The final review

AY 2021/2022 | Semester 2

Studio Leaders: Associate Professor Lilian Chee; assisted by Tan Yi-Ern Samuel

Domestic Capital was conceived as a studio of many firsts—a proving ground for design thrust into unfamiliar territories. As an option studio, it sets a precedent for how scholastic and design pedagogies might be collaboratively structured and function in sync. As a research project, it is the first out of the gates for the Social Sciences Research Council funded project Foundations for Home-Based Work: A Singapore Study.

Students began their investigations by searching for a home where one might observe domestic capital—simply, how work intersected with various facets of home life. Work not only constitutes activities that generated economic value for the individual, such as part-time engagements, home-based businesses, and telecommuting, but also activities that supports these economic activities, often somewhat sacrificially for others in the family and marred with a gender bias. These activities encompassed care work, housework, and even cultural activities upon which certain individuals’ right-to-be were predicated.

Students then had to document these homes with whatever means presented appropriate—photography, film, illustration, architectural drawing, etc. By documenting these homes—and by being sensitive to the methods they employed—students identified a way of life upon which a speculative scenario or narrative could be developed, using fictive and imaginative devices to critique architecture’s practice of directing the domestic. Using this narrative as a context, students developed a project brief for themselves. For some, this brief was direct and recognisably architectural in content, and, impressively, always engaged with contemporary critiques of architecture. For others, the briefs were imaginative and whimsical, leaning fully into the freedom afforded when one is given permission to speculate. And others still developed briefs around architectural methods, calling us to consider how our conventions fail to capture life as it is lived in reality—the bits that get left out in plans, sections, and elevations.