You Are Here.

There are stack piles of luxurious architectural magazines that are collecting dust in the garage.

In the spring of 2011, I was introduced to experimental poetry and John Berger. Things such as Flarf, and other forms of expression without the conventional, frankly boring, rhyme scheme. After reading Berger's Ways of Seeing, I was confronted with an issue that I did not discover until one day I found myself with my face completely planted in an Architectural Digest magazine.



I have lived in apartments all of my life, and the occasional houses I did live in we had rented for no longer than 6 months. I stared at the piles of magazines I was collecting of luxury homes and wondered for a moment why I was so infatuated with them? Did I want to be an architect? An interior designer? By the time I was 19 I drafted a blueprint of my most ideal home. It had 5 bedrooms, three floors, a two-story garage, a game room/theater and a library. I stared at those blueprints hoping that they would lead me closer to what I really wanted.


But what was it that I wanted? I was attending college for a degree in English Literature not Architecture. Yet I could not break away from these magazines that had my jaw floored in mystification.

Suddenly it hit me: It wasn't the house.


Not only was I collecting years worth of luxury home magazines, but I also collected fortune upon fortunes from cookies. I had to ask myself: Why are you doing this?

Home.




I held onto these images hoping that one day I would build and find my own home. Really, I was buying into this product that each image was selling: You are Here. You are Home. You are exactly where you want to be.

Every moment that I spent staring at the pages of these magazines I was being mystified by this false impression that these images are right where I belong. There are no families in these pictures, they are all empty - move in ready. (Above) Look at that desk, cluttered with images of smiling faces, fond memories, and treasured books.

For a moment I was convinced that putting myself in these images would change everything. I tore out the pages and depicted what these pages meant to me, and solidifying the paper to glue was like inserting the key to the lock of my freedom. I packed the magazines up in box, threw the fortunes away and never looked back (of course unless one of the magazines required butchering).

I held onto two fortunes:
"All we are, is the result of what we have thought." (and more importantly, "what we have acted on")

the other was "To do nothing, is the be nothing." These I hold to be very true.

As of now, I am twenty-three years old...still searching for my home, but I know for a fact that it is not within the pages of an Architectural Digest Magazine.