UNCANNY HOME (家有玄机)
Huilin Wu & Jiwei Wang
2025
2nd Prize: Britton Memorial Awards 2025
UnCanny Home explores the quiet negotiations Chinese immigrants make to transform rigid American housing into culturally resonant domestic spaces. What might appear “awkward” or “out of place” at first glance - like slippers stored in bathroom cabinets or altars placed on AC — are, in fact, canny adaptations that reveal immigrants’ spatial agency. The project captures these uncanny moments not to critique, but to illuminate the layered homemaking process across cultures.
Through interviews, photographic documentation, and spatial analysis, the research presents stories from individual families shaped by distinct cultural, regional, and personal backgrounds. The exhibition amplifies these tensions through creative reinterpretations of real domestic conditions, reimagining how cultural rituals might inhabit overlooked, unclaimed, or unconventional spaces. These speculative spatial interventions make visible the hidden discomforts and quiet resilience embedded in immigrant domestic life. UnCanny Home neither romanticizes nor diagnoses but invites reflection on how home is redefined in translation and how design can better respond to diverse cultural ways of living.