Negotiating Domesticity

The home as part of material culture is the very place where the intricate relations between architecture, gender and domesticity become visible. This book investigates the multi-layered themes evoked by the interconnections between these terms. The contributions to this book address the gendered conceptions and the use of built spaces, the role of women as active agents of spatial production, and the mutual inscriptions of the materiality of architectural space and gendered subjectivities.
The focus of inquiry is modern architecture, also including the celebrated architecture of the Modern movement as its more common and widely spread derivatives that became the dominant mode of building in the twentieth century. The articles in the introductory section provide an overview of the existing discourse on modernity, domesticity and gender. The following three sections consist of essays on specific spatial scenarios from a broad range of geographical locations in the West, whereby the complicated relationship between gender and domestic space are revealed in architectural discourse and practice. The topics range from well-known architects and architectural examples such as Adolf Loos and the Maison de Verre to relatively unknown cases such as the polykatoikia apartments in Greece. In all cases, the authors' emphasis remains on how the concept of domesticity is produced by the gendered subjectivity of builders and users of domestic spaces and by architectural discourse.
The essays brought together in this book are based upon new interdisciplinary research which enriches architectural history with sociological, anthropological, philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches. Despite the Modern movement's prominent emphasis on housing, the point is often made that modern art and architecture were about the suppression rather than the glorification of domesticity. This book contends that the modern era marks the rise of a new sense of domesticity that developed simultaneously with re-definitions of gender roles and which led to unprecedented articulations of sexuality with domestic space.