Familiar Horror: Toward a Critique of Domestic Space

The essay seeks to revisit the history of domestic typology from the point of view of the politics of reproductive labour

Familles, je vous hais! On Architecture and Reproduction

Far from being a haven of tranquillity, the house is not only the battlefield of social and personal conflicts of class, gender, and ethnicity, but it is also arguably the most important workplace. However, while in the pre-modern era the productive vocation of the home was not qualified, the refined division of labour that is a hallmark of early capitalism expelled the production of goods from the home, leaving behind the unwaged and unseen toil of women. The institutionalization of reproductive labour, that is to say the sum of the efforts needed to generate, maintain, educate and care for the workforce, is perhaps the single most effective act of primitive accumulation we can imagine; in this process, half of the population is dispossessed of any control on their work which becomes a simple natural destiny sweetened by the trappings of domesticity and familial love. The home of the middle and working classes, which had hardly been a concern for European architects until the late Renaissance, is invented precisely as a tool to optimize this process. The presentation used projects and writings developed in France from Sebastiano Serlio to Charles Briseux, the Grands Ensembles, and Lacaton and Vassal to retrace the way domestic space has been choreographed first as a mechanism to separate production and reproduction, and later as a disciplinary microcosm of which the housewife is both victim and villain. Such a critique is all the more urgent today as the last decades have seen the ambiguous blurring of reproductive labour into the ungendered, micro-entrepreneurial field of ‘affective labour’. It is perhaps in such a conjuncture that architecture could claim the responsibility it refused to assume before, and think again housing within and against the realm of labour

The Supreme Achievement

In 1971, Superstudio published their twelve Ideal Cities, “the supreme achievement of twenty thousand years of civilization, blood, sweat and tears”. After 44 years, CAMPO and Black Square ask twelve groups of architects to give their own answer to the original brief.  The Superstudio piece was less about imagining the Future than it was about re-imagining Architecture as a form of knowledge and as a platform for thinking rather than mere practice.  The format itself – one image and one text for each of the twelve cities –implies a project of an Archetype rather than a pragmatic solution to a problem. In fact, these visions of ‘supreme achievement’ are not answers, but open questions.  Perfect and dystopian urban mechanisms where any incoherence is eliminated, they challenge the idea that space and bodily presence might not matter anymore in the future, while at the same time they provide an ironic commentary on the architect’s curse: that we have to be projective and optimistic by default, even (or maybe especially) when civilization seems in fact to have come to an end.  While Superstudio's response was intentionally dystopian, there might be other ways to interpret today the same brief. We still need architecture to put forward not only ideas for new forms of life, but also new possibilities for our political imagination to go beyond the current conventional models

Education, Consumption, Reproduction: Three Cautionary Tales

Once upon a time, the neoliberal city was a fiction: it is the aim of the present essay to discuss three key aspects of the neoliberal city through paradigmatic projects put forward in a decade when the first effects of post-Fordist production were starting to be visible in the European city. By rereading Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt (1966),Archizoom’s No-Stop City (1969), and Superstudio’s 12 Ideal Cities (1971), the essay tries to shed light on the changed role of education, consumption and reproduction in the contemporary condition. The three projects will also offer an occasion to discuss the value of architecture as a critical tool: if architecture is always necessarily entangled with power and economy – and this is all the more true in the neoliberal era – these examples show that the political edge of architecture can lie in its being a laboratory for new concepts and archetypes. This continuous search can ultimately sharpen our awareness of character of the environment we live in. After more than four decades, these projects have proved to be acts of radical realism, parables that sought to redefine the political subject the XXI century within and against capitalism. As a matter of fact, the issues put forward in these scenarios have become the hallmarks of the neoliberal city: the transformation of higher education into a form of industry, the collapsing of the difference between production and consumption, the transformation of architecture into a biopolitical apparatus for the reproduction of suitable subjects

LIKE A ROLLING STONE Revisiting the Architecture of the Boarding House

This book presents the results of a research project and architectural proposal conducted by Dogma and Black Square into the architecture of the boarding house. This research originated from our long-standing engagement with the architecture and politics of domestic space. In recent years we have attempted to rethink domestic space (in light of its historical and present vicissitudes) through diverse projects, teaching and writing. The opportunity to develop this specific project on the architecture of the boarding house was the product of an invitation to contribute to the British Pavilion at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale titled ‘Home Economics.' Our answer to this brief was to revisit the tradition of the boarding house as the quintessential typology for temporary habitation – a model that is neither a house nor a hotel. Our interest in this typology was motivated by its disappearance at the moment mobility and nomadic life has become the norm for many dwellers. At the exhibition in the British Pavilion the project is represented by a 1:1 model and a 60x60 cm version of this book

John Soane: From Theatre of Memory to Framework for Memories

The essay uses two museums designed by John Soane as paradigmatic examples of different ways of constructing the concept of memory as a social product

A Soft Story: The Invention of Formless Space

Although the rhetoric of Dom-ino is based on technical performance, its vertical structure is not entirely rigid, and its beamless slabs are inefficient. Here, alleged simplicity generates real complexity. Partitions and skin detach from any tectonic rationale to no longer be discussed in terms of finite form, but as flexible, interchangeable shapes. As the physical elements that helped relate the self to the world disappear, a new inhabitant emerges – more free yet condemned to permanent instability. This talk traces shifts through a genealogy of projects that either resisted or exacerbated the Dom-ino model, thus exposing its fundamentally ideological character

Specific Spaces: Government and the Emergence of architecture d’accompagnement, 1584–1765

Architecture d’accompagnement, or formulaic architecture, developed in Paris during the 1600s – a period marked by the emergence of modern government models. Accompagnement is a simplified classicism, devoid of figurative details and reduced to its most abstract form: an architecture that, for the first time, is concerned with the framing of empty (public) space rather than with the embellishment of (private) built space. With its deliberate blankness, accompagnement shifts the focus of architecture from the objects to the milieu. Until the reign of Henri IV, streets and squares in Paris were ambiguous leftovers both in juridical and representational terms. There was no formalized public space, as the very idea of a public sphere did not make sense until a secularized concept of state, based on a social contract, emerged. Through an analysis of the first prototype of accompagnement – the parisian places royales – the essay argues that modern public space is essentially an invention of the age of government, the result of a conscious political and architectural choice. By comparing the development of the places royales with a rereading of key political theories of sovereignty from Bodin to Hobbes and Rousseau the essay traces a genealogy of early European public space as social and cultural product. Today, understanding the political instrumentality of public space is crucial, as it might give us insights in the roots of the conflicts that we witness in the contemporary city. Ultimately, the Paris example shows how the very idea of public space was first put forward as a tool of management – as apparatus to shape the subjectivity of the citizens through their use of space

Rome: The Centres Elsewhere

The talk focuses on a large-scale project for the Rome region put forward in the 2010 book 'Rome: The Centres Elsewhere'. The project reimagined the consular roads as a potential armature for future urban development while challenging the contemporary understanding of public space and infrastructure

Rituals and Walls: The Architecture of Sacred Space

In recent years the idea of sacred space has not been considered a relevant topic in contemporary architecture, a neglect that is even more pronounced in terms of debates about the city. The texts and projects collected together in this book aim to redress this oversight, and re-open a contemporary understanding and discussion of the architecture of sacred space. The book itself is the result of a year-long investigation on the nature of sacred space and its manifestation developed in the AA’s Diploma Unit 14. It consists of design proposals that range from a multi-faith school in Strasbourg to the reconstruction of a festival hall in the city of Xian, China; from a Jesuit monastery in Detroit to a women’s Islamic centre in Paris. Each proposal is introduced by critical texts that analyse the political and ideological meaning of religious architecture. The book is complemented by essays by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria Sheherazade Giudici and Hamed Khosravi that focus on the relationship between forms of worship and architecture, and argue that within sacred space form must follow function – in other words, architectural space must adhere to the rituals through which the sacred is enacted, and that the meaning of sacred space goes far beyond the stereotypes of contemplation and spirituality, and instead aligns with the political and social ethos of the city