Riti, Miti e Infoarredi
The Rituals of the New Telematic Home
Academic Course Architectural Design Studio 3C | University of Genoa, Polytechnic School | a.a. 2022-2023
Topic
The love of home, John Lukacs writes, is one of the principal achievements of the bourgeois age.1 Yet, during the twentieth century, for the middle classes it materialized as a clear division of existence into two distinct spheres: the public sphere, assigned to men, and the private sphere, entrusted to women.
If, in the century of liquid modernity² and of everyday life as performance,³ these categories progressively lose their polarity, giving rise to an increasingly hybrid and dynamic scenario, it is with the introduction and subsequent proliferation of telematic devices within the home that a revolution takes place—as real as it is immaterial—radically transforming the rituals performed within it.
Throughout the twentieth century, the obsession with the “house of the future” produced visions that anticipated radical changes in the form and organization of domestic space on the basis of technological progress: from Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1927), to Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson’s House of the Future (1956), to Reyner Banham and François Dallegret’s article “A Home Is Not a House” (1965), and the countless visionary scenarios that we now classify as “retro-futurism” or “paleo-futurism.”⁴
One such reflection, Ugo La Pietra’s La Casa Telematica, installed at the Milan Trade Fair in 1983, placed the impact of media and telecommunications on the domestic environment at the center of its inquiry. The project did not seek to offer practical solutions, but rather to encourage visitors to reflect upon a transformation already under way: information and telecommunication technologies were destined to change their lives forever. Ugo La Pietra reduced the home to a kind of television set, in which connections forcefully invaded and traversed the space in order to reach the cathode-ray tubes of television sets incorporated into more traditional pieces of furniture: in the “hinge” of a dismembered double bed; in the backrests of armchairs—dignified and independent substitutes for the sofa; and finally as the guest of honor at the dining table, or even as the floor of the bathroom itself.
Although the physical, tangible, and decidedly parodic appearance of these connections—formally distinctive nonetheless—could easily be situated within a literary subgenre that would enjoy considerable success in the years to come (Blade Runner was released in 1982), the language of the contemporary home, increasingly populated by wireless devices of remarkable smoothness, has never been so restrained. The extensions of telematics are omnipresent yet immaterial, and their terminals rigorously anonymous, as the market demands.
Although many of the visionary predictions of the twentieth century have proved inaccurate—the typology of most dwellings has remained substantially unchanged—the insidious and tentacular spread of digital devices has nevertheless profoundly transformed private life and, in some cases, generated genuine chimeras. An array of screens turns the wardrobe into a hypertechnological framework for the gamer; strategically positioned webcams convert the bedroom into an adult-entertainment set for the camgirl or camboy; smartphones and tablets in the hands of groups of social-media addicts undermine the living room’s role as a catalyst for social interaction; the modem transforms the hikikomori’s cubicle into an impenetrable yet hyperconnected bunker; ring lights and theatrical backdrops disguise the appearance of the sparsely furnished rented rooms occupied by YouTubers and TikTokers; and entire apartments become virtual showrooms in the influencer’s home.
The love of home, John Lukacs writes, is one of the principal achievements of the bourgeois age.1 Yet, during the twentieth century, for the middle classes it materialized as a clear division of existence into two distinct spheres: the public sphere, assigned to men, and the private sphere, entrusted to women.
If, in the century of liquid modernity² and of everyday life as performance,³ these categories progressively lose their polarity, giving rise to an increasingly hybrid and dynamic scenario, it is with the introduction and subsequent proliferation of telematic devices within the home that a revolution takes place—as real as it is immaterial—radically transforming the rituals performed within it.
Throughout the twentieth century, the obsession with the “house of the future” produced visions that anticipated radical changes in the form and organization of domestic space on the basis of technological progress: from Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1927), to Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson’s House of the Future (1956), to Reyner Banham and François Dallegret’s article “A Home Is Not a House” (1965), and the countless visionary scenarios that we now classify as “retro-futurism” or “paleo-futurism.”⁴
One such reflection, Ugo La Pietra’s La Casa Telematica, installed at the Milan Trade Fair in 1983, placed the impact of media and telecommunications on the domestic environment at the center of its inquiry. The project did not seek to offer practical solutions, but rather to encourage visitors to reflect upon a transformation already under way: information and telecommunication technologies were destined to change their lives forever. Ugo La Pietra reduced the home to a kind of television set, in which connections forcefully invaded and traversed the space in order to reach the cathode-ray tubes of television sets incorporated into more traditional pieces of furniture: in the “hinge” of a dismembered double bed; in the backrests of armchairs—dignified and independent substitutes for the sofa; and finally as the guest of honor at the dining table, or even as the floor of the bathroom itself.
Although the physical, tangible, and decidedly parodic appearance of these connections—formally distinctive nonetheless—could easily be situated within a literary subgenre that would enjoy considerable success in the years to come (Blade Runner was released in 1982), the language of the contemporary home, increasingly populated by wireless devices of remarkable smoothness, has never been so restrained. The extensions of telematics are omnipresent yet immaterial, and their terminals rigorously anonymous, as the market demands.
Although many of the visionary predictions of the twentieth century have proved inaccurate—the typology of most dwellings has remained substantially unchanged—the insidious and tentacular spread of digital devices has nevertheless profoundly transformed private life and, in some cases, generated genuine chimeras. An array of screens turns the wardrobe into a hypertechnological framework for the gamer; strategically positioned webcams convert the bedroom into an adult-entertainment set for the camgirl or camboy; smartphones and tablets in the hands of groups of social-media addicts undermine the living room’s role as a catalyst for social interaction; the modem transforms the hikikomori’s cubicle into an impenetrable yet hyperconnected bunker; ring lights and theatrical backdrops disguise the appearance of the sparsely furnished rented rooms occupied by YouTubers and TikTokers; and entire apartments become virtual showrooms in the influencer’s home.
The kitchen is perhaps the only room of the old guard to have been comprehensively affected by the transformation under way, effectively converted into a temple of interfaces, where “the computerized automation of tools and appliances gives rise to an almost passive relationship with those who use them,” ultimately turning “into a space of decision-making, where merely brushing against a surface or screen is enough to activate the ‘info-domestic appliances,’ which begin operating independently, beyond personal control and according to logics established elsewhere,”⁵ and finally addressing an audience far removed from the housewives who, in the imagery of the previous century, preserved there the last faint glow of the domestic hearth . . .
> How will the skin of the other temples change, so that the old gods may coexist with the new divinities now at play?
Exercise
Beginning with these reflections, and with the combined study of digital devices and new domestic rituals, the project proposes a reconsideration of the home through its furnishings, with the aim of designing a topography of dwelling centered on the human being, understood in all their specificity and through their rituals. The process comprises a multidirectional critical investigation of domestic utensils, intended to rediscover and celebrate the banal (phase 1), followed by its operative application in the design of an “info-furnishing”⁶ devoted to a new ritual: an object formally engaged with its symbolic component and unashamedly incorporating new media (phase 2).
Notes
- John Lukacs, “The Bourgeois Interior,” The American Scholar 39, no. 4 (1970): 616–30.
- Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 1999.
- Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959.
- These are two English neologisms. The first term is generally attributed to Lloyd John Dunn (1983), while the authorship of the second is more uncertain. See the blog Paleofuture, edited by Matt Novak.
- Imma Forino, La cucina. Storia culturale di un luogo domestico (Turin: Einaudi, 2019).
- A newly coined term, derived from infodomestico, itself introduced by Imma Forino (see note 5). More specifically, it denotes an interior microarchitecture incorporating one or more telematic and/or digital components.
A selection of the results is presented below.
.
