After the Domestic is Violent — Architectures of Agency


















































Charlotte Perriand’s Modern kitchen - Unité d’habitation of Marseille, 1945
photographie de Karquel, tous droits réservés

An Introduction





Research lead: Caitlin Roseby - Architect
Collaborators: Dr Lê-Anh Dinh-Williams - Clinical Pschologist and researcher

This ongoing project will explore the notion of spatial agency in establishing safety, paying particular attention to those for whom safe spaces have become a vital concern – those who must seek refuge in order to build new possibilities for life after the experience of Domestic Violence. 

Findings published by the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research estimate “1 in 4 women (27%), and 1 in 8 men (12%) in Australia experienced violence by an intimate partner or family member since the age of 15 years”1. While these statistics are alarming, the magnitude of the problem is likely far greater due to well-known underreporting of domestic violence.

After violence, the individual’s psychological capacity to experience safety is disrupted - and without safety, any sense of agency is greatly compromised, if not altogether destroyed. When the domestic sphere becomes one of violent association, what role can architecture play in providing a secure base from which to explore novel and urgently necessary formulations of home? To restore possibilities for agency, architecture must prioritise the capacity of individuals to subvert received associations of the domestic as a space of passivity and subservience. Hilde Heynen’s Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, outlines the entwined historicity of modernity and domesticity, too often subject to the simplistic dichotomy of “gendering of modernity as masculine through its opposition with feminine domesticity.”2 Heynen articulates  “it is clear that architects such as Loos or Le Corbusier were deeply hostile to the conventional understanding of home, which they associated with sentimental hysteria and dusty conservatism.”3 How do we make spaces that provide a vibrant and generative refuge, rather than continuing to offer the lifeless vision put forth by the canonical figures of Modernity? 




Notes: 
  1.  NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. “Domestic violence statistics for NSW.” Last modified June 13, 2024. https://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Pages/bocsar_pages/Domestic-Violence.aspx
  2. Heynen, Hilde, and Gülsüm Baydar. Negotiating domesticity: Spatial productions of gender in modern architecture. Routledge, 2005, p.6
  3. Ibid, p.4


Domestic Residues - Whiteread’s ‘House’, Roseby, 2020
residual memory - Whiteread’s ‘House’, Roseby, 2020

Reach Out ?





For Eileen Gray the house was not an object to be apprehended through visual detachment, but a flexible structure given life by its occupants as she argued…           "External architecture seems to have absorbed avant-garde architects at the expense of the interior. As if a house should be conceived for the pleasure of the eye more than the well being of its inhabitants.”

From  ‘E. 1027: The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray’ , Caroline Constant This site will contain and archive the findings of this ongoing research project

 and we would 
                                love 
                                                 to hear from you -- 
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