Matt Bua and Max Goldfarb invited artists and architects to provide "un-built (impossible or speculative) structures that exist on paper" for a publication entitled Visionary Drawing Building, included in Bua's exhibition at Mass MOCA. At that point, I had to ask myself what sort of visions was I capable of? Marginal, dystopic, reckless, unsustainable phantasms that fleece you while they feel you. Those kind.

Here, my paper was wet concrete and my pencil was some one's "micro penis". I had the micro penis sunk into a concrete rectangle. It left its mark. Below, see the pictures.

My visions of a marginal architecture are generated in the lost structures I came across in the Mojave Desert when hiking with my father as a child- roofless adobes, handmade cattle troughs, carved stone pits used in ancient fertility rites, abandoned mines and crumbling homesteader's shacks. On ridges overlooking the desert we sometimes sighted newer structures, hand built by drug dealers and sex traders, and bereft of any vegetation for hundreds of feet. The ground floors were windowless. It was related that once, in the wet concrete of a fresh driveway, ladies in negligees stumbled out, pressing their breasts and buttocks into fresh concrete.

Despite my inexperience, I could deduce that was I was seeing was no home; but what I couldn't tell was whether what I saw was more fortress or dead house. I'd hazard now, that its denizens were haunting a space that was simultaneously crypt and fortified compound. For me, the conundrum of the dead house has transformed into a sly command with strings attached:

Undo professional architecture but do not undo human beings.

So, given that imperative, what built gesture points away from Negative Architecture (be it dangerously professional or professionally illicit)? What can operate within the unheimlich- a house unhinged from home, a genital unhinged from gender?

Given its formal properties (dimensions, materials, texture), the provenience of this object hovers somewhere between gravestone and doorstep. An impression of a modest penis (uncircumcised and flaccid) has left a trace on the surface of the concrete and serves as signature/epitaph/animal track. It is an artifact from the future past- a vernacular architecture, hand built and humble.