Domus Academy has for twenty years been the meeting place between experimentation and education. The projects for the Master’s course accordingly to apply the logic of design culture to the micro-transformation of urban landscape. Text by Dante Donegani, Giovanni Lauda. Photography by Laura Fantacuzzi. Edited by Francesca Picchi 

Dante Donegani, director of the Domus Academy Master’s course in Design, and Giovanni Lauda, one of the teachers since 1992, talk about their research experiences with students over the last decade.

Dante Donegani: The projects carried out with Domus Academy students since 1997 are a continuation of the study into new living patterns conducted at the school since its foundation. They are researching the major transformations taking place in the contemporary city. This has been accompanied by a design approach dealing with architectural and urbanistic issues as witnessed in the Agronica territorial project (the first model of “weak urbanisation” formulated with A. Branzi, A. Petrillo, C. Raimondo e T. Ben David).

Giovanni Lauda: Our starting point was the decline of the industrial city and the rise of new electronic topologies and behavioural patterns. All these factors had rendered urban zoning and residential planimetric layouts useless. The failure of the methodological unity “from spoon to city” gave rise to a different hierarchy of design. It no longer ranged from the general to the particular or from the city to household utensils.

DD: In the projects that we developed during the 1997 Master’s course, the goal was to find a new model of “constructing” homes that would be open and provisional. To increase domestic mobility and the freedom of undesigned space, furniture, systems and products were integrated. To free individual consumption from the possession of costly and obsolescent hardware, supplies of services and new distribution systems were envisaged.

GL: The direction given to students was to liberate the home not only from architecture and furniture, but also from property dimension, which being the most important financial investment in lives, ends up freezing savings and consumption. Hired furniture, ready-to-deliver spaces, disposable units and shared equipment that were halfway between private consumer goods and collective services were designed to allow for personal likes in an approach that stated “Less living is better living!”

DD: “Space liberated for the pleasure of consumption” indicated a new user pattern for houses that was based on access and not on possession. It was an attempt to apply the logic of design to the construction of houses, not in the metaphorical sense of radical design, but by envisaging a new generation of components, systems and products evolved for building.

GL: The exhibition by Mirko Zardini, “News from the Interior”, at the 2004 Venice Biennale (in which a number of models developed with Domus Academy students were shown) featured the transformation of the ready-built and changes in the use of urban spaces behind the apparent immobility of their architectural scenes. From this perspective, design (and not architecture or planning) is the discipline that contributes most to the enhancement and transformation of a city. In the Master’s projects conducted in 2004, we worked both on this idea of domestic transplants (meaning the introduction into interiors of new temporary or permanent elements of habitability) and on the idea of urban lifting. The latter, by acting on the exterior (the skin) of urban artefacts, represented new possibilities of “furnishing”, i.e. of making architecture habitable and comfortable.

DD: These projects are fragments, micro-environments and macro-objects installed within architecture or on the facades of existing buildings. For example, they could be habitable shutters, curtains conceived as domestic appendices or panels used as enlargements of domestic activities, not to mention advertising supports or dynamic facades. Like clothes chosen on the basis of taste, occasion and the desire for self-representation, these new living components simulate the possibilities offered by the market to the consumer.

The liberated house 1997-2003, Domus Academy. Project leaders: Donegani and Lauda with Jae Kyu Lee

Habitat catalogue, Ik-seo Choi, Korea, 1997
The houses are composed of prefabricated environments (domestic spaces, garages, laundries, hanging gardens, Spas,etc). Vertically assembled on metal skeleton frames, they are linked by private habitable lifts (fitted out as living rooms, terraces, WCs,…). The living units, conceived as temporary storage of public and private functions, inspire new forms of mobility as well as space and resource sharing.

The perimeter home, Jae Gong Lee, Korea, 1997
It is composed of fitted out walls that include the home’s furniture and technical fixtures. The concentration of objects and connections in the walls contrasts with a not designed void for the growth of personal attitudes, as an element of “existential” ergonomics.

The horizontal house, Carole Chabert, France, 1997
A habitable carpet, composed of inflatable seating and freely modular technical elements: the evolution of the floating floor towards a domestic space endowed with functional flexibility and structural instability. Sleeping, eating and cooking: old and new rituals performed crouching, lying down or kneeling, by superimposing different and remote cultures in the idea of the floor as a key element of the house.

Direct service. Nikolaos Koronis, Greece + Omer Unal, Turkey, 1997-2003
The introduction of services to replace products frees individual consumption from the purchase of expensive, definitive and rapidly obsolescent hardware. Service and disposable furniture regenerate the domestic space and release it from its patrimonial dimension. Refrigerator bags distributed in supermarkets, against a deposit, keep food fresh. Tatamis and linen are supplied, and periodically redelivered, by the laundry; the home office, provided together with the assistance contract, incorporates the equipment for working at home...

Transplants and Urban Liftings, Domus Academy: Donegani and Lauda with Luca Buttafava, Jae Kyu Lee

Sof_t, Heper Selin, Turkey
Sof_t is a collection of special frames that integrate traditional domestic functions into the window: from the technical ones (systems such as heaters, fan coils and air-conditioning units) to aesthetical and usage ones (mini-offices, bookshelves or systems for plants and flowers cultivation). A variety of textures and colours of frames allows users to change the appearance of their homes as well as projecting a new landscape in their domestic surrounding. A collection that makes your window inhabitable.

Cell, Cenker Zeynep Ece, Turkey
Cell is an intelligent architectural skin that regulates the exchanges between the inside and the outside of buildings. The “parassite” structures are applied to the outside of windows so that they can filter the outside air and light, while the LEDs send personal messages to the city.

Multi-face, Lee Jung Sun, Korea
Multi-face is a multi-functional skin, applied to existing buildings to provide the house with new functions from the outside. The different elements of the system (which also become the support for advertising) can be used as spaces to store food in the open air, keep suitcases or bicycles, domestic appendixes to wash and hang out the clothes...

Karma, Senturk Mert, Turkey
Karma is a modular system that, similar to a technological exoskeleton, can be applied to the side-walls of buildings. The modular elements of the system contain the conduits for electric cables and air conditioning. Covering the entire facade, or simply part of it, the visible systems distribute technologies within the apartments, creating a decoration of the building that can be related to the figurative culture of the place.
 
Wall Pockets, Kim Bo Yeon, Korea
A textile skin is superimposed onto existing buildings. The elements, which can be interconnected, perform the functions of curtain/containers. Like pockets applied to the walls of buildings, they organise and contain certain functions outside the houses. Chosen on the basis of individual necessities, the textile elements are like a suit displaying the lifestyle of individual inhabitants.

Drag In, Lee Hwa Seon, Korea
Drag In is a dwelling cell that develops lengthwise. The house’s essentially furnished spaces are connected by a corridor fitted with floor and ceiling tracks. The furniture (technical equipment and domestic objects) slide horizontally on the tracks and are positioned where needed: outdoor in the terrace or near the bedroom or the bathroom. Visible from the street through the continuous window, this sliding furniture keeps on changing the facade of the building.