Kaitlin Tse / fall 2018 HAA 92R Design Speculations seminar
Architecture has the capacity to liberate notions of gender, sexuality, and therefore, citizenship. Historical associations with domestic architecture tend to symbolize democracy, capitalism and material expressions of heteronormative identity and the nuclear family. This project situates these traditional forms of domestic space as a battle-ground for aesthetic, political and social ideologies. The work begins through an analysis of postwar aesthetics of domestic architecture and their representation as media promoting women with particular typical behaviors, legitimizing spatial perimeters of gender. The act of looking is understood as a primordial concept through which the home - as plan, as object, as image – controls the body. This project redesigns the traditional postwar American catalog home in order to critique heteronormative domesticity and its relation to gender within the context of the present. Architecture is examined for its capacity to give agency back to the occupant through open spatial arrangements, to foster collective living, and to heighten haptic awareness of all members of the family household through an architectural tectonic of prolonged partial glimpses into serial spaces.
