Aaron Scott
Notes on "Trophy" In June 2001, I was involved in a car accident while showing work in Frankfurt, Germany. While I was lucky to escape with relatively minor injuries, I still found it necessary to spend the summer convalescing at my parents' home on the West Coast. During my recuperation, which marked my first extended stay in Southern Oregon in over 10 years (I was born and raised in Gold Hill, Oregon), I began a project of documenting new housing developments (commonly referred to as "trophy homes" or "mcmansions") that had sprung up like mushrooms along the outskirts of the valley over the past 10 years. These developments tended to be located on tracts of land which were previously farms, orchards or open space, so they were often dramatic incongruities between the homes and the landscape. I was interested in the disproportionate scale of the developments as well as the diverse stages of completion that existed simultaneously. The homes seemed to be in a perpetual state of construction, and their nearly identical designs made them seem like an endless series of genetic mutations. I took an amalgamation of common floor plans for trophy homes and designed my own variation, to be constructed at one-sixth scale (of a 5,400 square ft. home). The building would be arrested in the stage of raw framing - to preserve the beauty of the incomplete, transparent skeleton, a structure which perpetually anticipates but never arrives at its destination of being a "home". The piece is an investigation into relationships of scale, as well as the reactionary consumer-mandate to build at a monstrous size in order to compensate for the collapse of the "home" as the privileged/sacred social space in modern society. Aaron Scott New York |
