The Swing House
After site-based projects in Northside and Camp Washington, where art and architecture merged in living environments, Mark de Jong began imagining his next work as a fully immersive experience—one where structure, space, and the body meet in motion.
The work begins with a space—a house, a room, a fragment of architecture—and an intuitive sense of its potential.
Swing House is the first piece in Triptych in Time , a series exploring buildings as both structures and vessels. Its central gesture is radically simple: remove the staircase and the three floors it joined to create a vertical chamber that holds a functional 30-foot swing. The intervention transforms the building from domicile to portal; from container to instrument.
The swing—playful, heavy, suspended—embodies duality. The hidden lead weight inside its seat anchors joy to gravity, echoing how relationships carry levity and burden over time. De Jong doesn’t erase the past; he amplifies it. Scars in the wood, worn floors, and remnants of prior use become part of the language. The house describes time as something we feel, not simply measure.
As with all de Jong’s houses, Swing House is available to occupy; an invitation to step inside an ever-evolving work that fully reveals itself through use, movement, and time. Visitors become part of the composition. Their presence activates the space and brings new rhythms to its evolving constitution. By sleeping in Swing House, swinging through its embedded archive, or simply breathing within its walls, habitation becomes another layer of the work’s expression.
