In my memory, it’s a Zoom call of a house, a collection of two or three irregularly shaped buildings of five storeys or so, with amorphous facades of windows coming out on all sides and little decks with houseplants. Each apartment-sized facet was so different from the others that it seemed as though the whole couldn’t have been built as one project, yet the units couldn’t have been built separately either. Together they formed a perfect apartment complex — it was clear that’s what they had to be — though had they been built on a smaller scale it’s possible they could have been just single-family homes. When I first saw those pieced-together houses, after ambling away from the Bauhaus Archive on a grey Berlin afternoon, everything about them bespoke different lives happening separately, but in tandem. Fourteen years later, and three months into our experiment in living exactly this way — alone, but together — I wanted to see those shapes again.
I thought I’d find...
Jessica Duffin Wolfe is a professor of digital communications and journalism at Humber College, in Toronto. She wrote The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Literature and Illness, out this month.
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