PEREGRINE GERETY
My room is on the upper floor of a 1925 bungalow that was originally built on Stadium and was moved to its current location in the Dicken neighborhood thirty years later. This portion of the upper floor is part of a later expansion into what was once simply attic, as evidenced by the use of gypsum drywall rather than lathe and plaster and the altered roofline at the back of the house. The room measures 13’-3” by 10’. There is an eight foot wide closet on the southwestern wall, accessed through four louvered doors. Along the southeastern wall (to your left as you enter the room) is our bed and a nightstand that we found on Craigslist just after we moved to Ann Arbor. The nightstand came with the dresser described in the elevation. The bed is quite junky. We purchased it from Wayfair and it has necessitated multiple repairs, even though it's barely over a year old. On the far side of the bed, in the corner of the northwestern wall, is a glass-doored bookcase that an elderly man gave us after his wife had died and he was cleaning out her office.
Walking into the room, you will find yourself directly facing the southwestern wall, which is pictured in this elevation. The windows on the southern end of the wall measure five feet across (5’-4” including trim) and 4’3” high. The position of the windows allows the dawn sunlight to fall diagonally across the center of the room, directly onto the bed. Below the window sits a cedar chest that we bought at an antique shop in Colorado shortly after we were married. To the left of the windows is our dresser, which we purchased as part of a set with the nightstand mentioned in the plan description. It was manufactured by Bassett, a Virginia-based furniture company. It is oak in the mission style and is topped by a large, triptych mirror.
This Actor Network Map traces what actors exert agency over the parcel of land where the house containing my bedroom sits. These actors may be living or nonliving, tangible and intangible, but they all fall within seven broad domains, which I have defined as follows: the Humans, the Nonhuman Beings (living things besides Homo sapiens), the Elements (non-living natural processes), the Built Structures (tangible human creations), the Imagined Structures (intangible human creations such as governments), the Ideas (thoughts or ways of thinking that pass between individuals and drive actions), and finally the Living Legacy of History (those actors from the past that continue to exert agency over the present even as they have substantially changed form or may no longer even exist). The actors in each of these domains interact freely both within and across domain lines, as indicated by the red arrows. If you look closely, you will see that each red arrow is labelled with the type of agency each actor demonstrates. Together, these actors determine the composition of this little piece of land at every scale from the type and placement of buildings to the microclimate and seasonal variations in noises. Both for good and for ill, and sometimes in quite unexpected ways, these actors come together to make the land what it is.
Visual fields and use form the foci of this organizational diagram. The partial ellipse at the top of the diagram represents the view that immediately greets the visitor at the door of my room. This is also the view depicted in my elevation drawing. The diagonal line cutting through from the upper lefthand corner represents morning sunlight, which defines the room’s character. The circular field shows the zone of privacy, as it is out of view from the hallway. At its center is the rectangular bed. The dashed arrow represents the most frequent paths of circulation. It crosses over the bed, since I frequently do climb directly over it.
The two curved lines in this composition show the interplay (and sometimes uncomfortable intersection) of public and private. These lines both have organic shapes to represent the natural flexibility of this boundary. The line of sunlight becomes a square dashed line, showing the way the window frame shapes light as it enters the room. As the bed is not a boundary, but a tangible object central to the purpose and life of the room, it becomes a matrix of intersecting lines. Finally, the path of circulation becomes quite wide, but varies in width along its length.
In faithfulness to the meaning of the two dimensional composition, the top view of this three dimensional model shows that each of the elements has retained its original position; the alteration in form becomes most apparent when we shift to other positions. That said, the variation in shading across the composition in this view hints at the most defining feature of space: an enormous sphere (generated from the circle at the end of the path of circulation) that has cut away the top portion of the structure.
As we see sections progressively cut away from the top. The depth of the space starts to become apparent. The sphere has cut portions of major boundary lines and the line of sunlight, while the zone of circulation has been extruded upward and then also used as a cutting implement to open up the space. The bed has become a cityscape overshadowed by the curved, monumental boundaries. Finally, selected portions of the composition have been reflected directly downwards below what would be the ground plane in a world with physical boundaries.
This angle allows us to see the basic form of each of the major elements of the composition and highlights the great variation in height between them. As sections are cut away, we also see the variation between the main, upward facing elements of the composition and the portion that has been reflected downwards. While the top section is orderly and complete, the bottom portion leaves elements out somewhat randomly, allowing the form to breathe.