Finch: Building History

A non-profit organization celebrating the stories of our houses and those who have dwelled within them.

Close your eyes and think of home. Can you hear the floors creak? What color or smell comes to mind? Do the cupboards close sharply or silently? Named for the birds often found nesting in the eaves of our homes, Finch is the first independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating the stories of where we dwell. Partly an ode to domestic architecture, partly a human-interest storyteller, this organization acts as a place to share the history of our homes, creating a worldwide, crowd-sourced map of memories.

THINKING

In April 2020, there was a national shortage of two things: toilet paper and wall paint. Developing Finch meant understanding and exploring a hole in the market. In recent years, there has been much demonstrated interest in homes and architectural history. Platforms such as Airbnb have created a trend for unique vacation stays. Glamping, the tiny home trend, and ‘new’ approaches to how we talk about homes in popular culture - from Hygge, to Marie Kondo, to HGTV programming - have all created a bigger dialogue about the walls between which we dwell. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our lives surround the home more than ever before. In 2020, nationwide campaigns such as #istayhomefor or #workfromhome placed emphasis on our residences. Suddenly, people were looking to accomplish the home improvement projects they had been meaning to get to.

Once a profile is made for a home on the website, the house is assigned an icon that indicates the time period in which it was built. These icons were inspired by mid-century modern breezeblocks and each feature an element symbolic of the respective period of architecture being represented. These icons are also used to denote featured homes within the website and as pins on the Memory Map.