The House Magic Fort was designed and constructed in 2005 at the California Institute of the Arts. The project was conceived while trying to plan an escape from a class camping trip that never took place, but came to fruition through the realization that there were other and more immediate things that needed escaping from. We’d been ruminating on our futures and the possible roles of the graphic designer in society; thinking too much and not thinking enough, or at least not thinking in a liberated manner when the House Magic Fort presented itself as the simple and obvious solution. The basic idea was to create and inhabit an ideal, a space which would provide total freedom and accommodate critical thought free from preconceived notions or modes of working. In a way, we felt that we had to voice our position on the state of our craft in some strange times; a secret proclamation which poked fun at ourselves and our craft while remaining totally earnest. We developed some basic criteria and allowed the idea to ferment during a few late nights involving donuts from the trash, the fabrication and playing of a cardboard drum and an oscillator, a near fatal gong accident and a vicious verbal attack from the Institute security which only served to confirm our suspicions. Ultimately a site was chosen and the pact was entered into with a traditional and symbolic sharing of blood. Without speaking we initiated the design and manufacture of the physical manifestation of our ideals; its space implied the functions of our daily needs and nothing more.

. . . we continue to stake claim to as much [space] as we can that it can wait for our arrival to add importance or meaning to it. Like all of our limited resources, space will one day become depleted, but largely remain empty and unused by anything living. Chairs will inherit the earth; coffee tables will have deep and meaningful conversations with ottomans. At a point in human history, necessity dictated that man lived and died by its own means, totally self-reliant and self-sustaining. Man used no more space than it occupied. Its only specialized functions were eating, sleeping and defecating which occurred in spaces dictated by nature, rather than the arbitrarily demarcated areas we use today. But as man developed, knowledge was shared and became communal. Skill sets became specialized and along with them the space used for their execution. These became standards which at their fundamental level serve their original purpose, but in many cases have become decadent and unwieldily, disconnected from the purpose of their origin and irresponsible in their use of allocated space.

Institutional walls house institutional ideas and institutional ways of thinking. Institutional walls assault us.

In order to become a liberated space our project had to fulfill the following criteria:

Be easily re-creatable
Be utilitarian in construction and use
Made with love
Made with hate
Provide a safe haven from oppression in all its forms
Sit, read, eat, sleep, interact

Three days after generating this list, The House Magic Fort was built.
The structure practically named itself. The men’s bathrooms at the California Institute of the Arts have always been fertile ground for fresh ideas and anonymous collaborations. Once while in the stalls (independently) we were taken out of our complacency by some fresh graffiti blistering the wall reading: “House Music”. Apart from being moronic and inane, the letters were malformed and shaky which opened the door for interpretation and manipulation. He approached the left word and I the right, and soon it read “House Magic”. We immediately realized the power in altering set conditions to make the world a better, safer and more interesting place and promptly applied this principle to the CalArts graphic design program. After four years, countless heartbreaks, magnificent failures, failed relationships, two typefaces, 700 Elves, 1000 reams of paper, 5 pounds weaker, delirious blood loss, hundreds of acts of vandalism, 2 cars, a lost portion of a thumb, rent increase, income decrease, massive debt, bleak opportunities to create works of aesthetic/spiritual/cultural value, morning trips to the ocean, two incidents involving an xacto blade, two beards, one wedding and four threatened divorces, three motor vehicle collisions, 15.36 tons of earth and 224 hours of manual labor, the Fort was constructed. The secrets of our craft were revealed to us exactly eight feet under the earth. The Fort should be seen as a culmination of our education, a symbol of our beliefs, our ethics, convictions, and everything we refuse to accept. Building the House Magic Fort was an inductive and transformative act establishing an approach to the rest of our lives. It was an attempt to resolve the struggle of prevailing institutional conditions (especially their attempts to erase our memories of better times), a gesture towards temporary moderate utopias, and a statement about the standardized approaches taken in design. Most importantly, the fort should be viewed as an extension of our practice as opposed to a singular vestigial endeavor.

There are too many stories to relate the power the Fort had as a liberating space.

The House Magic Fort embodied our thesis, antithesis and ultimately synthesis, but because the Fort was built as an intuitive manifestation of ideals, we felt that its meaning and implications needed reflection and explanation. Because it was authored by our understanding of the world through the translation of ideas into practice on an extremely personal level, we felt the need to reveal the way we interpreted those ideas through questions. Rather than pretending to hold profound solutions or models for living, we felt it would be more effective to define the questions that we asked ourselves when approaching a decision. Ultimately, we compiled a book containing all previous and historical manifestoes relevant to our craft in the form which they were intended to be printed. The pertinent points were extracted, pondered over and a list of considered, relevant, well-informed questions was generated. A typographical analysis of each manifesto was also required.

This idea came to us one early morning when we found a list placed on the table in the Fort. It was unsigned, but obviously placed there by someone familiar with the craft. Probably the victim of some planned obsolescence fearful of becoming obsolete themselves, or perhaps a student whose ideals had yet to be crushed by the machinery of the work for pay system. They left a bottle of homemade wine next to it and placed a photo on the wall of lush Redwood forest. Upon closer inspection, the photo revealed doors cut into the bases of the trees. A single domesticated animal with a collar was spotted resting outside of one of the trees. The back of the photo was adorned with Letraset press type reading: “If everything was well designed, then what?”
The accompanying list read:

Why do you feel the need to connecting with others?
Why is being understood by others important to you?
Are you willing to change?
Are you willing to remain the same?
Is autonomy the most valuable state?
Is being free to travel and have a warm bed a ridiculous bourgeoisie demand?
Why is it good to make mistakes?
Should you have the freedom to shorten or lengthen your own life?
What from the above list do we LOSE in the advent of convenience?
Why isn’t Robin Williams funny? Why is he famous?
Why are the majority of intellectuals that I know so boring? Why are their ideas so engaging?
Why is the working class funner to hang out with? Why are the majority of the ones I hang out with so stupid?
Why didn’t you study something that had more of an aesthetic and cultural impact?
Who is your audience?
What do you want to say?
Why is modernist legibility a turn off? Why is it attractive?
What are you trying to say?
If you don’t like it why are you making it?
Are decadence and nihilism more then a self-serving vestige of Vampiric dinosaurs.
Is the common good is better than the personal?
Is the common good devoid of the eccentricities of the personal?
How did I go from being happy playing with trash to being unhappy typing this?
Why do we value people who don’t change?
Why do designers think that people look at their designs long enough to decipher the meaning?
I wonder if designers forget that sometimes they make things that other people HAVE to live with?
Some objects lose their function after they have expressed their meaning so why do we throw them away afterwards and why do we keep them?
If you are making a lot of money and being successful in what you love (yes, this includes art and music) then are you making safe palatable flytraps for consumers?
What do you value? Why?
Do you value things based on that which you do not value? Does this imply that the things you do not value are equally as important? Then why not treat them as such?
Why is hunger viewed as negative?
Why is it so much fun to fool others?
Why can’t we be satisfied with what we’re given?
How did our parents get it so wrong?
Why can’t we be trusted?
When did you know?
Why do things become funnier in situations where you’re not supposed to laugh?
What would you change? Why not change it?

FLAGELLATE YOUR SOPHISTICAL TRADESMEN OR ELSE !!! (or else what?)