A4499 Domination, Desire & Domesticity
History/Theory SeminarGwendolyn Wright
INTRODUCTION
Domestic environments, whether today or in the past, evoke multiple associations, from the dread of a decline in status to a longing for familial intimacy. Experiences and symbols intertwine with formal rules and tastes. All are inscribed in architectural form, whether as icons proclaiming aspirations or as screens concealing what cannot be shown. Universal needs for shelter, protection, privacy, and sexuality can be found in most dwelling places, of course. Yet our contemporary culture has become ever more sensitized to varying needs and desires, based on gender, culture, class, and location, as well as individual memories, beliefs, and stylistic preferences. Accordingly, most architects conceive of dwellings as poetic personal representations; from this standpoint, social housing leaves them bored or nihilistic.
In general, we rigidly bracket the issues and even types of dwellings under discussion. There is, in fact, no single inherent meaning or formal typology for domestic architecture. A dwelling can be at once modern and traditional, a haven from the world an d a site of family violence, a castle and a claustrophobic trap. The very words domination and domesticity reveal a gendered antagonism in the Latin domus , still embedded in every dwelling, yet seldom experienced in the same way by all women or men.
OBJECTIVES
This seminar seeks instead to juxtapose houses and housing, modern and historicist tropes, historical changes and constancies, European and American trends, architects or builders desires, and those of residents. Similarly, we will analyze the representations of ideals and fears, functions and fantasies, narcissism and apathy.
Historical examples, viewed through the prism of contemporary theories of domesticity, will provide both precedents and dissonance. The analysis will then be brought to bear on recent architectural designs for houses and housing, including critical statements and more conventional solutions to various housing problems: affordability, homelessness, alienation, work at home, care of the body, single-parent households, isolation of the poor, or the need for creativity and self-expression.
REQUIREMENTS
Each student will pre sent several brief architectural analyses during the course of this semester and write a short paper on a specific domestic issue. Final papers will outline a program-and-theory statement for a contemporary house or housing proposal, tied to a specific site and client type.
TOPICS
1. Decoding the Domicile: Past and Present
2. Self-Expression and the Domestic Fetish
3. Mass production, mass taste, and the shelter industry
4. Class prejudice in 19 th century housing reform
5. Urban Hybrids: apartments, SROs, and communal dwellings
6. Recasting the modern house as a machine for living
7. Narratives of modernism's social housing
8. Prefect Post-War comfort and fit
9. Feminism and gendered space
10. Cleanliness, communication and control with domestic technologies
11. Prosaic images and nostalgia for tradition
12. Homelessness, Exile and Vagabondage
13. Conventions, Critiques, and Creativity