This studio will explore the relationship between the architecture of domesticity and its production and representation, both as idea and as space, through photography and photographic images.
Beginning with a critical examination of the latent assumptions, incentives, and intentions that drive the production and consumption of images of domestic space (and position domestic bodies in that space), we will think about how photographs send messages promoting particular lifestyles, ideologies, power dynamics, colonial histories, and cultural hierarchies, and how architecture is implicated in these. We will look at domestic representations produced not only by architects, but by social reformers, artists, governments, and popular media, with an eye towards the formal techniques used to convey those messages, and consider how these images mediate how we understand space, and broadly how they shape our lives and behaviors.
In designing a dense collective living space, to be located somewhere in the Mexico City neighborhood of Santa Maria la Ribera, with our critical understanding of image production, we will explore the use of photographic process as generative analytic, narrative, and compositional tools in the design process—both using photography as a way to see what is there, and inventing new techniques of image manipulation that may make possible the unlocking of alternative mode of space imagination and new ways of living.
The studio will include two intensive workshops with the photographer Iwan Baan.
