the edge of Beijing, China, and, secondly, A House for Essex (2015), which Grayson Perry designed in collaboration with Charles Holland (FAT Architecture/Ordinary Architecture). To understand practices of making, the chapter investigates critical stages in each process and the emerging place and conditions for practice in each dwelling. In so doing, it explores and extends understandings of architecture as ‘fabric’ and ‘object’ in a place (Meiss). It finds that a dwelling can offer a valuable means for an artist to speak to the context in which she or he is situated and to invite practices that expand definitions of fabric or object and engage with locally understood definitions and conditions of place. To build a dwelling is to engage in dialogue with the local situation, create a particular place and invite or allow for particular means of engaging with that place.
