My Cool House or How I Learned to Let Go and Embrace the Orbit

Designing my childhood home from memory was perhaps one of the more difficult tasks given to me this term. Despite the formative years in my home, the summers that seemed to drag on for eternity and the winters that tested my youthful resolve, the image, the memory of my home itself, seemed to elude me. This visual loss was compounded by my complete inexperience with SketchUp, a program that presented itself as an easy-to-use architectural program but also had a relatively high skill ceiling (a ceiling that, unfortunately, was much too high for me to grasp). Perhaps the most troubling aspect of SketchUp was its orbit technology; by simply holding onto the middle scroll wheel of a mouse, a user could perform advanced rotational movement across a three-dimensional axis. Yet, this feature confounded me as my experience with 3D modeling normally utilized a click and point schema, one that seemed to register better with my sensory-motor-schema. Furthermore, the drag-and-drop functionalities also presented itself as an obstacle; in a digital age that revolves around modularity and compartmentalization, it is disappointing to find that simple browser engines can make the act of clicking and dropping (perhaps the most fundamental transfer of objects that exists in a digital environment, an ability that defines some level of tangibility despite a lack of physicality) rather tedious and impractical to use.

Building this home may rival my most formative experiences; it tested my right-hand clicking capabilities and totally restructured my understanding of digital dimensional movement. I compromised my home by making the model more of a reflection of my home within a SketchUp framework; my difficulties with the platform and its functionalities forced me to simplify the details of my home, reducing it to its basic foundation– a two-story duplex without character or charm, the definition of a commercial piece of real estate meant to placate middle-class suburban desires. The bare-bones nature of my home is also a result of my difficulties with adding the correct paint colors, an obstacle I circumvented by applying simplistic hues that offered perhaps just the image of the house, the being of the home itself as a shelter for weathering the years.

While I had much trouble with SketchUp, I would be amiss to disregard its potential within a humanities framework. Is the act of designing homes, of architecture, by definition a practice that revolves around the allocation of space itself, space that defines and is defined by the individuals that exist within it? SketchUp’s advanced modeling capabilities can certainly offer benefits in terms of teaching architecture. If I were to list off the number of reconstructed homes, landmarks, or historical locations that could theoretically created by SketchUp, I’m afraid my vocal chords would collapse in agony as there is simply an infinite number of models that could come about. Imagine! Castles towering over our friendly introductory character, whose presence reminds us of the maneuverability of digital space itself, a luxury that one can only dream of in our confined reality. If anything, SketchUp as a platform forces us to reconcile our own conceptions of space itself, that this digital space may serve as a haven for ideas that cannot exist physically. While my creation is a rudimentary example of what can be achieved, it serves to remind us of the nature of digital spaces, that sometimes, it may be okay just to lose sight of the thing itself, that the idea of its existence in some cyber-cloud is enough for me. As I continually age, I am unsure of the memories I will hold onto; some say that the older we get, the shorter time itself seems. I fear that in hundreds of years, far after my existence, eons after my last memory has entered and exited my consciousness, that physical reminder of my existence I call home will no longer exist. Yet, I am reassured by programs like SketchUp, digital platforms that will allow my creations, however rudimentary, to exist in eternity.

Some advice for new SketchUp users– take some time to get used to the orbit functionality. Despite my initial hesitations about it, it is definitely a useful tool and can allow you to quickly look around the plane. Also the tutorials are incredibly helpful and offer great advice.