Research by Design

Work is moving everywhere. Buildings that previously distinguished productive (paid) from reproductive (domestic/care) labour are being rendered obsolete; sacrosanct boundaries between private and public realms are made ambiguous. While this phenomenon is not new, its historical insignificance arises from architecture’s tendencies to divide these realms, minimizing a territorial intersection with multiple social-cultural-economical-ethical-political repercussions. This is to say the home-work phenomenon remains to be conjectured.

This studio finds interest in expanding architectural methods past the study of building, proposing questions of the domestic interior now made complicated and problematic with the widespread (re)introduction of work into its boundaries. The studio will enact a series of counter-situations—practices, objects, temporalities, scales, programmes, sites—which challenge the conceptions, forms and experiences of ‘work from home.’ We will engage in the production and curation of architectural artefacts (drawings, paintings, field sketches, photographs, models, and other objects), with the aim of delineating emerging domestic sites of labour by projective means—ie. the descriptive, the imaginative, the speculative.

This studio is part of Foundations of Home-Based Work: A Singapore Study, funded by the Social Science Research Thematic Grant.