Ella Nadeau
HOMEWARD BOUND:
moving homes ... moving home
While transportation and agricultural sectors have brought autonomy and ease to the lives of many in America, migrant farmworkers, who continue to perform the essential but arduous labor that sustains our nation’s food system, are constantly forced to live in harsh and insecure housing.
By re-purposing defunct strip malls across the country into dynamic community centers and deploying fleets of livable vehicles to connect with these hubs, a network will arise that empowers transient, working populations with the dignity of choice that every human deserves.
With adaptive reuse of interior spaces as my weapon, I poke at the sleeping bear that lays soundly over suburban sprawl and strip malls, hoping to shake it awake and break
the cycle.
This page was intended to visualize the suffering that the people and the spaces involved in this hardship go through. We ask a lot of them, we give them nothing. By simplifying the abstract concept of an inspection catalogue to a first-person blurry home visit, we feel the pain as if we live there, as if we know the people who do.
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Hand drawn sketches of various inspection notes for migrant farmworker housing are scattered around the page, depicting stages of decay and deteriation. On the center of the page it states "moving home in a still world".
I find myself chatting with spaces, asking them what hurts, who put it there, when? We act as though built forms are exempt from the totures of the human soul, that they live in an ignorant bliss. Truly they suffer in silence, infect the air within them, stubbornly sit forever.
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Found photography of mall decay is collaged next to a cascading list of difficulties the mall deals with. A sketch of a personified mall getting interviewed by a therapist, inquiring how these things make it feel.
The tiny house contained my own personal sentiments of home, as all structures do, but I attempted to be as many people as possible throughout this process. I attempted to advocate for the child, the visitor, the host, the disabled, the isolated, the social, all things I have been and have not been in varying amounts.
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Three hand drawn aerial perspectives of renovated tiny u-haul trucks, containing all elements of daily life from beds to kitchens to bathrooms. They vary in size from a 12' trailer to a 26' truck.
Not everything should get the same treatment, some walls should be closed while others should be open, but we must always be open to change. If we lose the ability to change then our spaces constrict around us, like a dry skin. Not everything needs to change but everything should be forced to validate its existence, to fight the tide of destruction as all living beings do, a fight that we accept always ends in change.
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Hand drawn sketches of issues with the strip mall are accompanied by sketches of proposed diagrammatic adaptations. Arranged in a kind of flow chart, it shows spaces built for products turning to spaces built for people
IKEA broke down design and lifted the curtain to the world of construction for me when I was very young. Knowing how to decipher the packets of instructions and pieces was a skill of mine and one that I would barter out for friendship. IKEA knew how to utilize the customer to construct the product, and yes that may have been to reduce shipping or assembly costs but it also had the effect of putting our foot into the factory door, blurring the line between something you buy and something you care for.
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An IKEA style catalogue depicts the hand drawn tools used to adapt the mall. The text beneath the diagram describes how to use said tools.
This perspective rendering of the adapted strip mall shows readers what walking towards the space would feels like. Blue scale figures dot around the community center, showing the forms within the form.
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A computerized rendering in a blue color pallette with scale figures spreads across the page with repeating plan diagrams showing impactful changes below.
Parking lots have popped up everywhere, almost as a neutral choice. We prefer asphalt to grass and yet we still do not appreciate the potential, the patterns, the shapes. They are such a simplified format of use, tracking human bodies and the shells we use to interact with each other.
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A grid of ariel black and white Ed Ruscha photography shows the variability of parking lots. The title: "Are you my site? "is centered on the page.
The last book of my thesis collection utilizes flipping pages to involve the reader, with this page demonstrating forms of parking lot community found during the 2024 eclipse. With collaged sketches from my notebook to demonstrate my zoom in zoom out style of thinking, the pictures swirl inside my mind and on my page. Customization?
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Photography from a parking lot at the 2024 eclipse is ordered in three segments of color, layered with hand drawn sketches and shaped borders representing all three users.
