Towards an augmented domesticity and a domestic city.

In the contemporary era, changes in the family structure, work organization, technology, gender, social groups and communication are reflected in a new revolution that combines the domestic environment with the city. The dualities of the public and the private, the exterior and interior, work and leisure, man and woman, day and night, of the house and the architecture of the city are now disappearing. 

This revolution is affecting and involving all aspects of daily life, from the body to architecture, sociology to psychology, productivity to reproductivity, isolation and community. It also implies a rediscovery of the crucial role of architecture as a discipline related to many aspects of the social system, and that could later understand and respond to our current society, abandoning its self-referential and theoretical autonomy.

Domestic Boundaries 2.0 is an installation that aims to investigate how architecture must understand contemporary transformations, helping to develop new possibilities that respond to current needs.
Through the insertion of objects and domestic spaces within a public space - the university - it is shown how today domesticity expands, abandoning its traditional places and, with the use of devices of Augmented Reality (VR), we want to critically investigate the role of technology in the redefinition of our space-time limits. The augmented domestic environment in the university takes users into new immersive places, showing how today the physical relational limits are dissolving, making the surrounding space irrelevant, and generating a sudden transformation of the domestic and urban sphere.

The idea of the traditional domestic space guaranteed the presence of spaces to relax, feel safe, expose the concept of property, build relationships, express personal identity and promote gender segregation; It appeared as a refuge from external anxieties, derived from the uncertainty of the future and from the needs of work and production of the capitalist context: a place of ambiguity and paradoxes.

However, this conception of the house linked to a society that has already passed, based on a different economy and with other ideals, today is challenged by sudden changes in the social, affective, economic and labor structure: it is therefore useless to continue proposing solutions based on a previous system.

Its questioning leads to a redefinition of the limits and functions of the home space, causing expansions and contractions, and seeking an identity not only in the interiorization of the physical space, but also in the relationship with the urban context. The border between the house and the surrounding environment is dissolving, including within its definition many other social areas, public and private, which include the sphere of work.

The domestic space of today is a domain, a field or a mental territory that extends beyond the material, concrete, tectonic, spatial and corporal allusive conception, even quantifiable. It is a multidimensional condition that also includes architectural elements as a whole through a series of considerations that have to do with the domestic and intimate existential perception of the human being, close to the domain of space as a sense of protection, tranquility, interiorization, rest, renovation, recovery and pleasure.

The arrival of the "immaterial work" where life itself is working, makes again the domestic space the epicenter of production. The spatial separation between work and home is erased, nullifying its construction of space / shelter from external concerns. The new technologies make production an omnipresent mechanism, making the traditional workplace no longer relevant, because the “immaterial production” is based on aspects that until now were limited to the domestic domain (aspects such as sociality, affectivity and concern).
The urban structure on which cities have been founded in recent centuries is changing radically.

The multiplication of domestic media is causing an alteration in the way of interacting, influencing the physical structure of space. The public enters and permeates the domestic sphere, amplifying the departure of the model of the house as a purely private place. The dissolution of the physical relational limit causes the surrounding space to become irrelevant, generating a sudden transformation of the domestic and urban sphere.

The idea of movement, migration, change and openness brings new ideas about how to inhabit the city. In fact, the contemporary urban dweller lives in the condition that Verschaffel has called "a-topia", where he automatically becomes a nomadic subject able to redefine his position at any time and to free himself from the concept of belonging, migrating to a permanent transit condition. The idea of a vital urban context, therefore, changes from fixed and permanent to nomadic and temporary.

The concept of domestic space deviates more and more from a certain fixed place making it necessary to speak of domesticity as a term that incorporates time as a fundamental parameter. This situation highlights the meaning of no-place, the ephemeral and transitory space for circulation, consumption and communication as the new form of domestic center in the vital urban context.

The independence of the non-place of any sociocultural construction allows it to become one of the crucial forms of the new nomadic urban structure.

Eating, socializing, relaxing, sleeping, going to the gym, practicing sex, seeking privacy, are now part of a system of domestic activities in the city.

The house expands to the city, and the city is domesticated.