BIENNIAL PROJECT
The Room of One’s Own: The Architecture of the Private Room
The room is perhaps the most obvious form of architecture, and yet it is the least investigated. It seems that the room has always been there, before us; that as dwellers, and then as architects, we have no choice but to live in and design rooms. If the purpose of architecture is to make space, then the room is the most direct architectural form that can result from such a claim. While architect Louis Kahn considered the room as the essential origin of architecture, writer Virginia Woolf argues that to have ‘a rooms of one’s own’ was for a woman of her time a challenge to the patriarchal logic of domestic space. Far from being a timeless form, the room is thus the product of specific historical circumstances that are related with one of the most controversial and problematic issues of human history: the domestication of society. The architecture of the room expresses subtly and yet directly the way in which households, families, and individuals have been individuated as subjects with specific gendered and class connotations. This research attempts to narrate the genealogy of the private room in three ways: by writing its concise history (in Book 1), by mapping the plans of its most salient examples (in Book 2), and by showing through forty-eight perspectival drawings some of its most significant uses and subversions (displayed on the wall and in Book 3).
BIO
Dogma was founded in 2002 and is led by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara. From the beginning of its activities, Dogma has worked on the relationship between architecture and the city by focusing on urban design and large-scale projects. Parallel to their design work, the members of Dogma have intensely engaged with teaching, writing, and research: activities that have been an integral part of the office’s engagement with architecture. For the past few years, Dogma has developed through multiple projects and studies on the transformation of domestic space. The work of the office has been widely published and exhibited. In 2006, Dogma has won the first Iakov Chernikhov Prize for the best emerging architectural practice. In 2013, on the occasion of the exhibition Dogma: 11 Projects in London, the first monograph on the work of the office was published by AA Publications.
