The street, the block and the room: these are the most common spaces of existence. Everywhere, at any time, we dwell within these places, and for this reason we assume they are innocent backdrops for our lives - stages for the everyday. Yet these spaces represent the summa of how human subjectivity has been tamed and moulded within predictable social patterns. Life and work are now one and the same; labour cannot be confined within specific ‘workplaces’. For this reason, domestic space - the space of reproduction - becomes the most strategic vantage point for considering how life itself - as bios, as dynamis - is put to work. Issues such as gentrification and the credit crunch are truly brought to bear when they are seen as part of the enslavement of life as a source of economic value. Here, our common spaces become insidious spheres where dwelling happens in a state of permanent precariousness. This condition clashes with the ideological cliché of the home as a reassuring space of intimacy and family values. Instead, the intimacy of the domestic becomes the locus of a familiar horror.
This year Diploma 14 opened the Pandora’s box of our contemporary horror as it emerges in our daily routines. We looked at dwelling on three scales - the street, the block and the room - in order to analyse how economy, politics and form have shaped subjects and habits. This analysis was used as the starting point for a molecular revolution within and against domestic space with special focus on the architecture of the interior as an arena for radical spatial and social invention.
Fabrizio Ballabio, Monia De Marchi, Elias Guenoun, Adrian Lahoud, Charles Rice, Francisco Sanin, Irénée Scalbert, Tom Weaver
Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. His research and projects focus on the relationship between architectural form, political theory and urban history. He is Davenport Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture at Yale University and is the author of The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011) and The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Architecture (2008). Aureli is cofounder of Dogma, an architectural studio based in Brussels and focused on the project of the city.
Maria Shéhérazade Giudici earned her PhD from TU Delft with a thesis on the construction of modern subjectivity through the project of public space. After completing her MA at Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, she has been working on large-scale urban developments with offices BAU Bucharest, Donis Rotterdam and Dogma Brussels, as well as teaching at the AA, the Berlage Institute and BIArch Barcelona.
