I’m a subletter, living in someone else’s space with someone else’s stuff. I sleep on a white IKEA murphy bed framed with dangling vines. Other plants litter the shelves and hang from swag hooks in front of the windows. They’re all dying. There is a large tapestry centered above the headboard: Jesus Christ rendered in bold reds and blues, stigmata hand raised, haloed sacred heart, embroidered into a Rwandan rice sack. There are ornate skeletal figures cut from steel and painted calaveras nailed to the surrounding walls. In the closet, there are empty suitcases, plastic-wrapped suits, dress shoes, a white crate of folded laundry, and a long, leather-encased rod labeled Chuck’s cue. Under the bed even, there are clear, shallow containers filled with keepsakes: tapes, letters, photographs, newspaper cutouts, hand-cut poker chips and jewelry boxes. I could go on about the common spaces: the blackened pots and pans, the rows of Walt Whitman volumes, a sculptural collage of Winston Churchill, a wall-hung memorial plate of Queen Elizabeth, more and more plants, none of it mine.
I think about drawing an axonometric of this Brooklyn bedroom. After outlining the four walls that all go straight up and meet at right angles, I’d start in with the objects. Chuck asked that his things not be moved, as if it would disrupt the structural integrity of the room, so I’d mark everything in its exact location. I would draw it all colorless and in ligne claire, recalling Corbusier’s wonky interior sketches with bowls of fruit and vases on the counters, a dog laying on the cool tile floor; or the early penned perspective drawings of Andrea Branzi, of rooms only decipherable by the scale and organization of scattered objects; or SANAA’s intricate aerials of open rooms inundated with furniture coating floor plates like flowers overtaking a field. The stuff isn’t drawn in as an afterthought, nor is it there to render an experience or to even make a suggestion, but to actually measure architecture in its four-dimensionality. Chuck’s stuff can all be rearranged, just as Corb’s dog can find a different spot in another room, redefining the space and its physical properties over time. A drawing is animated by the architecture and not the other way around. Space is made and re-made within the room itself and it is drawn afterward.
I moved to New York City with the pandemic still at its peak, when there were 1.4 million rooms for rent. I came on a fast moving train of subletters just like me, to take care of the plants of those fleeing to Upstate and crossing the country to be with family and away from crowds. When I sat down to draw my bedroom of four months, I drew Chuck’s stuff. In many ways this has been my experience in New York, sitting down to describe it and fearing I’d describe someone else’s version of it. Now, approaching the end of the month, the city stirs and bristles with life reclaimed. New Yorkers like Chuck are returning in droves unmasked and subletters like me are searching for new rooms. The sidewalks are free marketplaces and passersby stop and gather things up in their arms, filling backpacks with books and clothes, carrying furniture on their heads, bringing the stuff to other places where it will reshape other rooms. After picking up coffee with a friend, we stop and use the free chairs stacked beneath a pin oak and outside an old brownstone to enjoy our drinks. We talk about the next phase of our lives and about the years it might take to feel a sense of belonging or ownership in the city. When we get up, a couple b-lines for the chairs and carries them away before we’ve even made it down the block. New York is an architectural wonderland made up of rooms, indoors and out, filled with other people’s stuff. It is all of ours and it is nobody’s, all at once.