10 Fowler Ave. January 2009. Photo: Winston Morris
The office at 10 Fowler Ave. in Poughkeepsie, New York has been occupied by the Taxpert accounting business. Photographs courtesy of Winston Morris.
10 Fowler Ave. January 2009. Photo: Winston Morris
Detail of 10 Fowler Exterior in Winter (35mm Photgraphs and Cardboard)
OPEN OFFICE is a vacant podiatry office in Poughkeepsie, New York owned by Sandra and Leonard Gerber. The project began as a series of speculative activities aimed at finding a piece of disinvested real estate which could be freely occupied for a temporary period. I answered an advertisement posted by the Gerbers on the website craislist.com. They had been seeking buyers for the building for a year without success. In an act of great generosity Mrs. Gerber donated use of the space for ten days in May 2008. It was this initial act of generosity that came to define the character of all successive actions.
Detail of 10 Fowler Ave Exterior in Winter (35mm Photographs and Cardboard)
Poughkeepsie, New York is home to many vacant and unused architectural spaces. These buildings are understood to be the product of a community that has refused responsibility for its own environment - a community that has been unable to fully constitute itself as a wholly cohesive body.
Detail of 10 Fowler Ave Interior in Winter (35mm Photographs and Cardboard)
A “useless” architectural space is understood as a transgression or failure to be, quite literally, condemned. The sooner diagnosed and condemned the sooner a new architectural structure can be instituted and the sooner a new social body can form itself around that structure.
10 Fowler Ave Blueprints
The problem is not, however, the failure of a fragmented community but an architecture which aims at false unity and impossible endurance.