Design and Domestic Narratives

Referencing Gaston Bachelard, Clare Cooper Marcus and Rachel Sebba and their writings related to children and domesticity, this paper elaborates on the themes of experience and memory and their relationships to design. It is based on two projects undertaken by the author in collaboration with Coryn Kempster: the research project “Growing up Modern” and the design project “Sky House.” Using a methodology based on oral history, “Growing up Modern” comprises conversations with children, now senior citizens, who were the first to inhabit Modernist houses and housing, and photographic documentation of the iconic homes themselves. The study discovered patterns of living and occupation as well as memories of spatial arrangements and idiosyncratic details. Influenced by the focus of this study was the subsequent design of “Sky House.” The project is rooted in a desire to accommodate and elicit personal domestic narratives through specificity as much as it is driven by more conventional architectural preoccupations such as careful understanding of the site, and associated massing, programmatic, environmental and material strategies. Foregrounding personal narratives of inhabitation, the paper explores the relationship between research and design in architectural scholarship and practice, and the links possible between historical analysis and contemporary application.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.108.22

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ISBN
978-1-944214-26-5