After five years and six issues, our time as the designers of the architecture magazine Quaderns has ended. It hasn’t been always easy and there are things that could have gone better, but there is one thing we are very happy with: the tone we achieved. For us, the content and form of the magazine should reinforce its temporary nature. A magazine is a document of its time. Contrary to a book, its frequent publication allows an immediate response to currently relevant themes. These themes may be irrelevant in a years time, but by then a new issue will be out anyway.

With each issue of Quaderns we tried to express the unfinished state of an immediate response to a specific moment and theme. Rather than giving answers, we tried to raise new questions. Allowing different voices, sometimes contradictory, to appear. In each issue we celebrated imperfection and incoherence. Not just because we thought this to be the adequate answer to the problem of Quaderns, but also because we felt that design in Spain at that particular moment was stuck in a neatly composed nostalgia. A lot of designs looked like an idealized version of north-european design from the seventies. For us, this did not and still does not make any sense, especially considering the times we live in.

This issue of Quaderns explores some of the questions raised in the previous one, House and Contradiction. While that issue focused on the relationships between domesticity and politics, this one aims to analyse the relationship between domesticity and the public space. This is a logical continuation if we take into account to what extent the very definition of the domestic often blurs the boundary that exists between the urban sphere and the home, between the public and the private. It is impossible to understand the domestic without understanding its indissociable bond with the public space, their complementary nature.