Domestic Logistics: Worldbuilding the Home

Abstract

Architecture furnishes spaces for narratives but also contributes to the building of fictional worlds. While these worlds might be glimpsed through the more classical drawn representations of architecture—plans, sections, and elevations—the collateral disciplinary texts of architecture such as manuals, specifications, contracts, and promotional materials can participate in the construction of design fictions. A recent research seminar, Domestic Logistics, unpacked the multifarious intersections between the worldbuilding of speculative fiction and the alterities of home futures. Through texts and allied narrative media used for speculative worldbuilding, designers can rethink the future of architecture to encompass new dimensions of society and culture.

Keywords:

• pedagogy
• architecture
• society and politics

Notes

Notes

1 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home: Its Work and Influence (New York: McClure, Phillips, and Co., 1903), 4.

2 Roy Mason, Lane Jennings, Robert Evans, and Bob Masters, Xanadu: The Computerized Home of Tomorrow and How It Can Be Yours Today! (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Books, 1983), 172–174.

3 For example, G.E.’s exhibits at the 1933 New York World’s Fair.

4 For example, Corning’s promotional video “A Day Made of Glass,” 2011.

5 For example, the Disneyland ride “Carousel of Progress,” 1967.

6 The 2018 exhibition “Home Futures” at London’s Design Museum, considered both these anodyne and market-oriented future fictions as well as more critical proposals. Eszter Steierhoffer and Justin McGuirk, Home Futures: Living in Yesterday’s Tomorrow (London: Design Museum, 2018).

7 Rick Altman, A Theory of Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 16.

8 Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (New York: Routledge, 2014), 14.

9 Jarrett Zigon, Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding (Fordham University Press, 2017), 75.

10 Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, 154.

11 Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, 35.

12 Margaret Atwood, “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context,” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 119, no. 3 (May 2004): 513.

13 David Fortin, Architecture and Science Fiction Film: Philip K. Dick and the Spectacle of Home (New York: Routledge, 2016).

14 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1980), 217.

15 The Futurist 16–17 (1982): 59.

16 The Futurist 16–17 (1982): 59.

17 Lee Stickels, “Exiting the Grid: Autonomous House Design in the 1970s,” Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand 32.

18 Lydia Kallipoliti, The Architecture of Closed Worlds (Berlin: Lars Müller, 2018).

19 Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds.

20 Stephen Phillips, “Toward a Research Practice: Frederick Kiesler’s Design-Correlation Laboratory,” Grey Room 38 (Winter 2010): 90–120.

21 Jane Callaghan and Catherine Palmer, Measuring Space and Motion (New York, John B. Pierce Foundation, 1944).

22 The phrase is actually derived from the e.e. cummings poem “all ignorance toboggans into know.” John Todd, Nancy Jack Todd, Tomorrow is Our Permanent Address: The Search for an Ecological Science of Design as Embodied in the Bioshelter (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Witt

Andrew Witt is an associate professor in practice of architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he teaches and researches on the relationship of geometry and machines to perception, design, assembly, and culture. He is also cofounder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a design studio that works at the intersection of architecture, technology, and media.