How to Model Love

Communication creates the foundation for any strong relationship.
In a crowded room I only see you.
Home is where the heart is.

The language of love and space making intertwine like the hungry limbs of two animals wrapped up in the ribbons of a rendezvous. Quickly thrown together and awkward when too much thought stresses every word and its action. What material is the foundation of a relationship made of? Are its footings evenly spaced pads under load bearing columns or does it have monstrous tendril like piles, driven by force deeper and deeper into Earth’s pocked crust, held in place by friction at the surface. How deep does it lie? Can it feel the magma at the core pulling us all back to its center? Beyond its structure, I wonder if the phenomenologists ever considered how the presence or absence of a crush makes a space feel. Did Christian Norberg-Schulz ponder how the appearance of a budding romance could contort the experience of space into a distorted and morphing labyrinth. The room’s edges dissolve into infinity with the distance between you (the dissociating subject) and the other (external object of infatuation) growing further and further apart. A quick glance, a set of locked eyes, and the walls snapback. Close and tight. Claustrophobic and oppressive. The sounds of mechanical systems and chittering voices unheard over the thump of a heart.
Buildings, parks, coffee shops, or entire cities avoided or attended due to the potential of seeing another, of being reminded of someone. I’ve been in some of the most beautiful buildings in the world, flung across continents and countries, and none of them compare to the experience of being in a room with only my desire. Ocularcentrism cowers at the power of the heart. The spaces I think of most fondly are unknown to me in their construction techniques or author. It’s probably my own ignorance that I couldn’t conjure up the floor plan of Rudolph Hall but could easily trace every wall and opening of an old boyfriend’s house. The experience of love is the most defining architectural element of all. It charges any place, mundane and quotidian, with the utmost divinity. I’ve been closer to holiness in a bedroom than a basilica.
On my phone, in a digital folder that the junk apps I’m too indecisive to delete rests a 3D scanner and model generator. The leading “3D Scanner application for iPhone and iPad (…) for easy 3D modeling & floor plans,”. The app’s description is pitched at a niche audience of people fascinated by form and space. It boasts its ability to export LiDAR-scanned floor plans to AutoCAD, Sketchup, and Adobe illustrator. There is the ability to measure, with inch-level accuracy, walls and door frames and cabinets. The icon is a minimal axonometric drawing of four walls extruded in black against a white backdrop; an image an architect or designer can identify with when scrolling through the catalog of applications. A serious app for serious users interested in minute calculations of square footages. I haven’t opened it in over a year, the blue button suggests I need to update it. I probably won’t.
Opening the app two lonely scans exist. One of a shody clay model I sculpted and scanned in for a studio project. It was a half-hearted scan, by the gaps in the model’s mesh I could tell I didn’t even have the enthusiasm to get out of my chair to properly capture all sides. It was an experiment in which its results didn’t evolve past a single desk-crit. The other file is dated March 2022, 2 PM. Around a vacuum of digital white void sits a whole model of a screened back porch in Florida. Zooming into the first vantage point the walls engulf the frame of the phone. To the left, a hip height wood balustrade, topped with two plants left in their store-bought plastic pots cooking in the rays of the sun. A screen, thin black mesh almost indiscernible in the render, holds the pots in, rising up to the wood joist that completes the edge. Wiry multicolor Christmas lights trace the room’s contour from top of wall to top of wall. I don’t remember the lights ever being on, both due to the fact that the plug’s pins had rusted brown in the humid air and that we never needed any light beyond that of the moon and the glow of the kitchen through the glass paneled door. The door, to the right of the view is glazed over in renter-friendly film, creating dazzling dances of light streaks on the interior, back where the dogs used to lie. The film wasn’t an aesthetic decision, not an experiment on capturing the ephemeral play of light and aperture- just a way of quelling a childhood fear of peeping toms and faces pressed to glass. A personal quirk, not conscious design effort. The shingle cladding drew horizontal bans of seafoam-green across the wall, crudely meeting the wood of the balustrade and screen. A color odd to the beiges and brick of New England but overly familiar to anyone who grew up in a Florida suburb.
Panning around the room with my finger, altering the axis of the world at my whim. Zooming out till the space is just a pixel in my palm, pinching into the fabric of the pillow on the porch bench. I think about the model as a memento of my devotion. A symbol of my resistance to change, an effigy to a feeling of love. The desire to capture this space in its totality. Moving around the water logged floor boards trying to scan and capture every inch of its space. A need to shrink this porch from an old lovers house that we shared into a weightless object in my phone. A need beyond drawing or photograph or render or video. A need to fully immerse myself in the most simple of spaces for the only purpose of not forgetting its existence. A portal I could step into anytime. The importance of the model wasn’t about the space itself in its tangible materials and form, it was a model of a feeling of love.