This art project was started on March 15th, 2020, when pandemic “stay at home” orders began in Arizona.

Quarantine anywhere is bothersome at best, though living within Phoenix’s suburban landscape the isolation had its very own peculiar surreal quality. When looking outside from one’s neighborhood house, nothing in the city was different except lower traffic on arterial streets, and more people working from home. The lack of drastic changes to the immediate surroundings should have been comforting, though it exacerbated a feeling of uncertainty. What was really going on out there? How many people were really sick? What was everyone else feeling? Did anyone need help?

A home became an island- one of many islands in a neighborhood and city, as if each house was surrounded by a moat. Outsiders became potentially dangerous invaders. Groceries, delivered contact-less, became a trojan horse requiring a rigorous kitchen-integration processes of being thoroughly washed and/or decontaminated before allowed in the house and put away for future consumption. Simultaneously, the feeling of sanctuary each house should give was greatly strengthened, as was a sense of a property acting as one’s own little universe.

Perhaps people in rural areas felt less affected, already having a sense of separation from heavily populated communities. Perhaps people living within high-rises of Manhattan felt like caged pets on shelves, separated for their safety. Without living in those situations in the time of a pandemic, it is difficult to understand how anyone else might have felt—even other people within Metro Phoenix undoubtedly felt a wide range of unease. People in different areas all over the world would undoubtedly produce a different take on “Pandemic Housing” than what is presented here.

This project is not a proposal. It is an exercise in uncertainty, originated by intuition and processed through imaginary thought-spaces. Much like the surreal atmosphere of Phoenix through the pandemic, this presentation exists in-between unstable realities and subsequent intuitive reactions to what one is immersed within.

Is this a re-imagined Phoenix, purposefully designed for a pandemic quarantine?

Is this psychologically oriented?

Is this a critique of the way Phoenix has developed?

Is this political commentary?

Is this an illustrated stream-of-consciousness?

Is this architecture, or art?

Is this utopia, or dystopia?

Yes.

And no.