a vulnerable + intimate architecture of home
2020 design research thesis.
thesis supervisor: Dr. Colin Ripley; second reader: Dr. John Cirka; program rep: Cheryl Atkinson; program director: Marco L. Polo; narrative process influence: Elsa Lam.
“Contrary to what one might imagine, our health will not come from a border or separation, but only from a new understanding of community with all living creatures, a new sharing with other beings on the planet. We need a parliament not defined in terms of the politics of identity or nationality: a parliament of (vulnerable) bodies living on planet Earth.”
Citation reference: Preciado, P.B. (May/June 2020). Learning from the Virus. (Stevens, M. Trans.). Artforum. Retrieved July 30, 2020, from: https://www.artforum.com/print/202005/paul-b-preciado-82823
abstract/ The boundaries and apertures of home are not separate from but play an active role in a politics of body and social body health. As both the idea of home and housing fail increasing numbers of people, this thesis seeks alternatives to home’s narrative of utopic internal intimacy that endorses retreat and a relationship of non-responsibility vis à vis the public realm. It suggests the result is dystopic in its concealment and exacerbation of vulnerability and its resistance to change. Instead, a vulnerable and intimate architecture centers the vulnerable body to uncover unique, pluralistic, personal intimacies.
To draw out the uncanny, repressed and emotional in home, Five Principles and corresponding drawings of unhomes are proposed. The Principles are based on Corbusier’s calibration of the subject and values of modern architecture almost a hundred years ago, in the aftermath of the 1918 Spanish flu and in a time where Tuberculosis was a leading cause of death. During Modernism, concern about fitness, evading disease and the aesthetics of diagnostic technologies such as the x-ray revolutionized the architecture of home.
Today, drawing in the midst of the 2019 Coronavirus pandemic and the environmental crisis, at a time of heightened visibility of social and economic polarizations and of increasing tendencies towards solitary inhabitation, it seems time to reevaluate the physical and psychological effects of architecture’s boundaries on health in a more wholistic manner.
Architecture’s inside and outside, traditionally structured according to a narrative of binarization (nuclear internal intimacy and vulnerability to the external environment and external people or groups of people) are re-examined. The intent is to speculate a new healthy home (as a universal right) based on new understandings and boundaries of self in relation one’s neighbours and context, in the broadest sense. This new home relishes in the pleasure of mediating the tensions of vulnerability and intimacy, health and social health (in its multiple readings) through apertures and boundaries that reflect its inhabitants. This home is urban and personal in its conscious relationalities, and its temporally selective connection and isolation, regardless of its distance.
section AA’
section BB’
“If architectural discourse has from its beginning associated building and the body, the body that it describes is the medical body, reconstructed by each new theory of health. Throughout the twentieth century, designers positioned architecture against medical and psychological trauma. Each new instrument of medical diagnosis implied new positions for design and new systems of architectural representation. The occupant is a patient, with modernity itself being both a disease and a possible cure.”
Citation reference: Colomina, B. (2019). X-ray architecture. Zurich, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers. p.55.
on boundaries + apertures: drawing a vulnerable + intimate architecture [research presentation available on youtube].
This thesis has been exhibited @ Paul H. Cocker Gallery’s 2020 Student Award Show + 2021 Graduate Thesis Show.
Maya’s graduate work has also been recognized on the 2020 RAIC Honour Roll and with a RAIC Student Medal.
© Maya Orzechowska 2020