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tags: Architecture
I saw roses and similar decoration between two houses. These pinks roses had blended between the yards. It almost gave the impression the house was one property.
It occurs to me that yards in NY are always generally distinct - similar elements don’t blend into one yard to another. Even a tree will be firmly in one yard. You’ll not see a bush that overtakes a fence and bleeds into one yard, uniting them. If this does occur, generally the intrusion will be chopped, often with disagreement.
You won’t see full landscaping, or features that fully mirror a neighbor. I wonder what would happen in a neighbor started mirroring your property exactly. They’d begin simply with replacing small welcome signs that match, maybe selecting the same design for a house number. Then then in spring they’d lift the flower selections and bushes etc.
I’m sure there’s local inspiration, but a full copy. I could see that feeling strange.
But nature really doesn’t observe this. It must be controlled. The tree will stretch across the yard. The rose bush, will distinctly blend the properties with flowers and thorns.
String lights
I was in the back and noticed my neighbors running those decorative light bulbs in the backyard. The last couple of years these light have appeared in a few surrounding properties and I also notice them at certain cafes etc. At night they reveal themselves, one a few blocks and one directly across the lane, the same warm, glowing string lights that immediately make themselves known by their “distinctiveness.” I remember seeing this meme talking about “you’ve made it if you own these lights in your backyard.” A checkmark in progress.
But anyway, it made me think back to LI suburbs in the early days and home ownership. Demiurge Levit would giga-Amish like 30 homes a day, slab by slab. You see aerial photos of it and they look like electronics from their uniformity. Within the limited variations (cape, ranch etc and natural landscape deviations) we’ll say this was a point where things were stable, t0.
The Levitt project, problematic as it is and was, has drifted through iterations of home owners. You find “original” feel quaint homes like the original capes, but also McMansions next door. But I thought now of this feature, the string lights gradually appearing at this point in time, lacing the homes. Also kind of like a natural beacon, or an indicator. In this state of flux and chaotic growth, a shared element emerges.
Starting from uniformity what is the end state of these designs? A maximally aberrant and chaotic space doesn’t seem possible (thinking to the idiosyncratic “named” bungalows on Fire Island, destroyed then rebuilt). The neighbor hood Witch’s home redeemed? OR a return to the basic case, like a Poincaré recurrence point of Levittown, strangely coalescing back to original Levittown homes through random process of edits. (This idea has been interesting to me lately. There’s “nothing” from stopping us from developing all 2024 games on Gameboys.) The end state of a Levittown home, the atrophied mcmansion, returning to the single Levit Cape but laced with string lights? Is the appearance of the pergola with lights the same space, distributed?
Perhaps the maximal chaotic state of the architecture is ruin, and not this twee mcMansion of desire. Maybe it is just chaos with another axis. Is the end state chaotic designs, or patterns/trend? The two seem at odds. Thinking of a home I would theoretically own, what decisions would be made that would adhere to a trend or my own choice (chaos). Could you make your yard a thick forest of trees? An amphitheater? You see the no-lawn movement appearing around here. Also those people who make their entire yard a garden. Oddness at the periphery, by the shore, where people can “pay” to be odd. Pay to be different, vs the rose garden front yard, free and odd and enmeshed. Like this laced lights - we have trends. I was thinking of the my reading of early gravestones of long island being like a home in this regard, like a gravestone. The home owner does always perform their own work, their own gravestone. There are stone masons or builders that impart their own method on the space. Levitt, the Ur builder.
Evidence of a child
rel: Mummification on the Dance Floor In the beginning of the movie “Broken Flowers” a postal worker walks between various nondescript suburban yards.
One yard, clearly has children.
I have noticed this before, and thought of it while watching the film - how children will leave an incongruous mark on the aesthetic of home. There will be strewn toys in the yard. If the children are older there might be a small bike cast, wheel tweaked as if leapt off.
There is no harmony to the scene. There is no denying that a child lives there. But still there is a connective aesthetic harmony between the different homes with children in them, despite the disarray they manifest as.
In a way, it is the type of Roses between yards concept example.
