Really Little Pink Houses
As the Chinese pursue their 'Chinese Dream' you can bet it doesn't involve moving into a tiny cabin by a burbling brook. Like Daniel Burnham in Chicago in 1909 they are making no small plans. They are exploring and expanding in accord with their expansive dreams, while Americans contemplate contraction. This may be the manifestation of the increasingly atomized life and the desire for solitude--or as an extreme Plan B, or just sour grapes.
As many creative people understand, solitude is the sine qua non of creative work--but so is space. Ideas can exist independent of the studio, but ultimately are constrained by the ultimate size of the work area.
To move a creative operation into what is essentially a tree-house would require an extreme makeover of an artist's modus opernadi. It is a romantic notion to envision the simplicity of jotting things into a journal (or smartphone) by candlelight as you drift off to sleep on a cot or sleeping bag at 8PM. But to do anything more expansive requires a bit more availability of tools, and places to store them. Not to mention the electricity, both literally and figuratively, as in the electricity of ideas.
If one's livelihood relies on technology as a tool, then those are requirements for the job. For an electronic musician that uses a modicum of gear, it would be difficult to thrive in a smaller space than you already have. Downsizing the life of an artist means stanching the possibilities, an idea inimical to the artist archetype. Ideas are our sustenance and our raison d'être.
There would be ways to be industrious in a tiny space, but the work would reflect the change.
If I were to downshift into the Z-House, these are a few changes I would need to make:
1. Pare down the instrument collection to one bass, one electric guitar and maybe one acoustic. If no room, sell or give away the acoustic. If still out of space, pitch the electric guitar. If still no room play everything on a keyboard.
2. Purge almost entire library of music and art books and read them at a library. All other books can be electronic.
3. Sell or donate all art work that can't be accommodated. If neither just put it 'on the curb'
4. Sell or donate all furniture, except one cushioned chair, a small dining table (or TV tray) and one small chair.
5. Decamp musical activities to large shared studios, but may be too expensive in big cities and really not very convenient when the muse strikes.
6. Do more digital photography, poetry, writing that doesn't involve objects that takes up space.
And so on...none of them too exciting.
While the small house movement has its virtues, it is unlikely that an intentionally winnowed life will not naturally re-expand. Maybe in the future, a child will ask, 'What are all those old little houses for?" The answer that people used to live in them will seem either depressing or absurd.
For many people this diminutive existence will equate with happiness, but for the artist or craftsman it would seem like life in prison.
