Architectural Fiction
Every year the AIA — the professional organization for architects — sponsors a tour of new houses in Austin to promote architecture. On that day you get to invade a lot of privacy, arguably to get a sense of what’s going on; but really, it’s not critics along for the ride, it’s all voyeurs. The AIA gives you a map, and you drive along from one house to the next, following a path of least resistance. The architects are usually there, and the clients too, and sometimes even the builders — in some houses you can still smell the wet paint.
In the morning there might be some serious questions about content, but mostly it’s the middle aged appreciating kitchen layouts, or improvements in plumbing technology. The year I went, one of the houses had a remote control toilet from Japan that you flush with something like a TV clicker, to avoid the aeration of bacteria — or to torture your significant other. I think of it every time I flush now, and it tempers my bathroom with dissatisfaction and worry.
Anyway, the tour, it’s the kind of thing I hate. I would prefer to wait until the owners are dead. I only went because some clients, Paul and Shelly Delveccio, wanted me to accompany them. Paul was a tech industry wizard who’d made a fortune with a product he had developed and marketed called Honestly!, a sort of home polygraph. Honestly! came with face and arm sensors — clad in brightly colored Nerf — that you attached to your computer through a firewire port. The idea being that you’d strap in your friends and ask them all sorts of embarrassing questions. The information was transmitted directly to a website linked to an analysis mainframe, the results read out in real time on your home computer screen. Honestly! was somewhat subversively advertised as a children’s game, but its real success was as an adult party toy. Paul had sold enough to never have to work again, and he wasn’t; and neither was Shelly, who had quit her work as a lawyer.