Many thanks to Marco Ferrari (of Studio Folder) for inviting me to give a lecture on critical design and domestic space, as part of his Ikea Interiors workshop at Domus Academy!



The lecture briefly looked at some polarities in the history of interior design in the past 100 years, such as industry/expressionism (via the Frankfurter Kitchen, Alexander Klein's Functional House for Frictionless Living, and Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau), efficiency/intimacy (Le Corbusier's urban sketches versus le Cabanon), and speculative design/critical design (Archigram, il Progetto Domestico, and Dunne & Raby).

A bad house:

A good house:
From "The Functional House for Frictionless Living", Alexander Klein, 1928

I formulated the following categories as a framework for understanding how contemporary designers and artists approach the domestic environment:

Performative space: bodies and objects
Protective space: microenvironments
Productive space: material processes
Symbolic space: virtual representations