What Happened:

The Club House was intitially installed in the eucalyptus forest behind the Student Health Center on a Friday. There was some activity and a few messages written on the outer walls during peak hours in the middle fo the day. Over the weekend, the Club House experienced a boom in use, so that when I returned the following week, about 50% of the total input was collect from that first weekend. Additionally, there was evidence that people had not only passed by to write a quick message, but that they had stayed and used the Club House for other social interaction.

Initially, I had not provided any seating inside the Club House. Over the weekend, one of the patio chairs had been placed inside. The other two chairs had been moved to face eachother on either side of the table, suggesting a setting for a dialogue. There were also bottles left inside the House and beer cans about 10 feet away. When I later provided folding chairs specifically for the interior of the House, I found that people moved the chairs slightly within the house, though the new positions did not change much about the sitter's position in the House.

A surprising development I found was that people liked to write and draw on the roof despite the fact that the material was flimsy, floppy, and very hard to draw on. There were complex drawings and long messages that didn't even turn up on the material, but people evidently did not give up even though their messages were not visible. Perhaps it was the convenient height of the roof or the otherwise lack of usual horizontal writing space that encouraged people to write on the roof. I found that any writable open surface would get written on. Even the chairs had scribbles.

When I changed the cheap tarp roof for the more solid colored shingles, people were immediately drawn to them. From then on, the majority of new material was on the new roof. Again, the roof's position made it easier to write on in passing than the lower walls, and now the paper coverings on the roof and individual canvas-like shingles made writing on them even easier. People were approaching and writing on them before I had even finished putting them on.

On the inside, the Post-its had trouble sticking to the painted surface, especially in the windy environment. People actually left notes commenting on the fact that the Post-its did not stick, which, like all the others, ended up on the floor. I collected the fallen notes and glued them to the wall, thinking that since Post-its were meant to stick on paper, that people could build Post-it webs around them. People did not stick Post-its to other stablized Post-its at all, it turned out. The continued to try to stick their messages on the paint, and then left more notes saying that the Post-its did not stick. Otherwise, they were also successful and well-used. I later glued large squares of colored paper to the interior so that people could stick Post-its to them and write on them directly. Again, this is not work the way I planned. Perhaps people don't like intermingling their Post-its.

My original hypothesis was that the content on the exterior would be more communal and public than the content on the interior. I never formally defined public and private, but it appeared that most feedback and personal opinions were written on the post-its on the inside, while the outside content was more likely to reference external influences like pop culture. It's difficult to gauge the nature of the content because the Club House, by it's very nature, is a public art piece, and I think that people have it mind when they leave messages that others will see them.

The project design was difficult to implement by myself, which resulted in some structural weakness--especially in the roof. Future social architects should consider working in partners or groups to implement a piece of this nature, which is supposed to be relatively large and solid. The positive response to the Club House, including requests to keep it up indefinitely, shows a desire from the UCSD student body for social spaces that are perhaps not as clean cut and industrial-looking as most of the structures on campus. This and other Social Architecture projects have shown that the UCSD has a definite need for architecture that functions soley as a social enabler, apart from formalized meeting rooms and university-sanctioned activities.