ABSTRACT

Adopted as a framing device for a series of non-representational practices, housework points to architecture as process rather than project, involving ‘work’ in at least three different registers: aesthetics, labour, and performance. While such re-thinking of the architectural object – what architecture is and does – carries implications for current re-orientations in theory and practice, housework is above all a powerful lens to capture the relationship between architecture and capitalism. Advancing from the most obvious outset, addressing housework as unskilled or unpaid labour (as determined by ethnicity, gender and class), what immediately rises to the surface are structures concerned with 1) social reproduction as the ‘hidden abode’ of formal production; 2) the socio-historic construction of home as the ‘other’ of commodification; 3) the neoliberal emphasis on house ownership and the re-installation of domestic labour. These trajectories cannot be understood in isolation – they are entwined as facets or elements in what Nancy Fraser calls ‘the social institution’ of capitalism. A full investigation on the implications of housework in-and-for architecture would therefore necessitate a transversal approach, tying together and moving across these different realms that are at once exposed and dismantled by housework. I will discuss whether housework carries the potential to go beyond the logic of capitalism, and whether it offers the opportunity to think ‘devaluation’ in architecture – a concept that recently has been proposed as a strategy for artistic resistance.