Disrupting the Architectural Line: Wandering Domestic Objects in Public Spaces

ABSTRACT

With a particular focus on the construction and occupation of space, we will engage and trouble habitual distinctions between the interior as a site of private domestic occupation and the street as a public domain. Drawing from philosophical and cultural discourses about nomadism, mobility and everyday life that prioritise the dissolution of boundary conditions, the article will develop a feminist lens through which to interrogate three architectural practices and projects by the essay authors. Notably, each of the three case projects – Fence Parasite, Streetlife, and Public Beds – involve the placing of domestic objects and actions in different public or non-residential urban settings, thereby unsettling their usual associations with the home and thus the boundaries between the inside-outside and, by extension, private-public space. From the dynamic overspill of domestic labours and artefacts into the urban streets through to the deliberate breaching and co-option of footpath boundaries, these projects support a wider conception of both the location of the home and its political agency, particularly in considering what is urban and architectural within design practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Interior architecture
• architecture
• nomadic
• urban space
• urban mobilities
• public space
• domestic artefacts

Line, Linearity and Power in Architecture

Our support structures – houses, self-identity, property, proprieties, bones, walls, scaffolding – are almost isomorphic with one another. As such, they speak to each other – not, however, in the interest of unity. (Ingraham 1998, 153)

In her key architectural text Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity (1998), architectural theorist and feminist Catherine Ingraham draws attention to the important, though arguably infrequently discussed focus on the line and linearity in architectural theory and practice. She posits the line as ‘crucial to the construction of an architectural epistemology’ (1998, 4) that is based upon the conceptualisation of architecture as the creation of boundary conditions, ranging from physical walls and property thresholds through to the more intangible aesthetic geometric considerations. Ingraham presents the line as a problematic construct in architecture: focusing attention on the building envelope as ‘bounded, owned entity’ (1998, 130) which by extension, becomes a tool of power and exclusion – particularly for women and other groups struggling to own, control or access buildings, and residential buildings specifically. To overcome this inherently exclusionary focus on architectural boundary conditions, she suggests we concentrate instead on notions of ‘temporality and spatiality’ (1998, 147) which force us to confront and question our relationship to buildings as bounded, static, immutable objects disconnected from the places in which they are located, rather than spaces to be freely occupied.

Ingraham’s essay and notion of the architectural line was posited over two decades ago and a time when more inclusive theories of space and architecture were yet to fully infiltrate the architectural canon. Nevertheless, it must be said that it continues to be relevant in the post-pandemic context of real-world cities where housing precarity continues to exclude our most vulnerable. To this end, this article revisits Ingraham’s notions of the architectural line as a frame for exploring three projects by the authors. Each explicitly challenge the boundaries between home and public space, triggered through the relocation of artefacts associated with private domestic environments and women’s labour into atypical, non-residential settings; artefacts that could be described as ‘wandering objects’ (Rendell 1998, 243). The selected projects are drawn from a combination of the authors’ own practice-led research and pedagogical practices within a university context – itself a limit and boundary of sorts. Yet in drawing attention to specific examples of boundary limits within built urban environments, these projects are presented as particular instantiations of the ongoing relevance of the notion of the architectural line within architectural discourse, and feminism more broadly. The first project, Fence Parasite explores the fence as a contestable built instantiation of the proprietary, that is, the line between private and public space. It was conceived and constructed by Cathy Smith and Rowan Olsson as a series of low-cost, foldable, re-deployable stools and a table that temporarily sit atop a standard height domestic fence or balcony, but which can also be redistributed across the footpath and adjacent residential garden space. Nonetheless, as a privately constructed and operated work, Fence Parasite does not ultimately alter the property binaries it questions. Accordingly, the article then turns to a second project, Streetlife, in which public space is more freely reimagined through domestic occupation. It involves a series of student-created analytical diagrams of nomadic ‘gray spaces’ (Yiftachel 2009) in southwestern Sydney and a related site in central Phnom Penh in which domestic objects and acts inhabit footpath spaces, spilling from commercial and residential interiors to roam freely, so to speak. Generated as part of an interuniversity course exploring street conditions across diverse socio-cultural and spatial settings in Sydney and Phnom Penh, the student-produced images and diagrams investigate lively, heterogenous and everyday exchanges intertwining domestic objects, labours and bodies with architecture and the urban realm. The third and final project, Public Beds explores the explores the domestic affordances of discarded mattresses placed in public urban settings. While Fence Parasite explores the shifting physical line between private and public, and Streetlife looks at the domestic inhabitation of public space and objects, Public Beds focusses on one domestic object out of its domestic environment. The project title, Public Beds, references mattresses which are out of place. Though the widespread association of mattress with domestic space and private, sanitised home environments, the seemingly haphazard placement of these mattresses in weather-exposed public footpaths challenges the distinction between the interior and exterior, and private and public spaces. The project follows ‘public beds’ in action through a collection of photographs. Collectively, these three projects recast the notions and practices of everyday dwelling in urban space and challenge the dualistic consideration of private and public. In doing so, they also support and illustrate longstanding extant feminist discourses that overturn the distinction between domestic private and public space, albeit through an architectural and spatial lens.

Through its wandering across case project and discourses, it could be argued this article itself demonstrates a conceptual or theoretical breaching of sorts, loosely aligned with historical feminist and architectural discourses of the nomadic as they relate to spatial occupation (late twentieth century through to the present): particularly those discourses that challenge habitual and often misleading distinctions between binary conditions in cities (public-private, home-public, women-men), including Deleuze and Guattari’s (2005 [1980]) poststructuralist philosophical invocations of the nomadic, through to Grosz (2001) and Braidotti’s (2011) respective explorations of nomadic thought. Collaborating feminist geographers Gibson-Graham similarly foreground places and/or objects as simultaneous sites of nomadic becoming and belonging which: ‘move beyond the divisive binaries of human/nonhuman, subject/object, economy/ecology and thinking/acting’ (Gibson-Graham 2011, 1). Within architecture, the notion of the nomadic has provided a conceptual frame for challenging disciplinary, practice and conceptual boundaries, thus opening alternative considerations for spatial occupation (Ingraham 1988, 1991, 1995, 1998, 2004; Ballantyne and Smith 2011; Ballantyne 2013; Burns 2013; Brott 2016; Smith 2016; Kovar 2019). These discourses challenge the recognised ‘anti-domestic tenor of avant-garde architectural theory’ (Reed 1996, 9). More specifically, these theories explore the relationships between the occupation of architecture and the crossing of property boundaries through a focus on discordant occupations. As Ingraham mentions: ‘there is also no human movement across or within frontiers and borders – with documents of identity in hand – that is not consequential for architectural movement and no architectural movement that is not consequential for human movement’ (Ingraham 2004, 79).

To this end, each project, while individually initiated by the respective co-authors within the last decade and for the most part located in the greater Sydney region, are specific instances of the ways in which lines, thresholds, and boundaries in architecture are productively unsettled. Aligned with Erin Manning’s thinking around the ‘everyday’ in a domestic context, we worked with the premise that each case invokes a dynamic mix of improvised occupation and established domestic habits in which occupants not only populate environment, but form it through dynamic occupations (Manning 2012, 13). Our attention to wandering domestic objects and the lines they produce is also considered through this feminist lens, not only because these projects form part of our lived experiences as women caregivers, authors and practitioners, but because this focus accords with a feminist desire to unravel the boundaries that render our domestic lives mute.

Methodologically, the article adopts a qualitative mixed-method approach, applying a critical theory lens to each case study, thereby grounding the discursive framework in the authors’ lived experiences and ‘the diversity of realities that are multiple and socially constructed’ (Sarvimäki 2018, 25). These projects are therefore thematically rather than chronologically linked, with a focus on how the domestic artefacts complicate the ownership of public spaces and its behaviours, whilst noting that we understand ‘objects as processes defined by their potentials, and society as constituted primarily by actions’ (Graeber 2001, 52). Finally, the authors are intimately connected to each of respective projects discussed below, in recognition ‘that there is an interactive link between the investigator and the investigation […] the researcher is one of the research tools’ (Sarvimäki 2018, 25). The mix of individual authors, communities and projects is intentionally diverse when considered from the perspective of conventionally narrow research parameters; however, this is because we aspire to an ‘agency as always distributed and at work in "heterogeneous assemblages"’ (Muller and Langill 2021, 3). Indeed, our overall research approach is similarly exploratory, questioning the notion of the architectural limit (built and metaphoric) rather than providing definitive solutions. Borrowing from the words of Deleuze and Guattari, the article is ‘dependent upon sensitive and sensible evaluations that pose more problems than they solve: problematics is still its only mode’ (2005 [1980], 373). Although the projects of focus in this article did not physically alter property boundaries and spatial thresholds, the observed liveliness of their occupations suggests that the binary conditions of buildings and their limits may be largely illusory, reinforcing an extra-legal conception of property ‘as socially constructed, plural and performative’ (Thorpe 2018, 766).

Lines that Wander: The Discursive Context

Lines are used in architectural drawings to create order and render visible boundary conditions, particularly those relating to property ownership, and in order to demarcate inside from outside, public from private space. According to Ingraham, the use of lines in architecture is significant within the architectural profession, to such an extent that it could constitute ‘an architectural epistemology’ (1998, 4). She suggests the popularity of linear boundaries and forms derive from the historical desire to create geometrically pure or ideal forms using ‘Euclidean geometry’ (Ingraham 1998, 81). In architectural drawing and practice, the line has is synonymous with the construction of property itself, thus is also a technique of power and exclusion. Accordingly, Ingraham (1998, 130) suggests that the line (and therefore the architectural boundary condition it represents) is inherently problematic within architecture as: it implicates the profession in the construction of buildings as ‘bounded, owned’ objects rather than spaces to be freely occupied by broader publics.

Despite the longstanding use of ‘architectural line’ as a drawn and built boundary condition delineates an architectural envelope, it is still approached as malleable and negotiated construct by some architectural theorists and practitioners, sometimes (but not always) in domestic settings. This malleability is illustrated, for example in architect Bernard Cache’s invocation of the mobius strip, a linear yet infinite condition in which the inside and outside conditions are indivisible, such that ‘the interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior a projected interior’ (Deleuze as quoted in Speaks 1995, xvii). In a similar vein, anthropologist Tim Ingold (2015), who dedicates an entire book to lines and linearity, invokes actions and artefacts that breach or trouble ‘interior containment’ (41).

Drawing attention to domestic objects and practices in public spaces is an important task of feminist architectural discourse. Even when the notion of the domestic has been historically recognised as an idea and construct (Reed 1996, 7), the notion of the home with which it is conflated has often been ‘the main area for the enforcement of conventional divisions of masculinity and femininity (along with their complement, heterosexuality) – [… even if] the modern home has also been staging ground for rebellion against these norms’ (Reed 1996, 16). To this point, the perceived contamination of public footpaths with ‘wandering [domestic] objects’ (Rendell 1998, 243) serves to highlight how norms of domesticity and gender are often founded upon flawed assumptions about the private character of domestic life. If we become accustomed to living life primarily through an ‘experience of containment’ (Ingold 2015, 41), then actions or artefacts that breach that containment not only unsettle our experience of those objects, but also the very world in which we live. Accordingly, the focus is less on the contained object, and more on the effect of the object for the inhabitants (Rice 2007, 17). Ingold (2015, 155) similarly prompts us to consider domestic space as a concentration of materials and potential energy from which lifelines emanate beyond it into the milieu of the earth and air, where they tangle with the lines of other living things. In conventional architectural discourse and practice, an over-focus on architectural structure, property boundaries and envelope conditions can lead to the minimisation of inhabitants and specifically, inhabitations that move seamlessly between them (Ingraham 1998, 54). Focusing on inert, immutable, hard property lines works to (consciously or unconsciously) constrict and control wayward bodies. Indeed, with its established focus on inert structure and property envelope, the architectural discipline often works to support the construction of the bounded:

Architecture is, in some sense, the name of what acts in opposition to the animate. It is the embodied principle of the inert […] architecture controls or attempts to control this divide in order to maintain the proprietary, the seemliness, of the body in space. We know that the body is prone to improprieties – indeed, it is not only prone to but thrives on the tension between proprietary and impropriety. (Ingraham 1998, 54)

Conversely, focusing on domestic artefacts and their associated spatial settings both renders visible and simultaneously troubles binary conceptualisations of architecture, the home, public space, and domestic labour. To this end, the following projects involve placing domestic artefacts in unexpected non-residential spaces to draw attention to what Ingraham describes as the ‘architectural breach’ (1998, 24), that is, an interference with cultural, disciplinary and spatial norms. These breaches also rely on locating and leveraging examples of the ‘noncapitalist household economy’ (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996], 12), domestic caregiving and social labours in other, non-residential spaces. It is to the first example of breaching – that is, the breaching of the line between property and the proprietary – that the article now turns.

Fence Parasite (2014+)

Though Fence Parasite has already been discussed as an example of exploratory, feminist architectural practice (Smith 2016), it is included here as a brief primer, showing how the foregrounding of artefacts rather than fixed built forms productively unsettles a proprietary understanding of the domestic-public spatial relationship. This creative research project centres upon the delivery of an ‘architectural breach’ whereby a table and accompanying stools are located on a front property fence and can be folded out and used to occupy the adjacent domestic garden and public footpath areas simultaneously. The configurations of the table and stools are determined by the occupants at the time.

Fence Parasite takes the proprietary and its contestations quite literally as a project site, rendered visible particularly when the stools and fence are in their closed resting position straddling the existing fence – an otherwise-invisible legal bounding line between private and public space (Figure 1). When opened and spatially activated, the distributed furniture components create a physical condition that supports the introduction of other domestic artefacts (food, plates, drinks, condiments) drawn internally from the adjacent private home as well as externally from the nearby local shops. These artefacts, and the table-stools, temporarily enter into the public realm and return thereafter to their seemingly ‘proper’ locations, as if an ‘architectural power can be newly located in this moving recapitulation and temporary recovery of the object’ (Ingraham 1998, 147).

Figure 1. Fence Parasite, Cathy Smith and Rowan Olsson (2014+). Source: Cathy Smith (2014).

A series of photographs of children opening and using folding chairs and a folding table on a residential fence in Newcastle, Australia.

First installed in 2014–2015 on an inner urban fence in the post-industrial regional Australian city of Newcastle, north of Sydney, the table and stools are themselves in a state of flux, materially and spatially (Figure 2): the steel hinges holding together the plywood planes of tables and stool are now rusted, the plywood itself chipped and weathered by the storms that regularly visit the regional coastal street in which it is located. They continue to operate as a much-loved scaffold for impromptu neighbourhood gatherings, but ultimately rely upon willing neighbourhood actors to perform the breach. The next case study project, Streetlife, considers the way in which more densely occupied urban footpaths are regularly invaded by domestic acts and actors, acknowledged or otherwise.

Figure 2. A wandering Fence Parasite stool leg discovered one morning on the footpath. Source: Cathy Smith (2016).

A detail photograph of a folding table on a residential fence in Newcastle, Australia.

Streetlife (2015+)

The pedagogical project, Streetlife, involves student observations and visual outputs exploring temporary domesticised spaces in the footpaths of Sydney and Phnom Penh. In an interuniversity fieldwork course, students examine socio-spatial practices that flow, adapt and leak, much like Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘lines of flight’ (2005 [1980], 415). Through student-created analytic diagrams, attention is drawn to fluid, ordinary, and often-unnoticed exchanges between urban and domestic objects, actions, and bodies. This course posits both space and learning as ‘parts of the ‘becoming world’, where everything is interconnected and learning happens in a stumbling, trial and error sort of way’ (Gibson-Graham 2011, 4).

Street studies in Sydney’s Lakemba and Phnom Penh’s Sangkat Phsar Kandal Ti Pir reveal bottom-up examples of seemingly ‘messy’ public-private and domestic-urban boundaries. Hou and Chalana describe messiness as ‘urban conditions and processes that do not follow institutionalised or culturally prescribed notions of order’ (2016, 3). Extending this is Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘rhizomatic’ system of organisation which ‘has not beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ (2005 [1980], 25).

Lakemba and Sangkat Phsar Kandal Ti Pir have diverse social, economic, political, and cultural settings. They are examined here as two instances of one larger study whilst allowing the complexities of each location to mutually unfold as a way of ‘seeing better’ the other (Livingstone 2003, 484). Students, staff and community members from Sydney and Phnom Penh are the projects transcultural agents (Hou 2013, 12), providing ‘insider’ skill and knowledge in each location.

Streetlife’s first location is Haldon Street in southwestern Sydney’s Lakemba. It hosts transnational communities from Lebanon, Bangladesh, China, Vietnam, Pakistan and Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016), coalescing in what could be described as a diverse ‘ethnopolis’ (Laguerre in Cairns 2004, 18). Frequently demonised by the media, and subject to disproportionate surveillance during COVID-19 lockdowns (Shad 2021), Haldon Street residents demonstrate a ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ (Bayat 2000, 547), through an architecture-by (not for)-migrants that holds the aesthetics of possibility (Cairns 2004, 21). The occupation of public and private space in Haldon Street embodies Ingraham's ‘architectural breach’ as the straddling of two or more transcultural worlds where ‘subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture’ (Pratt 1992, 6). In their dynamic, and quietly defiant, occupation of public space, Lakemba’s transnational community members invoke the nomadic, not as travellers but through their ‘consciousness-raising and the subversion of set conventions’ (Braidotti 2011, 26).

Haldon Street defies the typical consumptive sites of ‘domestication by cappuccino’ (Zukin 2009, 4) found in Sydney’s urban milieu. Instead, it is characterised by unique local street phenomena, generated by community members, whereby everyday objects (furniture, plates, food, cooking utensils, clothes) seep from the interior to comfortably occupy the exterior urban realm. Many of these objects emerge from adjacent hospitality and retail venues, thus may not initially appear to be domestic themselves. However closer inspection reveals the ways in which their uses support domestic occupations of the public realm, and where ‘familiarity and intimacy converge across space and time for the reconstructed atmosphere of domesticity to empower its inhabitants to […] to feel at home’ (Mace 2016, 76).

Shopfront thresholds (Figure 3a) see clothes racks occupy the footpath, turning the interior ‘wardrobe’ out whilst simultaneously disrupting the once linear path of pedestrian movement. Similarly, the sensory and olfactory effects of mobile food stands spilling from shop interiors (Figure 3b) thicken and distort the private-public thresholds. Tenants adorn their shopfront awnings with decorative elements: swaying plastic Islamic motifs, layers of bunting with Arabic phrases, a sea of metallic wind chimes (Figure 3c). Often conceptualised as subservient to fixed built structure, here ornamentation transgresses the interior boundary to subvert urban form, gender and culture politics. Ornamentation is historically analogous with both femininity and the domestic interior, thus seen to be superfluous to architecture and the urban realm (Zamberlan 2013, 106). Adornments on Haldon Street’s urban awnings indeed evoke a home-like intimacy, becoming a powerful ‘site in which the exploration of cultural politics occurs’ (Lewis, Lewis, and Tsurumaki 2006, 20).

Figure 3. (a–c): Streetlife: Sydney. Composite of student-created threshold diagrams from the ‘Streetlife Studies’ course, UNSW Sydney, RUFA Phnom Penh. Top to bottom, (a) clothes racks turn the inside out, source: Andrea Picones (2019), (b) food stands evoke threshold as smell. Source: Tandia Hardcastle (2019), (c) adorned shopfront awnings. Source: Anina Carl (2018).

A series of student drawings of shopfronts, street awnings, street furniture and people in Sydney, Australia.

Studies of street life in Sydney’s Lakemba are repeated in Phnom Penh and examined again through the lens of nomadism. Following Livingstone’s (2003) methodology, Cambodian students, educators, and community members are bought into intimate dialogue with ‘outsider’ perspectives from Australian students and educators. In central Phnom Penh’s Sangkat Phsar Kandal Ti Pir, on Preah Ang Yukanthor Street (as in Lakemba), the domestic does not oppose public life. Rather, it is here that we explicitly see that the boundaries between public-exterior-urban / private-interior-domestic are culturally, socially, politically and economically generated and re-generated, noting also that the city was ‘remade from scratch after being almost totally evacuated under the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975–1979’ (Simone 2008, 188). Footpaths are a particularly fluid space for paid and domestic labour, community connection and social networking, where ‘everything is to be negotiated … because everything seems to be changing around us all the time’ (Simone 2008, 196). According to Simone (2008, 201), Phnom Penh is a ‘so-called inclusive city’ where inclusion is not driven by a policy of integration but ‘as a by-product of residents having access to diverse spaces of operation through which they can come in contact with each other and do something with that contact other than participating in shared consumption’. Architecture and the city exist here as ‘the furniture we are forever rearranging’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2005 [1980], 21).

The collective and dynamic inhabitation of street space in Phnom Penh has nonetheless been under threat since the late 1990s, due in part to urban beautification agendas (Hughes 2003) which disproportionally impact the vulnerable and dominantly female street vendor population (IDEA & APWLD 2021). Authorities in Cambodia have referred to informally occupied spaces and those who inhabit them as anatepadei or anarchy (Strangio 2014); ‘orderly’ property lines are increasingly being enforced, aiming to clear footpaths of non-pedestrian activity (Rachna 2017). This is a ‘beautification’ through a process of othering (Hou 2013, 4).

For now, footpaths in Phnom Penh are a seemingly exaggerated version of Lakemba. Loose retail objects, furniture, ornaments, and bodies unfold onto footpaths whilst the urban realm pushes inwards, with motorbikes and cars sidling up and crossing the thresholds of stores and homes (Figure 4a and b). Everyday objects are unhinged from their disciplinary roots (Muller and Langill 2021, 10) to muddy the binary conditions often accepted in cities of the Global North. Domestic objects and acts are also entirely decoupled from interior-exterior thresholds. In one example, a bench adjacent a shopfront is a place for the shop owner’s domestic labour of drying fish, storing food, washing clothes, sleeping, and monitoring child’s play (Figure 4c). Phnom Penh’s fences are also appropriated in an amplified version of the Fence Parasite project. They host hybrid commercial-domestic urban rooms for street vendors and their families (Figure 4d). Articulated material surfaces afford the hanging of tarpaulins for shelter, hammocks to rock young ones, clothes for drying, pots and pans for food vending, and tiny nooks for personal knick-knacks. Wandering domestic acts also intersect with wandering urban objects. The tuk tuk of a paratransit driver is a domestic node; for day napping and night sleeping, feeding, and breastfeeding children, hanging laundry to dry, eating, and socialising with friends over a game of cards (Figure 4e).

Figure 4. (a–e): Streetlife: Phnom Penh. Composite of student-created diagrams from the ‘Streetlife Studies’ course, UNSW Sydney, RUFA Phnom Penh. Top to bottom, (a) threshold dynamics, source: Sara Clipperton (2019), (b) threshold dynamics, source: Emma Hastie (2018), (c) bench as domestic host, source: Michelle Ly (2017), (d) fence as domestic host, source: Farros Ghozi Fatih Djojodihardjo (2018), (e) tuk tuk as wandering domestic host. Source: Daniela Novakovic (2018).

A series of student drawings of shopfronts, street awnings, people, fences and vehicles in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Celebrating these footpath and streetscape boundary breaches, it is important to neither romanticise (Dovey 2012, 385; Lombard 2014, 49) nor ‘gloss over’ (Devlin 2010, 132) the very real threats that street vendors face in their use of footpath space as a livelihood necessity. Predominantly women, street vendors often come from provinces outside of Phnom Penh, setting up temporary homes on the street and subject to facing harassment threats in the early and late hours. As informal workers, they are unprotected by social security and charged ‘fuzzy fees’ for use of space, umbrellas, sanitation, security, and police bribes (Economic Institute Cambodia 2006). Phnom Penh’s urban poor communities demonstrate a quiet resistance and resilience similar to that seen in Lakemba. Despite unjust conditions, ‘residents with limited economic means, through their configuration of space, social relations and infrastructure continuously attempt to construct the conditions that enable the city to act as a flexible resource for the viable organization of their everyday lives’ (Simone 2008, 1).

Streetlife, in both Sydney’s Haldon Street and Phnom Penh’s Preah Ang Yukanthor Street, demonstrates an alternative mode of socio-spatial practice where moving objects, actors and actions defy the definitive lines, disciplinary norms and power relationships of architecture and urban planning (Kabachnik 2012; Petrescu 2013). Both locations arguably embody Yiftachel’s ‘gray space’ of urban informalities that are expanding from the global South-East to North-Western cities, particularly in transnational communities (2009, 97). Entangled in the undeniable challenges faced by community members in Lakemba and Sangkat Phsar Kandal Ti Pir is the breaching and blurring of private-interior-domestic and public-exterior-urban boundaries, thus ‘making visible urban possibilities that have been crowded out or left diffuse or opaque’ (Simone 2004, 14). Both the temporary domesticised spaces of Fence Parasite and Streetlife’s wandering objects involve the purposeful relocation of domestic objects and attendant behaviours. From ‘temporary domesticised spaces’ to objects out of their domestic environment, the following case project, Public Beds, focuses on disposed mattresses left on streets, serving an active role in their own Streetlife.

Public Beds (2019+)

Public Beds is an ongoing research project (2019+) examining domestic objects’ social and political roles when located beyond their usual domestic environment. The project is a visual database of discarded bed mattresses discovered in footpath locations across Sydney. The images focus on the beds as displaced domestic objects without an active human presence, thus exploring ‘the potentialities of three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional medium’ (Shields 2014, 2).

A mattress refers to a large fabric pad usually placed on a bed base (or bed frame) and described as a fabric case filled with resilient materials (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, undated). Thus, a mattress could be considered as a bounded object with composed of many hidden layers from straw, hair, feather, cotton or foam rubber. Historically, these inner layers were held in place by various forms of wire mesh, chain-link, and vertical coil-springs (Wright 1962, 238–240). ‘Making the bed’ is a phrase originating from medieval times, when it referred to taking a sack and filling it with hay (Worsley 2011). Contemporary bed mattresses are ready-made and more durable than their medieval forebears, but nonetheless still function as a container in the same manner as their predecessors. Even in private dwellings, mattresses are typically hidden under other layers such as bedsheets and quilts.

Unlike the street furniture and domestic objects described in previous projects, mattresses are rarely considered to have an afterlife once removed from private domestic dwellings, primarily due to health and safety concerns. When discarded on public footpaths, they typically wait to be collected by government refuse collection services (Figure 5). The shifting domestic status of each mattress renders it part of the ongoing ‘vast uncontrolled experiments’ (Gibson-Graham 2011, 1) within a city. Due to its intimate association with domestic privacy and bodily intimacy, the mattress has also become an artistic medium for questioning norms about female bodies, domestic settings and society, in a genre described as ‘bedroom-as-artwork’ (Genç 2019). A case in point is Tracy Emin’s 1998 seminal and provocative My Bed in which the artist reconstructed her own bedroom as a public exhibition. It consisted of her bed frame and mattress replete with wrinkled and stained dirty bed sheets, and other private objects spread across the floor (stained underwear and a used condoms). In 1999, the artist Semiha Berksoy's bedroom was exhibited in the Bonn Museum, alongside her intimate personal objects. Both artists included powerful statements about ‘private reality’ and ‘the agency of the body in the cultural realm’ (Baydar 2012, 33). These infamous public beds breach traditional boundaries between the intimate spaces of the body and broader publics.

Figure 5. Disposed mattresses in non-domestic space, as public encounters. Source: Demet Dincer (2019–2022).

A series of photographs of disposed mattresses placed on footpaths in Sydney, Australia.

Though far more quotidian than the aforementioned gallery mattresses, those discovered in Sydney streets are arguable instances of Ingraham's ‘architectural breach’: they interfere with the spatial norms by breaching the lines between property and the proprietary, between sites of private domestic occupation and the public domain. The mattresses in Figure 6 typify the ways in which discarded mattresses disrupt public contexts, akin to ‘unmade beds’ for unexpected guests. When left open to the gaze of the public, a mattress still invokes the privacy of its domestic environment. Placed in open air and public settings, these beds both ‘contain’ traces (literal and figurative) of the intimate relationship between a body and a bed, while forming new and temporary urban thresholds of their own.

Figure 6. Mattresses placed in a public square, street, and/or on a footpath. Source: Demet Dincer (2022).

Conclusion

For us, challenging the physical and conceptual limits of what constitutes the home and public civic, as well as architecture and its practice more broadly, is a feminist act: it draws attention to the intangible soft lines of space, particularly those labours, materials and occupations that are rendered invisible through the privileging of the hard lines of structure and property boundaries. Through these three projects we have considered how, through the wandering of domestic objects – that is, being with domestic objects – we encounter a liveliness that actively challenges the singularity of the architectural line and its associated power structures. Fence Parasite took the domestic property line as a theme and site for productive intervention; Streetlife further explored urban footpath conditions augmented and transformed by domestic artefacts, actions and bodies, acknowledging the socio-political complexities of a multicultural and multi-sited project; Public Beds considered the implications of placing a ubiquitous domestic artefact in the public realm by documenting disposed mattresses where they shift the boundaries between private and public, and where traces of human bodies themselves became the elements that displaced the urban, non-residential settings in which they were documented.

Our approach, both to the article and the respective design projects, is akin to a line turned over itself. It is a conscious and directed feminist inversion in which the domestic, which has been hidden, marginalised, quashed and simply ignored, is awarded its place in architectural discourse. Our discussion of these three projects provokes acknowledgement of an expanding, elastic threshold of exchange between the domestic interior and the urban street in which we may question ingrained assumptions concerning what is public and what is private – and in turn how we may design architectural space to nurture complex, messy, feminist lives.

Acknowledgments

Fence Parasite was supported by a University of Newcastle New Staff Grant (2014, grant number 1031772) with research assistance by Rowan Olsson.

Streetlife Studies is collaboratively convened through an academic-practitioner network in Australia and Cambodia, including Kong Kosal, Chhay Karno, and Phal Piseth (Royal University of Fine Arts, Phnom Penh), Vuth Lyno (Sa Sa Art Projects), Pen Sereypagna (nk-a), Tia Vannvera, Richard Briggs, and Giacomo Butte. This project is conducted according to the University of New South Wales’ Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) requirements for the conduct of research, Approval Number HR191056, 30 March 2022. Funding for this project is provided by the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Program (grant number 29619) and the Southeast Asia Neighborhood’s Network (core funding from the Henry Luce Foundation, UNSW grant number PS66736 ), with past philanthropic support from Design Tribe Projects and Action Change.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a 2014 University of Newcastle New Staff Grant (grant number 1031772), an Australian Government New Colombo Plan Mobility Program grant (number 29619), and a Henry Luce Foundation Asia Program grant (grant number PS66736).

Notes on contributors

Cathy Smith

Cathy Smith is a registered Australian architect, interior designer and academic whose transdisciplinary research and practice seeks to understand and promote inclusive built environments. Her scholarly research on DIY production methodologies, creative placemaking and meanwhile property use has been widely published in sector and scholarly journals.

Ainslie Murray

Ainslie Murray is an interdisciplinary artist and academic trained in architecture. Her practice-based research explores the formation and inhabitation of architectural space in everyday life through attention to atmosphere, motion and itinerancy. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Demet Dincer

Demet Dincer is an award-winning international architect and academic who applies transdisciplinary approach to her research and practice, with an emphasis on nonhuman agencies in design.

Eva Lloyd

Eva Lloyd is an interdisciplinary educator with professional qualifications in architecture and interior architecture, and a particular interest in social justice through community-centered design practice. She specialises in education collaborations connecting academia, civil society, and creative practitioners, in local and international contexts.