The Politics of domesticity

Curriculum: MArch Studio 2A, California College of the Arts, Architecture Division
Date: Spring 2021  
Professors: Antje Steinmuller

Architecture, by its very nature, has a political dimension. Through architecture, we establish boundaries and territories, and thus, introduce spatial hierarchy and order that, in turn, impacts how people relate to one another. Architecture informs what actions and interactions are possible in space.  By giving form to the world we live in with intent, we not only create sites and spaces, but rather enable situations –a way in which something or someone is positioned in relation to others– and scenarios –specific possibilities for actions and events. Architecture, thus, has agency in producing social conditions, yet, does not prescribe how people act in the spaces designed. Nowhere is this dimension of architecture more fundamentally evident than in the domestic realm. Through housing typologies, architecture has both shaped and represented gender relationships, family structures, and the social bond between neighbors. As housing aggregates to form urban conditions, architecture defines how we relate to shared public infrastructures from the security of our private realm. In addition, questions about housing as a human right in the context of the affordability crisis have charged architects with rethinking how we live together today –namely, how architecture responds to changes in social units, changes in lifestyles, and to the increasingly nomadic conditions that characterize where and how we work. 

This MArch core studio embraced architecture’s agency vis-à-vis social conditions by taking this “composite crisis” of our domestic realm as an urgent call to action for architects to rethink fundamental disciplinary notions such as program, thresholds, and typology as they apply to how we live. This studio took on these notions through interrelated modules that critically revisit classic dichotomies of work / leisure, public / private, and collective / individual that have characterized a great part of the architectural discourse in the twentieth century, but no longer respond to how we use and think of domestic architecture. Module 1, Kitchen Stories and Other Family Fables, reconsidered program inside a single household through research into conventional and contemporary domestic program types and architecture’s historical complicity in propagating relationships between members of a household. Module 2, Let's Talk About Type, took a critical look at the legacy of housing typologies, considering the threshold conditions that separate, connect, and mediate relationships within established housing typologies, and ultimately reproposing those. Module 3, Living Together, leveraged the conceptual position towards contemporary domesticity put forward in the earlier modules towards the design of a collective domestic household for alternative family units.