houses for nobody

The walls are up. The first coat of plaster was smeared on with little ceremony. Now we must learn again. The second coat is sandier, trickier. We work with trowels now, no longer trusting the rough precision of our hands. Pamela tells us this is where we must be more exact, our building-out must be more subtle, the plane of the wall must be more deliberate. Although we’re still doomed to follow the flow of the straw bale waves, we must produce the illusion that the wall is flat with a smooth and firm stroke of the trowels on the second coat of plaster. But it’s still mud nonetheless.

Not many of us, if any, have ever done work like this and the hawks and trowels are foreign in our grips. The first coat was more organic and made more sense even to us novices—all we needed was a firm hand to slather the mud into the straw and build out a rough coat to approximate the look of a flat wall. Even the plaster mixers must be more careful: is there enough sand in the mix, has too much clay been added? We are in near- constant communication about how well the mud goes on the wall but we won’t know the ultimate truth of our application until it has dried and (hopefully not) cracked. That’s why we begin with the house that nobody will live in.

A few of the houses we’re building do not have owners right now. Some folk have backed out long ago when the project was still being planned, others more recently as financial concerns became more looming. So we practice and perfect on these houses for nobody. The experimentation that we all, even the supervisors, are a part of is played out on these walls. We note the dryness of the base layer and look forward to how that will affect the application and curing of this second coat. We consider the proportions in this mix and wait for the cracks to appear or not.

And we sculpt. The houses with owners on-site have their own special touches: niches carved here and there at the whim of the occupant, a truth window shaped like a heart rather than a picture frame. In the houses that aren’t spoken for, we interns have the freedom to curve the window space just so, or cut a crisp corner. We can even put shapes on the walls, and soon a couple of artists emerge from our ranks. Sunbursts, grapevines, moons and stars crop up in the future kitchens and bedrooms that as yet look more like empty garages or warehouses. The whimsical forms on the walls mock the dusty, formal concrete floor and naked wooden frames. The houses for nobody seem to be choosing their own personalities now. Perhaps these homes will call their owners into being just as the current residents fashion the image and characters of their own.