Red Sourcebook

Overview

Ilana Harris-Babou traces this racist legacy of land ownership by taking a Sharpie and quite literally redlining a Restoration Hardware Outdoor sourcebook. Flipping through the catalog, she divides up the idealized landscape used to sell outdoor living furnishings and finding parallels between the language of land stewardship and neighborhood planning in the FHA’s discriminatory manual and the design platitudes and sustainability double-speak of the RH brochure. These two books propose their versions of creating a “home”; Harris-Babou makes us consider what we want for our own—and why we want it in the first place. [Overview courtesy of DIS Collective]