ABSTRACT
In recent decades, the unprecedented concentration of people in cities around the
world, coinciding with the collapse of any safety net that welfare state policies used to
provide, has provoked a series of staggering effects, a ‘housing crisis’ possibly similar to
the one experienced in nineteenth-century industrial centres. Decency and basic rights
are ignored, and social responsibility or even a philanthropic agenda are replaced by the
rhetoric of ‘bottom-up’ and DIY. Unapologetic entrepreneurialism is often disguised and
sold as emancipation. Spaces and neighbourhoods of extreme poverty in Cairo, Rio,
Tunis, Athens or Shenzhen are celebrated as cases of improvised urbanization and self-
building ingenuity. Yet, there is no cause and effect relationship between space,
architecture, the economy or the political. There is no architecture as a ‘representation’
or a ‘diagram’ of a power relation external to its own production. The domestic is not a
scale of design, a response to a given, predetermined framework, but the construction
of the problem itself. The most emblematic object from the discipline of architecture
that is used to unpack the above is Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino. Yet, it remains
rather ambiguous. Seen often as a pure diagram of power relations, or just as an object
that is often reduced ‘stylistically’ to its abstract, formal qualities, it is probably as
enigmatic as in 1914.
