Expanding on the seminar, students in Domestic Capital will further their design research in a studio environment. Using documentative material from the seminar as a foundation, students 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. Students will imagine possible and alternative ways of life that envision how labour might intersect with the home in the future, grounded in the specific challenges and quirks faced by Singapore. These visions of an alternative way of life leverage not only upon the architect’s ability to design built environments, but to cast image as narrative, to extrapolate distilled spatial cultures into complex and populated speculations, and to think connectively between people, objects, rituals, and environments.

Image: Citing Kitchenless City by Anna Puigjaner, and The Grand Domestic Revolution by Dolores Hayden

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. And for one of us, it is the first studio we are teaching. Being ‘first’, our subtitle for the studio—an experimental studio—wastes no words conveying that which it is: The studio has been a space where ideas about the messy presence of work in the home could be tested, thereby testing the limits of the design studio itself. Ranging from projects that interrogate sacrosanctity of interior-exterior demarcations in high-rise-high-density buildings, to epistemological critiques of architectural ways of seeing, the work generated through the studio far exceeds the boundaries of interior flats—no doubt owing to the deep-reaching implications of the appearance of economic exchange within the so-called domestic.

The project students were tasked with was complex. They 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 bears a straightforward, but also expansive, definition for us. We considered work to constitute activities that generated economic value for the individual. In this way, work could be anything from part-time engagements, home-based businesses, and telecommuting. But we also sought to include activities that supported these economic activities, often somewhat sacrificially for others in the family and marred with a gender bias. This included such activities as care work, housework, and even cultural activities upon which certain individuals right-to- be was predicated. Put simply, we were interested in productive and reproductive activities, as opposed to consumptive ones. 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. What remains true between these different genres of projects, however, is the development of these briefs around observations that could only be made in the interior. While breaking out of the confines of one’s X-bedroom flat was indeed a challenge for many in the studio as we breached the final weeks of the semester, we can confidently say that each project has engaged with how studying the occupancy of architecture might influence its majors of form, structure, and representation.

Drawing from concrete evidence comprising the assets and processes of home-based labour, the studio inevitably encounters, and squares up against, the intractability of the high-rise as an architectural typology, and the limitations of normative architectural representation. Yet, as the new ‘field’ of home-work in Singapore, the seemingly rigid typology of the high-rise proved instead a conduit of opportunity for many, and surprisingly for some, a source of reverie. The convergence of productive labour in the reproductive space of home revisits Marxist critique of self-exploitation, class and social inequalities, gender and racial biases, and the elasticity of domestic space for new forms of inhabitation and life. These overlaps presented as new modalities for thinking about coincident opportunities when working in high-rise dwellings, and reciprocally, when dwelling in informal high-rise workspaces. In reconceptualising the potentials and networks of communal living and their economies of scale, a new sense of purpose for the high-rise emerges. In these instances, the high-rise’s potential for enabling multiple thresholds of privacy and publicness as sites of action, becomes a strength.

Finally, by situating ‘work’ in what is still a nascent and largely unremarked architectural typology, the ‘domestic interior’, the projects are compelled to redefine both terms in relation to their architectural origins. The intertwined relationship between work and domesticity transforms not just ways of working and the new architecture that shifts with our new modes of work. These projects implicitly inquire what it means to thrive within a mutual displacement of private and public domains. At their foundations, they operate at the critical intersection of two spaces, two routines and two modes of being that thus far, still remain resistant to juxtaposition.

— A/P Dr Lilian Chee and R Assoc. Tan Yi-Ern Samuel Department of Architecture, CDE, NUS 21 April 2022