The conversation pit: the return of a social micro-architecture

In 1952, the industrialist and major patron of architecture J. Irwin Miller, together with his wife Xenia, commissioned Eero Saarinen, Daniel Urban Kiley, and Alexander Girard to design their residence in Indiana. For the Miller House, Girard designed a living area sunken into the floor, accessible by steps, enclosed by a stone wall and furnished with cushions. This intervention became a point of reference for American domestic architecture of the period, demonstrating how the pit could function as the spatial fulcrum of the entire home. The typology spread throughout the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which architects and designers saw this solution as a way to reduce the bulk of movable furniture and concentrate social functions in a precise point of the floor plan.

In 1961, artist Charles Schridde produced an illustration for Motorola Electronics depicting a futuristic vision of domestic living, which included a lowered area with carpet, daybeds, and sofas arranged to encourage shared use of space. In the following decade, companies such as Simmons launched products like the Playpen modular sofa, designed to be assembled flexibly and placed in recessed configurations.

The conversation pit was not limited to high-end residential contexts, but was also adopted in public spaces, such as airports—most notably the TWA Flight Center in New York with its iconic sunken red lounge—and in homes across different regions of the United States, crossing geographical and typological contexts as an expression of a spatial model oriented toward social interaction.

Forms of collective sunken seating existed in different eras and cultures long before the modern codification of the conversation pit. In Pompeii, many houses were equipped with triclinia, stone or wooden dining couches arranged around a central area left free for the table. In traditional Chinese dwellings, the kang was used—a brick heated bed that allowed multiple people to gather or sleep together. In Japan, the irori was a rectangular sunken area with a hook for a pot at its center, used for cooking as well as for heating and lighting.

These historical solutions share with the contemporary conversation pit the idea of a defined, lowered area dedicated to sharing, albeit with different functions and construction technologies. The structure of the pit, as developed in the twentieth century, is built below floor level and integrates upholstered seating. This arrangement reduces distances between people and alters posture, encouraging circular or perimeter-based configurations. The recessed design creates a clearly defined boundary that separates the social area from the rest of the domestic space.

A significant example is offered by Mad Men: in the fifth season of the acclaimed television series set in the 1960s, the apartment of Don and Megan Draper features a sunken living room defined by continuous seating arranged along its perimeter. Over time, the conversation pit virtually disappeared for reasons related to accessibility, construction costs, and changes in the use of domestic space, while the growing centrality of television and the spread of more flexible layouts marked its exit from mainstream design practices. This absence gave way to more hybrid solutions, such as undifferentiated open-plan spaces, organized through movable and easily reconfigurable furniture, better suited to the need for flexibility and to changes in family structures.
 

In this context—characterized by open spaces that are often lacking recognizable gathering areas—the return of the conversation pit presents itself as a direct response, capable of making new social priorities visible and restoring the shared dimension of domestic space to the center. Introducing a dedicated area in the home today signals an attentiveness to the collective dimension of domestic space and to the creation of places designed for sharing.

Its return indicates a shift in expectations surrounding living spaces, which tend to move from being undifferentiated and flexible environments toward spaces with more clearly defined functions and stable configurations. The recessed area, whether more or less explicitly defined, concentrates social relations and influences the perception and use of the surrounding space.

An example of how the past is integrated into the present can be found in the work of Rossella Colombari and Ettore Molinario, who renovated a former silverware factory in Milan’s Isola district, transforming it into a House Museum. Here, the sunken living room takes on the explicit form of a conversation pit: a curved, continuous seating element that defines an intimate space, clearly separated yet visually integrated within the large industrial environment.

This trend fits into a broader re-reading of solutions from the past, reinterpreted through contemporary sensibilities. The conversation pit thus becomes a site of design experimentation, adapted to current needs while remaining faithful to its original principles. Its re-emergence reflects a cultural shift: a growing interest in spaces that encourage direct encounters, without technological mediation and without the fragmentation typical of recent living environments, restoring centrality to collective experience and conviviality.

Opening image: Charles Schridde's futuristic illustration for Motorola Electronics, 1961. Courtesy Charles Schridde