What was it like to grow up in an early Modernist villa or housing estate? How did this setting impact your attitudes growing up? Has it shaped the way you look at domestic spaces? Were you self-conscious of your avant-garde childhood home or proud of it?

Since 2015 Coryn Kempster and I have undertaken a series of interviews with individuals who were, as children, the first inhabitants of radical buildings from the early twentieth century. We asked questions and recorded memories in an effort to understand the impact, or lack thereof, these buildings had on our interlocutors as children and the influence, if any, they continue to have on their adult selves. Called “Growing Up Modern,” this research and documentation project uses the methods of oral history and acknowledges the personal and subjective impact of the interaction between the interviewee and the interviewer in the close reading of the narratives and the material artifacts.

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