Troubling domesticities

Content

Troubling Domesticities proposes alternative narratives for everyday environments, focusing on domestic territories and their inconspicuous qualities. It aims to unravel the contemporary biopolitics of the home as a spatial regime of control that constructs normative bodies. By mapping domestic experiences and their kinships, it opens up possibilities for caring architectures. The spatialization of exploratory domestic architectures for the multiplicity of inhabiting bodies and subjectivities will allow for the strengthening of interdependencies in domestic territories. The architectural discipline has constructed the contemporary Western home as a highly delimited spatial property, organized into typologies of units. With the emergence of neoliberal forms of work and their blurred space-time boundaries, domesticities have mutated, spreading beyond the established boundaries of the home and transforming the spatial regime of control it maintains over bodies. Troubling Domesticities closely examines these mutations by observing and exploring alternative narratives of domesticity that challenge the mere notion of a normative body.

teaching aims

Building upon interior architecture theory, feminist, queer, crip and decolonial studies, the course aims to unravel the material conditions of our unequal everyday built environment. Through the mapping and transformation of fictional domesticities, it will explore the repetitive and everyday performative enactment of domestic territories (Bonnevier, 2007). Focusing on body politics and the interactions between interior architecture and inhabiting, working bodies, the course approaches housing production as a spatial regime of control (Preciado, 2009) in which exists the possibility for minor architecture to rise (Stoner, 2012). Troubling Domesticities approaches interior architecture as a practice of possible resistance to patterns of domination and hopes to explore alternative narratives for caring domestic spatialities.

Teaching forms

Over 8 half days, each will focus on a fictional space and its inhabitant. Shaped as design research, the work will articulate the analysis of the pre-existing experience of a character from a chosen fiction (from a film or novel), chosen by the students, through an understanding of the space that stages the fiction, and writings from architectural theory and queer/feminist/crip/decolonial studies. The course will use and develop a range of tools from architectural (plans, sections and models) to research (readings and writings) to develop a 1000 word article that uses the project hypotheses to open up discussion and possibilities.

Further information

Knowledge of architectural drawing and physical modelling is required. The cost of materials for the models will be borne by the student. It is possible for students who have followed the course « Caring Architectures » last semester to follow this course, which deals with complementary spatial problematics.