Lecture Series: Martino Tattara

Living and Working

Despite the increasing numbers of people who now work from home, in the popular imagination the home is still understood as the sanctuary of privacy and intimacy. Living is conceptually and definitively separated from work.

In this lecture, we will argue against such a separation, countering the prevailing ideology of domesticity with a series of architectural projects that illustrate alternative approaches. These projects reenvision home as a cooperative structure in which it is possible to live and work and in which labor is socialized beyond the family—freeing inhabitants from the sense of property, and women from the burden of domestic labor. The projects aim to move the house beyond the dichotomous logic of male/female, husband/wife, breadwinner/housewife, and private/public. They include the reinvention of single-room occupancy as a new model for affordable housing and a plan for a modular, adaptable structure meant to house a temporary dweller.

Dogma (external link)  is a Brussels-based architectural studio that focuses on urban design and large-scale projects. The work of the office has been exhibited at various venues including the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2014, the HKW Berlin 2015, the Biennale di Venezia in 2016 and 2021, the Chicago Architectural Biennial in 2017, the Flemish Architectural Institute in Antwerp, the Seoul Architecture Biennale and the Sharjah Architecture Triennale in 2019. It was co-founded and is led by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara. Martino Tattara is associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven (Belgium).