AR Reading List 002

Where last week’s reading list looked at architectures of care and working from home, this week we consider patterns of domestic life: patterns that for many have intensified, or even pressurised over past weeks. As both work and social life fold into the home, and shared flats and families alike are kept in near-constant contact, the line between domesticity and public life has all but disappeared completely.

What do we owe to each other in an environment like this? What new roles or responsibilities might we need to take up, to care well for each other, or to keep sane?

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• Typology: The semi-detached house, Tom Wilkinson, AR July 2015
  ‘A symbol of middle-class aspiration, conservatism and compromised individualism, the semi-detached is the British modern domestic type par excellence’
• Soft cell: the minimum dwelling, Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara, AR July/August 2018
  ‘The “private” space of the house became also the secret abode of social reproduction. Only those who worked outside the house were remunerated and thus considered workers’
• Poem: phases of home life, Helen Charman, AR March 2019
  ‘For learning to love anyone is like receiving a death blow
  in the Ideal Home Show.’
• The high and low art of Rudolph Schindler, Dan O’Neil, AR April 1973
  ‘To Schindler, the act of dwelling is one of the most basic and continuing human activities, and the architect’s task is to give physical expression to this act’
• Outrage: the toxicity of house porn, Catherine Slessor, AR July/August 2019
  ‘When houses are seen simply as status symbols and repositories of capital, then the fetishisation of dream homes seems like a cruelly grotesque distraction, a tinsel-wrapped turd’
• Walter’s Way, self-build schemes in Lewisham, London by the Segal method, Charlotte Ellis, AR March 1987
  ‘As Segal himself remarked, the self-builders don’t waste much breath discussing the skilful proportioning of solids and voids. But they are extremely proud of their houses’
• Naked ambition: blurring the line between creator and consumer in the porn industry, Esther Fernández Cifuentes, AR March 2019
  ‘The bedroom amounts to one of the last remaining bastions for the exploration of the sexual or indecorous; a space characterised by a number of rules which allow for certain moral freedoms’