Good things come in small spaces
Artist Andrea Zittel is drawn to small, functional spaces.
“When I was growing up near San Diego,” said Zittel, “my family did a lot of camping in a VW Van and a lot of sailing in a 31-foot sailboat. That was my introduction to compact, efficient spaces.”
Now, 25 years later, she is famous for designing and building multi-purpose “living unit” prototypes that blur the edges of architecture, art and humor.
For more than 10 years Zittel’s creations have been shown throughout Europe, the United States and parts of Asia. She was profiled on the PBS series Art: 21.
Zittel will be in Spokane as part of the Visiting Artist Lecture Series on Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture auditorium.
“I have always been fascinated with intimate, controllable universes that people create for themselves,” she said by telephone from Southern California.
In 1995 Zittel fabricated five, small, functional “A-Z Travel Trailers.”
These movable living spaces had identical dark green metal exteriors, much like a boxy teardrop. The interiors were 12 feet long, 7 1/2 feet wide and 7 1/2 feet high. Each unit contained a stove, kitchen sink, shower and toilet. The remainder of the interior space was customized to meet the “life, values and whimsy” of the owner.
In October 1995, three teams departed San Diego for a ten-day test ride of the A-Z trailers. Each team took a different route to San Francisco and documented their trip.
Miriam and Gordon Zittel, Andrea’s parents, headed north along the Pacific Coast Highway.
“We were like gypsies,” said Miriam during a telephone conversation from her daughter’s home in Joshua Tree, Calif.
“We retraced our 1960 honeymoon route up Highway 1,” recalled the retired schoolteacher. “We had a great time.”
All three rigs rendezvoused in San Francisco on Halloween night.
“We had to get the trailers cleaned up because they were going in a show right away,” said Miriam. The A-Z Travel Trailers went on exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art the following week.
“One of the things that I found when I took them on trips,” said Zittel, “is that I met a lot of people who were living in trailers, but did not actually travel anywhere in them.”
Talking to them, Zittel came to realize that “rather than finding freedom in mobility,” she said, “many people found it liberating just to give up their big home and live in the intimacy of the small and controllable universe they created within their trailer.”
That insight led Zittel to next develop a series of “A-Z Escape Vehicles.”
“What I wanted to do next,” she said, “was build a new type of recreational vehicle where, instead of going some place in the outer world, a person could simply enter this environment and travel inward to one’s private world.”
Each of the ten escape units were identical on the outside, measuring somewhere around seven-feet long and three-feet wide—just big enough to lie down in, but small enough to slide through a standard size doorway.
“When someone bought a unit,” she said, “we would customize the inside for that person’s ultimate escape fantasy.”
The slogan for this vehicle was: “When you want to escape all you have to do is climb in and close the hatch.”
For information
• View more of Zittel’s work at www.zittel.org. She is represented by the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City, accessible at www.andrearosengallery.com.
• Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture’s Web site is www.northwestmuseum.com.