CARING ARCHITECTURES

Caring Architectures questions how the structural invisibility of both reproductive labor activities and their related spaces perpetuates power relations in the domestic realm. The course investigates domestic care spaces as reflections of the devaluation of care tasks through architectural theory. Modern Western housing continues the trend of optimizing and individualizing care spaces, a trend rooted in the late 19th century. While examining this patriarchal and capitalist legacy, the course also views these spaces as stages for daily practices, providing a form of bottom-up architectural knowledge. Fiction serves as a lens to understand power and resistance in spaces like laundry rooms, kitchens, closets, and garbage rooms, revealing their unremarkable power structures.

Integrating interior architecture theory with feminist and queer literature, the course examines the material conditions of essential care in our built environment. It identifies the repetitive, daily performance of these spaces (Bonnevier, 2007), focusing on body politics and the interaction between interior architecture and working bodies. Housing production is approached as major architecture, with minor architectures rising within it (Stoner, 2012). These minor architectures maintain domesticities and highlight architecture’s socio-political responsibility concerning care, repair, and decay (Malterre-Barthes, 2019).

Over six days, each module focuses on one care task and its related spaces: cooking, cleaning, storing, ironing, shopping, sorting, etc. Shaped as design research, the work articulates the analysis of the pre-existing experience of one character, one selected fiction (from a film or a novel), the space that stages the fiction, and texts from both architectural theory and queer/feminist literature. The course uses and develops diverse tools, from architectural plans and models to readings and writings, in order to foster collective discussion, problematize, and rewrite spatial narratives of care.