THE OPEN WORKSHOP

Today, urban dwellers are often starving for more affordable housing to allow them to create meaningful, social units and embrace contemporary ways of living while still reflecting alternative family forms. Commoning Domestic Space is a design and research project that uses thirty-five case studies—built, speculative, designed, and informal—and five speculative designs to better understand the role of: 1) hardware of spatial arrangements, their frameworks, and the physical interfaces between the public and private; 2) software or the social types that inhabit these spaces, their family units, communal endeavors, forms of reappropriation, and scales of sharing; and 3) orgware, which includes governance structures, distribution of domestic labor, and the organization of economics, resources, and power.

Image 1 – How will we live together?
Plan view of the installation for the Biennale Architettura 2021.

Image 2 – Sneak peek of the project
Kommune 1 - GRIDS. A series of differential grids organize collective life, private rooms, and objects. Collective life is parsed into vectors of domestic labor, immaterial labor, and recreation. By overlaying ordered systems of differential frequencies, a novel form of diversity is produced.

California College of the Arts Architecture Division
CCA Urban Works Agency with the San Francisco Planning Department
The University of New Mexico, School of Architecture + Planning
Canada Council for the Arts
George F. Jewett III
Kimberly & Simon Blattner
Stephen Engblom & Lance Relicke

Design Team: Neeraj Bhatia, Cesar Lopez, Andrew Bertics, Hannah Jane Kim, Shawn Komlos, Katharina Sauermann
Research Team: Neeraj Bhatia, Antje Steinmuller, Donna Mena, Duy Nguyen, Ireny Abrahim, Vishnu Balunsat, Sayer Al Sayer, Bella Mang, Alma Davila, Clare Hacko, Zhongwei Wang, Zizheng Wu