- Dining
- Description
- Where: The dining room connects the living room, kitchen, sunroom, stairway, and den. It holds the house together and acts as its center. The carpet is extends from the dining room into the living room, back toward the den, and up the stairs to the second floor’s hall. Thresholds block the carpet from the kitchen and sunroom’s tiled floors. Between each room and space a cased opening divides; between the dining and living spaces, the opening bridges the walls approximately eight feet apart. A door caps one opening in the northwest corner of the room, which leads to the garage exterior and turns down to the basement. The door’s handle is old: at least from the twenties but very likely from the home’s construction before the turn of the century.
- Active Verbs for Structure
- Vision: Light trickles in from the south facing windows and the sunroom to augment the overhead lumier and light from the fluorescent light in the kitchen. The southern windows frame the neighbor’s single story clapboard house, surrounded by juniper and the field and canal that separate the frontier of houses from the baseball fields and nearby factory.
- Touch: Clean white linen dresses the dining table stands in the middle of the room, directing all circulation along the perimeter of the area. Wainscoting and traditional trim guide the procession around the table to the many connected rooms. The tread-down beige carpet shields the floor from the hutch, chairs and table.
- Hearing: Tweets and caws from the birds softly resonate into the room from the single glazed, sashed windows to the south. The television in the kitchen broadcasts tinny commercials for flooring and carpet between soap opera and talk show segments, and toys vroom and clank between the living room and den, pushed by young hands.
- Smell: Remaining scents from breakfast foods waft through the space and undertones of the coming night’s dinner percolate from the kitchen. Walking near the wall surfaces, the sweet smell of paint enters one’s nose to announce that these old surfaces of an old house are rejuvenated to carry the structure a few more years, protecting its inhabitants. A faint smell of dust pervades the room and extends up into the stairwell.
- Taste: So many good meals mask tense moments and strained nights. The opposition of the savory food and the salty words, accented by sour internal stress create a complicated experience. But, the food provides focus to ignore and temporarily, at least, forget the actions of the adults who act like children with desires and jealousy and misuse of time and trust.
- Active Verbs for Structure
- What
- Active Verbs for Structure
- Vision: The grayish wallpapered walls hug the space and guide the eye to the white ceiling a cheap, bronze chandelier. All of the items in the dining room work together to create a consistent, but unexceptional experience to create a space that one could forget if not for everything else that took place in this room. Guests never see this; everything is perfect.
- Touch: Fingers on the ogee molding of the room glide smoothly across the edges and vertices of the space. Although there is nothing that feels hard, there is also nothing that is soft in the space, creating a middle ground of texture. As such, the space is in balance between order and chaos: we never know when nervous tensions will come to a head to become a cacophony of pounding, stomping, and screaming.
- Hearing: Footsteps and accidental thumps of falling and tripping descend from above, transmitting through the ceiling from the second floor. Moments throughout the living room and the others produce squeaks and cracks from the settling house and hardwood floors that sit below the carpet. Wiping, clinking, and sweeping sounds come from the kitchen, a defensible space that is shelters my step mother from my father and two brothers.
- Smell: Faint scents from the old house smell like earth and dust, and incidental smells from the nearby bathroom and kitchen pass through, pushed by a slight current from openings in the surrounding facades. Lilac perfumes from the diapers and other baby products mark points where my little brother frequents.
- Taste: The dusty smell transcends to become a taste that is persistent throughout the day broken by the items that sustain us.
- Active Verbs for Structure
- Who
- Passive for People
- Memories
- Actions
- Passive for People
- Why
- Analysis
- How do the spatial parts integrate?
- What do the parts create as a whole?
- Is there a main idea or emphasis in the space?
- Interpretation
- When
- Personal Meaning
- Past
- Now
- When
- The Poetic
- Past
- Now
- Analysis
- Where: The dining room connects the living room, kitchen, sunroom, stairway, and den. It holds the house together and acts as its center. The carpet is extends from the dining room into the living room, back toward the den, and up the stairs to the second floor’s hall. Thresholds block the carpet from the kitchen and sunroom’s tiled floors. Between each room and space a cased opening divides; between the dining and living spaces, the opening bridges the walls approximately eight feet apart. A door caps one opening in the northwest corner of the room, which leads to the garage exterior and turns down to the basement. The door’s handle is old: at least from the twenties but very likely from the home’s construction before the turn of the century.
- Invite Evaluation by the Reader
- Empty, Open Pause
- Simple Statement
- Description