Artifice domesticity

analyzing queer identity’s situation in the 21st century home

Self-Directed Studio Research

Under the Direction of Jennifer Akerman

A portrait is a representation of identity presented for consumption. As architecture represents its inhabitants and community, it too is a portrait. The existing formal archetype of the house exists in a static environment forcing inhabitants to act upon it through a series of retrofit banal decoration tactics. If the home is to accurately represent its inhabitants, it must evolve to include new narratives and voices outside of the existing homogeneous domestic landscape.

The difference between identity and self-identification is the characteristics that make us who we are and the agency of those characteristics respectively. Within the domestic landscape exist many representations of both identity and self-identification. This is most easily seen through the display of collections and personal artifacts. We have chosen each of these object allies either consciously or unconsciously and have surrounded ourselves with them.

The domestics of antiquity were filled with personal artifacts and collections, each piece unique in quality and story. As we now live in a post industrialized capitalist’s society, home furnishing and interiority has shifted to a homogenized state lacking personality. All the while the personalities of the inhabitant continues to flux with newly accepted queerings adding facets to individuality.

Architecture exists here to bring order to our lives, to support the basic need of shelter, and to shape our understanding of public and private. While the architectural form of the domestic is very much still rooted in tradition, its inhabitants have started to break away from the long-standing roles prescribed to us from the beginning. Family status and gender roles have dominated domestic space and its organization. Private rooms offered women space to keep house while the public domains were for the men to exhibit displays of wealth and pride.

If our domestic landscape is to properly represent us, we must turn current architecture on its head. As members of the 21st century, we have shattered expectations of family roles, pushed back against gendered spaces, and are starting to understand how sexuality further twists our preconceived notions of domestic identity. It is time for the domestic to catch up and allow its inhabitants to shape it rather than act upon it. The key to this lies in identity and its relationship to interiority.