SUBJECT, OBJECT Elaine Khoo
Acknowledgments Thank you to my advisors, Andrea Simitch and Iroha Ito, for your guidance and patience. My family, for the constant love and support despite the distance. Friends who were with me through thick and thin, and last but not least, my thesis helper Paz Cabello for your time and care.
For my grandmother
In an old house in a quiet neighborhood, time stands still, frozen in the 1960s. An accumulation of possessions: dust covered photo albums, a retired grandfather clock, yellowed books, an old wedding invitation. Thunderstorms trip the power, the roof leaks, and the tap runs dry. Its walls resonate with traces of kinship in the wear and tear and collections of paraphernalia.
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This was my grandparents’ home in Malaysia. This is where my dad grew up, and where my parents got married — the house witnessed it all. After my grandmother's passing, I was there to clear the house, its objects, donating or throwing things away. As we sorted through the items into bags, the home was slowly stripped away, reverting back to its white shell. The essence of home is in the objects. Through the labor of home-making, rituals of everyday, objects are embedded with memory and narrative. They coalesce into an environment that resonated with its history, the sense of home. This posits objects as the center of the story. Objects are the key to identity and memory, holding traces of the past that can be deployed and reappropriated to anchor ourselves and sustain continued spatial narratives.
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Entourage (noun) 1. A group of people who accompany and support an important person, such as aides, assistants, or companions. 2. Archaic or less common. One’s immediate surroundings or environment. From French entourer, “to surround.”
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In Architecture, entourage are the add-ons in the background for the subject, the building. They convey the texture of space at the human scale, and how it might actually be used. This mode of space making is typically not foregrounded in the discipline, but is the scale at which we most comfortably manipulate space. The life of a home begins when it is lived in, and is a space that continually changes over its lifetime.
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10C Taman Sentosa, Malacca, Malaysia
I use this home as a case study, transporting objects from this house in Malacca, Malaysia to a house in Ithaca, NY, to explore how objects can be used as vessels containing “home” for extrapolation of spatial narratives.
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Objects act as mnemonic devices to evoke the memory of rituals and textures of home. They are the physical fragments of space that act as tethers to the world, portable devices of home-making. Space is experienced through the objects, reinstated in the present, makes connections across the distance of time and space.
“After the original reverberation, we are able to experience resonances, sentimental repercussions, reminders of our past. But the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface.” — Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space)
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304 Thurston Ave, Ithaca, NY
Halfway across the world, an attempt to reinstate the home in a place vastly unfamiliar.
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The objects from the home are brought to this new environment, finding their place organically from memory, responding to the existing tectonics of the house.
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The space changes in accordance with the objects placed in them. Walls are surgically cut, some peeled away from the structure. Floors are depressed, and ceilings removed, openings are revealed, and windows punched out.
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Objects are spatialized in discrete moments, each with their own internal logic for responding to their new site, interpretations of their spatial memory. Moments spill from one to the next, chaining and layering them together.
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Memory is a difficult concept to represent, existing in its most raw, accurate form in the mind. Space, time, feelings, are merged into one fleeting image. It is difficult to pin down and delicate to define. The harder one tries to clarify it, the further it is from its true form.
“The painful memory of his beloved grandmother brings tears to his eyes, but it also gives him a moment of happiness… two separate moments in time combine into one fragrant crystal of time”
— Byung-Chul Han (The Crisis of Narration)
The solution lies in the balance of abstraction and figuration. The abstract is open to interpretation, communicates the intangible. The figurative is specific and pointed, can be grounding, but is overly informative and limiting. This project is never fully understood in one medium, but is pieced together through hand sketches, hard line drawings, models, and writing.
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The design is never finished, continuing to change as the house is lived in. Objects are moved, added to or removed, continuing their influence on the spaces they inhabit. The looseness of working models and sketches, fleeting descriptions of form, embody the everchanging nature of home-making.
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Incense The incense is always placed by the ancestral altar. The altar faces the front door as symbolic protection, and positioned central to the home, typically in the living room. The incense is lit every morning as a greeting, its scent permeating, tying the rest of the space to this center. This object carries a practice across generations and households, and is grounded in a long cultural, ancestral roots. Placed directly in front of the entrance, its memory carves away at space, breaking down walls and creating a series of doorways that denote the ritual of entrance. It opens up a central aisle to the surrounding rooms. With remaining structure, building out shelving for storage and display of offerings. At the end of the hallway, the altar itself borrows from the language of the American home, manifesting in the form of a heavy chimney that extends to the ground floor and towers to the roofline.
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Wall Sconce The family altar establishes this new living room, and its extents are denoted by placement of the wall sconce on the far wall. It molds the living room to its light, bringing in the corners of the room, creating a small zone for gathering.
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Toy Car + Neck Pillow The memory of the toy car resides a ways back in time. Children experience homes very differently. Tables and chairs are obstacles to climb, under beds are dark, mysterious caves for telling scary stories, the floor is an entire playscape. Placed in the North facing room, the wood framing is exposed, the ceiling joists mimicking the underside of a bed. Wood studs in the corners combine and grow in size — four posts for the bed. Entering this room is surreal, like discovering a place you were not meant to find. The bedroom is on the floor above, co-opting the space from the apartment upstairs. This object experienced the home at a different scale, now reappropriated, translates the bed to the size of an entire room.
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Wood Thing Every home has the drawer, closet, attic or basement space for hiding access stuff - most of which consist of random knick knacks that we hold onto in hopes that they will be useful to us in the future. These spaces have abstract height and depth, filled to the brim, objects often forgotten about. The storage closet at the end of the hallway becomes the void for this object, with a ladder that reaches the attic of the house. In the hallway leading up to it, breeze block filters little light and the floor is lined with a small, rough tile. A nondescript white door blends into the back wall. The space is textured with the raw atmosphere of the back end of a house.
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Snoopy Snoopy sits at the corner of a desk, in a study. The study is dim, the desk sits in front of a small window. This spot happens to be found in the bathroom. And so this space becomes both, an odd combination of program brought together through the memory of the object. The shower curtain becomes divider for the space. The room expands to double height, making room for the library of books. The shower curtain is extrapolated as a corrugated steel enclosure on the second floor.
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Pink Tile Tile has associations with the wet kitchen, wrapping around the interior to protect the walls from heavy cooking. This space was where all the mess was contained. In the kitchen, the floor is sunk by three steps, separating it from the rest of the home. Large openings are made on the exterior wall, louvre windows installed to ventilate the space.
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Back Scratcher The back scratcher, not just for scratching backs, but an item of utility to reach things high up or under the couch. Placed between the kitchen and the bathroom, this corner of the house is turned into the utility room, for tasks like folding laundry or preparing ingredients for cooking. Tile from the kitchen is continued across, linking these service spaces.
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Yellow Curtain Curtains protect from the sun, filtering the light and providing light shade. They soften the space, a secondary layer of enclosure. The yellow curtain is hung in the south facing window, catching the afternoon sun to give the room a warm, yellow hue. A steel grate is installed on the window, another layer that filters the light, creating diagonal shadows on the floor. The tile rotates in response, mimicking the same pattern.
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Glass Cup Home holds a growing collection of kitchenware, its walls lined with cabinets of cups, bowls, and plates of various shapes and sizes. The cup sits by the window, which grows to form a cabinet for other drinkware - a hybrid window/tea cabinet. The materiality of the cup is key, its crystal like quality now emphasized with this new relationship with the window. The cabinet grows to inhabit the adjacent window, becoming a gardening nook.
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Rattan Basket Rattan baskets were widely used in the home to store or move things. Its porosity lets water drain from it, air to breeze through. It could be used as a drying rack or to carry glasses outside to entertain guests. The space becomes a porch to support similar program, like outdoor gatherings, barbecues, dinners, birthdays, and celebrations. Large openings are made in the walls, installing folding doors that allow different degrees of porosity.
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More objects populate the house, each with their distinct influence on the spaces they find themselves, building up the layers of the home with the memory of rituals, atmospheres, and textures that were inherited through generations of homes. Moments meld together simply as it becomes lived in, movement of objects, layering of rituals, and eventually, home is reinstated in this place.
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I propose a deeper attention toward the familiar objects we continue to carry with us—not by preserving them as untouchable artifacts, but by reactivating them in our daily lives. Through use and reappropriation, these objects retain their narrative power, weaving past histories into present contexts. In doing so, they sustain a continuity of identity, anchoring us to wherever we find ourselves.
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Lavin, Sylvia. “Architecture In Extremis.” Log, no. 22, 2011, pp. 51–61. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41765708 Macleod, Suzanne, editor. The Future of Museum and Gallery Design: Purpose, Process, Perception. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. Meade, Fionn, and Jordan Carter. Question the Wall Itself. First edition., Walker Art Center, 2017. Mitrašinović, M., & Mehta, V. (Eds.). (2021). Public Space Reader (1st ed.). Routledge. Chapter 8. “Blurring the Boundaries: Public Space and Private Life”. Margaret Crawford. doi. org/10.4324/9781351202558 Newell, Sasha, editor. Of Hoarding and Housekeeping: Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective. Berghahn, 2024. Siegel, Harmon. “Memory.” Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium, edited by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Elizabeth M. Rudy, Harvard Art Museums, 2017. A&AePortal, aaeportal.com/?id=-16396#A-16396_49. Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro. In Praise of Shadows. New Haven, Conn., Leete’s Island Books, 1977.
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