Now, Marfa is home to a wave of minimalist, environmentally sound homes. And with floor-to-ceiling windows on opposite sides of the home, it’s perfect for watching the rare thunderstorm roll across the open horizon, or catch the even more rare Marfa Lights as they endeavor to keep a little mystery in this world. (Adventure Journal, “Marfa, Texas, Surprises Us Again”)
A travelogue description of Marfa’s promise. Don’t get me wrong, Alchemy’s weeHouse pre-fab design is beautiful. But it relies on a promise: Texas realtors aren’t peddling off lots of increasingly-primo land, and the giant-windowed weeHouses will start being starved of privacy from the neighbor twenty feet away.
The weeHouse is built for the photos. The photos are great. This small but efficient pre-fab, set alone in the Texan deserts. You can imagine yourself coming straight out of the shower to stare off and watch the Marfa Lights. Picturesque—but where are the other buildings that will inevitably surround it in a few years?
In cities, you’ve maybe passed by construction projects for apartments and WeWorks, and along the fencing there is a banner with an illustration of what the building might look like. This is the perfect vision of WeWork #3752 in Your City, Michigan. There must be a company that makes all of the banners—they always have the same general design; either a street or bird’s eye view of the complex, and then the promise: People, lots of them. People entering and exiting. People gathered around each other. People hurrying along. People using all the illustrated benches and amenities that will be erected outside the building. The promise is that this building will be successful because it will be full and busy and utilized by fantastical portions of people.
What do the weeHouse photos promise? It promises solitude, natural surroundings, even humility (Adventure Journal uses words like “minimalist, environmentally-sound”). What is the humility of a suburbian development? When 200 more weeHouses fill out into the desert, where is the solitude? What will your surroundings be then?
As the flights of the middle-class and rich push out more and more miles from the city, suburbia doesn't even need a highway exit gas station to exist. Unmoored from the confines of the megacity, the suburbs can congregate around mountains, forests, lakes, rivers, so on. No beautifully designed house is safe from the suburb. The image of the weeHouse promises an individual will to nature; the construction of the weeHouse promises large profits for land development corporations.