Disturbed Home is the first comprehensive survey of Ian Strange’s architectural interventions, including photographic and filmic interpretations of those works. Highlighting projects from the past 12 years and spanning geographies from Strange’s native Australia to New Zealand, Japan, Poland and the US, Strange’s provocative transformations of damaged or abandoned homes unlock themes of social upheaval and geographic displacement caused by economic blight, environmental disaster and migration.
Today, you can take a look inside Disturbed Home for yourself. Read on …
SUBURBAN (2011 – 2013)
Suburban is a project comprising seven architectural interventions on private residences, eleven photographic works, a selection of sculptural forms representing artifacts harvested from the interventions, and a three-channel film work. It was realized over a three-year period throughout the United States—in Alabama, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and other locations. Developing and realizing the work in collaboration with film crews, local volunteers, cities, land banks, and community organizations, I conceived it as an interrogation of the icon of the suburban American home. The architectural interventions reference both the familiar typologies of Levittown and the popular image of the middle-class postwar American home.
Initiated in early 2011, Suburban was created in the shadow of the 2008 global recession and the economic realities of the subprime mortgage crisis: many of the homes involved faced demolition following foreclosure. After consulting with community members and gaining their participation, the team physically restored and altered the homes, and documented the interventions in the photographic and film works. During the process it was often necessary to shut down the streets through the night and into the morning in order to accommodate the lighting and film equipment. The two-year Burn series, a component of the project that took place in Akron, Ohio, involved close collaboration with members of the community and a local fire-training academy.
The photographic works, film work, sculptural artifacts, and drawings debuted in a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, in 2013 and another organized by the New York–based arts organization Standard Practice in 2016.
FINAL ACT (2013)
Final Act was commissioned by Rise Festival and the Canterbury Museum for the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2010 and 2011, Christchurch had suffered devastating earthquakes that created what became known as the residential red zone, in which over 16,000 homes were slated for demolition. Four architectural interventions were developed over the course of a year and realized on a single street in the red zone during a two-month period. The interventions, a film, and photographic works were created in collaboration with festival and museum staff, volunteers, former residents, and community groups, alongside a film crew and my own team. Final Act also engaged the talents of the renowned New Zealand cinematographer Alun Bollinger.
Having been sealed off for three years, the red zone’s damaged homes were boarded up; its streets remained cracked and its gardens overgrown. The weeks leading up to the interventions saw repair of the street and meticulous restoration of the exteriors of the selected homes to index their original state. The interventions themselves entailed engineered incisions into the houses and collaboration with Bollinger to film and photograph the work over three days and nights.
A solo exhibition of the six resulting photographic works, the single-channel film work, and related artifacts and drawings opened in December 2013 at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch. The artifacts and editions of the photographic and film works were retained in the museum’s collection, becoming a permanent emotive archive of these lost homes and neighborhoods.
ISLAND (2015 – 2017)
Island is composed of three text-based architectural interventions on Ohio homes in Cleveland and Akron in 2015. The works were completed in collaboration with a local land bank, city residents, students, and my own studio and team.
The project title and the texts applied to the houses suggest the metaphor of a desert island, a place connoting both personal sovereignty and entrapment (“SOS” written in the sand), as well the history of words written on houses in extreme situations such as natural disasters. Island reflects on the individual circumstances of the selected homes and also on the identity of the house as both vulnerable object and personal vessel for memory, selfhood, and aspiration.
The research materials, found objects, and drawings that inform Island, alongside the three anchoring photographic works, constituted solo exhibitions at Fremantle Arts Centre (FAC) in Perth, Western Australia, in July 2017 and at Standard Practice in New York in December 2017.
—Disturbed Home by Ian Strange and Rory Hyde (Damiani Editore) is out now.
Disturbed Home
This is the first comprehensive survey of Ian Strange's (born 1982) architectural interventions, including photographic and filmic interpretations of those works.
Highlighting projects from the past 12 years and spanning geographies from Strange's native Australia to New Zealand, Japan, Poland and the US, Strange's provocative transformations of damaged or abandoned homes unlock themes of social upheaval and geographic displacement caused by economic blight, environmental disaster and migration...
Read an extract from KHA / Kerry Hill Architects: Works and Projects 
A coffee table book for people who don’t have particularly good coffee tables.
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