Our minds enjoy drifting in and out of memories. As fleeting as a dream in our sleep, a memory is easily interrupted by the present. Segments of memories that are associated with each other can develop into a story about our past. This project consists of drawing floor plans of the places I have lived. The floor plans bring back the memories of what happened in that specific time and place. The association with each room takes me into my memories. The rooms on the floor plans help to contain the thoughts. The furniture in the space, the colors of carpet or drapes, the view out the window all start a flood of what happened in that room. The floor plan provides the space reference and the notes on the plans provide the narrative to the story. Exploring the thoughts of a specific place and time starts a flow of memories. The objective is documentation of one person’s life in plan view. To tell a story about a certain place, what happened in that space, and the development of the person’s life. Unlike a book where every detailed is attempted to be revealed the Plan View approach is to tell the story between the notes and the visualization of the building floor plan.

Every life has a story to tell. One’s life should not pass without their story being told. Each person’s life has significance. The Plan View concept is to provide a visual experience in the form of a different type of self portrait.

How many lives pass without any record of who they were? We can stare at the photographs of relatives from the past only to see a representation of what they looked like. The story of who they were is missing.

We often talk about how someone should write a book about their lives. Only to find this is seldom accomplished because of the daunting task. The Plan View is to give a significant representation of the places and what happened in those places that defines the individual.

The information presented is to show the human side of the individual. The humor that defines a time period “John Denver sang in the Commons Building, but nobody knew who was.” “I still can’t believe the Beatles decided to break up. I don’t think I will ever get over that.”

The drama of being a kid in grade school “My best friend told me I made the baseball team when I really didn’t. I took the long way home that day.”

The depth of the story is only limited by what the participant is willing to reveal. The notes on the plans can fill every inch of multiple pages or a defining moment may be expressed in a simple drawing and pointed phrase.

The Plan View is a chance to travel back in time to explore those floor plans from the past and relive those days is a part of the process. In itself the process can be a fun or even therapeutic part of the adventure. The Plan View then becomes a self portrait for others to enjoy. More importantly for others to understand the person.

This project consists of my personal story as an example only because I know myself pretty well. The project now extends to developing the Plan View of others. I look forward to the opportunity to provide Plan Views for many. How we sometimes feel our lives are insignificant and not worth telling, but this is just not the case.

The art medium for the Plan View is ink applied to mylar film. This technique was commonly used before computers by architects and engineers to prepare floor plans as construction documents. It has a sense of a historical process to go with a person’s life story. Once the ink/mylar plans are completed they can be presented as a finished frame drawing, segmented into a book format, or scanned to an electronic format.

I can imagine some day that there would be this archival storage of people’s Plan Views for the world to enjoy and learn who we are. A life should not pass without their story being told.