Fire Drill Houses
2003
They are everywhere. They are enormous. Almost nobody has seen one.
Fire drill houses, the skeletal towers used by fire services to train for building rescues, stand in urban landscapes across Britain with the physical confidence of things that expect to be noticed. They are taller than the houses around them. They are painted in industrial colours. Their balconies and stairwells are unmistakable. And yet when you describe one to most people, even people who have walked past one regularly, the response is incomprehension. They cannot recall having seen it. The structure that occupies the corner of their street does not exist in their visual memory.
This project began with that incomprehension and tried to understand it.
A fire drill house has the skeleton of a house. It has stairs that climb to the top floor, balconies on each level, exterior walls enclosing the structure. If you drew a diagram of the elements that constitute a domestic building, vertical circulation, horizontal surfaces, enclosure, a fire drill house would satisfy every criterion. Architecturally it is completely legible. As a place to live it is impossible: no rooms, no water supply, no windows, no interior. Everything that makes a house habitable has been removed. What remains is the type, the pure architectural idea of a house, stripped of the domestic content that gives the type its meaning.
This is why they cannot be seen. The eye begins to read them as houses and immediately encounters an absence it cannot account for. No curtains. No light behind glass. No evidence of inhabitation. The category the building appears to belong to, domestic, residential, lived-in, does not apply. Rather than resolving the contradiction the mind discards the object entirely. The building becomes invisible not because it is small or hidden but because it is illegible: a form that insists on being read as something it has never been.
There is an inversion in their function that compounds this strangeness. A house is shelter, the structure that stands between its inhabitants and danger. A fire drill house is a house reimagined as the danger itself: a building entered in smoke, navigated in disorientation, escaped from under pressure. Firefighters train in them by rehearsing the worst version of a domestic space, the dwelling at the moment it has ceased to protect and begun to kill. The building that should mean home is used to practice surviving its failure.
Lefebvre argued that the city is made of uninhabited and uninhabitable spaces, public buildings, monuments, squares, voids, and that habitat does not define the city or exhaust its possibilities. Fire drill houses extend this argument into the domestic type itself: a building that looks like it should be inhabited, that has never been inhabited, that exists in order to rehearse the most extreme form of inhabitation, survival. They occupy a category that architecture has no name for. Neither monument nor home nor ruin. A house that was never lived in, waiting for a fire that will never come.
These photographs are attempts to make visible what the eye has learned to discard. The buildings are still there. They were always there. They did not need to be discovered so much as looked at, which turns out, as with most things hiding in plain sight, to be considerably harder than it sounds.
