At home: Panoramas de nos Vies Domestiques: some ecological reflections

Abstract

Domestic interiors are invested with a multitude of meanings; political, economic, social, cultural, psychological, and ecological among them. Between 2020 and 2022, the height of the Covid pandemic in Europe, the authors co-curated an exhibition—At Home: Panoramas de nos Vies Domestiques—for the 2022 St Etienne Design Biennale. The design exhibition explored those meanings, past, present, and future, and addressed the key themes challenging our domestic spaces in the early twenty-first century, including the climate emergency, housing inequality and the market, and the technology-fuelled erosion of privacy. This article will unpack the ways in which those themes and challenges interact with each other through the concept of ecology, understood in its broadest sense as a balanced relationship between human beings and the planet, and how, through the exhibits on display, designers have responded to them and suggested future directions.

Keywords:

• Domestic
• interior
• ecology
• exhibition
• curation

Introduction

The authors of this article (henceforth referred to as “we”) co-curated At Home: Panoramas de nos vies domestiques for the 2022 Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne, the theme of which was “Bifurcations,” i.e. finding alternative ways forward. Through the display of a range of artworks, designs, architectural projects, photographs, and films, our exhibition set out to critique the conventional readings of home, which tend to have consumerism at their heart, and to explore the ways in which the challenges that face the planet in the twenty-first century inevitably disrupt them.

Writing this article through an ecological lens offered us an opportunity to reflect on some of the curatorial decisions we made, and to revisit, and indeed problematise, some of the ways in which we had intended the exhibits to communicate what we believed to be key messages. Although we are focusing here on ecology, during the curation process it was just one of the themes that the exhibition addressed. On reflection, however, it has become clear that, at the core of the exhibition, lay the ecological disaster that the climate emergency, and the challenges that it forces designers of domestic spaces and artefacts, as well as the inhabitants of the home, to confront.

We define ecology in this context as an approach that recognises the roles played by nature, the economy, politics, and society in the shaping of the home. This builds on the earlier idea of the home as a site of refuge (Taylor, Downey, and Meade 2022) but expands it significantly to understand the home as part of a broader ecological system (Kaika 2004). This inclusive conceptualisation of the relationship between ecology and the home aligns with the imperative to understand the latter’s interconnectivity with, and complicity in, the challenges of the climate emergency.

If, as James Bridle reminds us, “Ecology is not merely the study of where we find ourselves, but of everything which surrounds us and allows us to live” (Bridle 2022, 11), then our conventional tropes about the idea of home require a redefinition. This aim informed our organisation of the exhibition into five themes—Utopia, Shelter, Identities, Well-being, and Connectivity—which we saw as core to how the home, defined in its widest sense, is both currently experienced and understood and is also redefining itself to address the challenges it currently faces.

In our curation of the exhibition, as a means of enhancing engagement, familiar, everyday objects were deliberately mixed with speculative art projects. Work from the past was also included to highlight the long-term ignorance of these key issues and to show how attempts have been made to address them. Although we selected several “radical” designs from the 1960s and 1970s, included because they confronted the early manifestations of many of today’s challenges, we were acutely aware of the need to recognise the nuances of different historical contexts.

The five sections of this article focus on some of the key issues—environmental anxiety; commodification and over-consumption; the exploitation of the world’s natural resources; human/non-human relationships; and the tension between the global and the local—which, in combination with each other, constitute the key causes and effects of today’s ecological crisis and which we explored in At Home.

Environmental anxiety

The term “eco-anxiety” is used today to describe people’s feelings of helplessness in the light of the ecological disasters that they see happening around them. Back in the 1960s and 1970s—as demonstrated, for example, by one exhibit, the Italian designer, Gaetano Pesce’s Habitat for Two People, Paesaggio Domestico: The Period of Great Contaminations of 1971–1972—the threats and responses to the environment were already becoming apparent, however.

Pesce’s speculative work presented an archaeological discovery of a place and time when people were seeking shelter underground to protect themselves from a contaminated outside world. An early manifestation of the future as a realm for concern rather than optimism, it was designed at a time when there was a significant threat of a nuclear war. Pesce decided that only by experiencing the effect of potential disasters—whether nuclear explosion, ecological destruction, or pestilence—would people be able to stop believing in nuclear war, or modern technologies in general, as a tool for protection and development. When commissioned to design one of the environments for the infamous Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition held in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1972, Pesce created this habitat as an uncomfortable and shocking life-size interior intended to stimulate reflection on the essential conditions of living.

Commodification and over-consumption

One of today’s main threats to the environment is the commodification of objects and spaces which, driven by the logic of economic capitalism, encourages ever greater levels of consumption and the growing quantities of waste that inevitably flow from that.

The first section of the exhibition, Utopia, which consisted of a wall of reproduced photographs of high gloss, fashionable, commoditised domestic interiors, recalling those that fill the pages of interior magazines and retail catalogues, and are scrolled through on social media, offered the audience images that were simultaneously comfortably familiar and uncomfortably provocative (Figure 1). The photographs represented a view of the home which defined its inhabitants solely as aspirational consumers whose relationship with their domestic spaces was one of conspicuous consumption and a desire for social differentiation through designed interiors. The desirable images on display reinforced W. H. Haug’s concept of “commodity aesthetics,” originally outlined back in 1963, and which, he had claimed, was “probably the dominant force in the collective imagination of millions of people every day” (Haug 1986, 11). Our intention was to suggest the persuasive power of these ever-present images which—directly or indirectly—play a key role in defining people’s relationships with their homes.

Figure 1 Section One: Utopia. c. Penny Sparke.

By stripping the audience of its preconceptions and sense of comfort, the surprise, irritation, and even shock, that we hoped that the audience would experience as it moved behind the Utopia wall into the Shelter section to see American artist, Martha Rosler’s 1989 exhibit, Housing is a Human Right, represented the exhibition’s key “bifurcation.” Rosler’s animation redefined the home from the position of human needs rather than consumable desires for the rest of the exhibition in which the home was presented as a complex spatial, material, and conceptual environment, understood, and also challenged, as a site for privacy, reflection, freedom, protection and agency.

One exhibit, Nomad Furniture, designed by Dutch designers Makkink and Bey in 2014, presented a home that could be carried on one’s back and was easy to assemble and move (Figure 2). With its elements fulfilling functions from comfort to assurance and flexibility, it could be read as a commitment to the reduction of consumption and the accumulation of products by asking what is essential to transform a space into a home.

Figure 2 Makkink & Bey Nomad Furniture 2014. c. Seghir Zouaoui.

Figure 3 Enzo Mari Auroprogettazione 1976. c. Penny Sparke.

This theme was developed in the next section of the exhibition where the work of several architects and designers, who had already in the 1970s been critiquing and seeking alternatives to what they perceived as the excessively commoditised interior, was revisited. They were presented as illustrations of the shifting concerns about, and approaches towards, questions of consumerism, in ways that took in ideas of domesticity and ecology. For example, the early 1970s work of the experimental Italian architectural collective, Superstudio, raised questions about what constitutes the domestic interior, or the relationship between domesticity and the interior. This included the collage Gli Atti Fondamentali: Vita (Supersuperficie) (1971) which depicts a girl holding a broom on a cut-out urban wasteland of rubble and discarded furnishings, almost floating on a gridded blue and white background which is at once sky and sea. Vita was one of five “Fundamental Acts” that Superstudio translated into collages and films in the early 1970s, depicting an ideal nomadic lifestyle in a liberated life without objects; or rather, a life without the alienating weight of commodities. In this utopia there was a disassociation between identity formation and the ownership of commodities, while a life of rites and rituals, it was suggested, offered a means of individual and collective well-being. There was also a seeming questioning of the relationship between bounded interior space and domesticity, and between interior and exterior environments; there were no walls and minimal, if any, boundaries between individuals and their nature-based surroundings. Amidst the earlier noted fledgling environmentalism embraced by architects in Italy and elsewhere in the early 1970s, noted above, the series’ absence of built architecture in favour of a pastoral imagining of nomadic encampments amidst mountainous backgrounds also posited a closer relationship to nature as another ingredient in a liberated domestic existence.

Exploiting the planet’s natural resources

It is very clear that human beings have over-used the natural resources that the planet has offered them with disastrous effects. Extensive deforestation, for example, has destroyed many of the ecosystems that support biodiversity, while the availability of water, oil, natural gas, and coal, for instance, is declining rapidly (Jowit 2008).

Sustainability and re-using resources inspired the design of the exhibition itself, which was intended to read as a series of interiors. It consisted of large-scale cuboid cardboard vitrines intended to evoke the language of packing boxes for moving house. Cardboard was chosen both for its economy and expedience but also recyclability, recognising here that, while recycling is not as effective as reusing existing materials, and, as Paul Micklethwaite explains, occurs too late in the process of production and consumption and on too small a scale, it still has a part to play in the reduction of excessive material waste (Micklethwaite 2021). The boxes were punctured with large-scale square openings for visitors to see the exhibits and were connected by low-level extended terracotta brick plinths (repurposed from an earlier exhibition on site).

With their room-height scale, language of windows, walls and floors, and collection of objects the boxes were designed to evoke domesticity. The Identities section was the most explicit example of this, with a mirror, brightly coloured walls and floor intended to give a living room-like framing to the exhibits, while the display of plants that occupied the Well-being room box represented the entry of plants into homes. The space also included a number of Enzo Mari’s radical DIY Autoprogettazione (1974) chairs, constructed with salvaged materials by students at the onsite Saint-Etienne School of Art and Design (ESADSE), and which served as both exhibits (in the Identities section) and audience seating (Figure 3). Recycling was also presented in the Well-being section through several domestic artefacts, among them Konstantin Grcic’s mass-manufactured Bell Chair for the Italian company, Magis, which was fabricated from recycled polypropylene that was almost entirely derived from the manufacturer’s own waste materials (Figure 5).

Selected to represent the bringing together of localism, natural materials, circularity, and recycling in a single product, a group of the Bangalore-based company, Daily Dump’s simple, everyday, hand-made terracotta pots, in which organic left-over materials can turn into garden compost, was also put on display (Figure 4). Also shown was Sápu—a device that could be used at home to transform fat and oil waste into soap—created in 2019 by British designer, Danielle Coffey. The intention behind showing it was to facilitate new behaviours at home and to encourage visitors to empower themselves in their domestic settings.

Figure 4 Daily Dump, hand-made terracotta compost pots. c. Sandrine Binoux.

Figure 5 Konstantin Gric Bell Chair for Magis S.p.A. c. Seghir Zouaoui.

Several other exhibits in the same section addressed the climate change agenda and the crisis of diminishing resources head on, none more so than Superflux’s short film, Mitigation of Shock (2019), a dystopian vision, set in Singapore in the year 2050, which aimed to stimulate the audience’s imaginations in order to prepare themselves for, or take actions to avoid, some of the possible future consequences of climate change—food insecurity, extreme weather, and resource scarcity. In the words of Superflux, “As they go about the drudgery of daily life, we have found that most people are at a loss as to how to translate the intangible data strewn across climate graphs and charts into tangible, sustainable action” (Superflux 2023).

Moving the attention from materials to the production process itself and the impact of digital technologies was Kate Crawford and Vlader Joler’s Anatomy of an AI (2018), a large-scale diagram included in the Connected section and positioned behind an example of a first-generation Amazon Echo (2014) (Figure 6). The intricately drawn out black and white schematic depicted what the designers identified as the triumvirate of “material resources, human labor, and data” required to produce and operate an Amazon Echo. (Crawford and Joler 2023). The designers cited as a key influence Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media (2015) in which the author updated Marshall McLuhan’s 1960s work to argue that we should not think of media as extensions of man, but of the earth (Crawford and Joler 2023). With its exposure of rare earth minerals, hazardous chemicals, submarine cable infrastructure, toxic waste and multiple other natural and human resources required for ubiquitous black-box technologies, such as the Amazon Echo, Anatomy of an AI showed that this relationship is defined less by seamless extension and more by the brutal extractivism that defines contemporary capitalism. The project also expressed the entanglement of climate change and global capitalism and the need to recognise the ramifications of a human-centred approach to the world.

Figure 6 Kate Crawford and Vlader Joler Anatomy of an AI 2018. c. Sandrine Binoux.

We did not only question the production, processes and systems behind products but also the home itself. Shifting from a human-centred to a more ecological approach to the world, with the aim of achieving resource neutrality, back in 1989 William Stumpf created The Metabolic House demonstrating that the house can be seen as a biological organism that takes in oxygen, food and water and expels it again. While the suggested circularity would improve energy efficiency, Stumpf does not imagine the metabolic house as a self-sufficient system.

More recently, architects have also turned their attention to the impact of buildings, specifically their facades, balconies and roofs, in order to influence air quality and temperature. As an example we presented the Italian architect-designer, Michele de Lucchi’s 2020 Graft Stations project. Employing the biological metaphor of “grafting” he made several additions, including loggias and bow windows, to some existing urban dwellings as a means of improving their environmental performance.

Human/non-human relationships

By interrogating the networks of domesticity, we expanded the definition of the interior beyond the confines of spaces within buildings to their surroundings. The inclusion of gardens, yards and even neighbourhoods, which, as will become apparent, featured strongly in the Connected section, allowed us to address the need for reconsidering the relationship between humans and non-humans in an attempt to take responsibility for the effects of the Anthropocene. Decentering the human being is an essential step to imagine and respond to the needs of others accepting, as Bridle defines it, “the increasingly evident and pressing reality of our utter entanglement with the more-than -human world” (Bridle 2022, 11). In the exhibition this was emphasised in a 2019 work by Marlène Huissoud, entitled, Please Stand By—The Grave/Black Sheep, a response to the global decline of insect populations by offering habitats for them in the city (Figure 7). The work used organic materials (unrefined clay, natural binders, and wood) and colours to which the insects are naturally attracted, and was originally installed in a city garden. Huissoud’s sculptural “hotels” provide refuge and protection for city-dwelling pollinators, such as solitary bees, wasps, and butterflies, where they can nest and hibernate.

Figure 7 Marlene Huissoud Please Standby – The Grave/Black Sheep 2019. c. Penny Sparke.

Several exhibits in the Well-being section referenced the damaged relationship between humans and the natural world brought about by the former’s long-term disrespect for, and abuse of, the latter. One group focused on the creation of novel plant containers, intended for a domestic setting, and aimed at encouraging people to build new, nurturing relationships with living nature in their homes. Echoing the forms of Swiss cheese plants (monsterae deliciosae) the Dutch designer, Tim van de Weerd, sought to animate his plant pots in such a way as to suggest that they had absorbed the life-force of the plants they contained (Figure 8). “The plant pots, being the extensions of the plants, seem to be creatures in themselves,” he explained, adding that, “giving them a botanical name emphasises this” (Van de Weerd 2023).

Figure 8 Tim van de Weerd Monstera Magnifica. c. Sandrine Binoux.

In Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Timothy Morton has explained that “the idea of the environment is more or less a way of considering collectives—humans surrounded by nature, or in continuity with other beings such as animals and plants. It is about being-with” (Morton 2009, 17). Van der Weerd’s designs embodied the idea of human beings “being-with” plants in their homes. In his Open Garden Series of 2017, German designer, Florian Wegenast, embraced the same idea through his series of domestic furniture items with potted plants integrated into them, thereby potentially making it easier for people inhabiting restricted spaces to live with nature in their homes. Starting with the aim of encouraging urban gardeners to open gardens in their homes, the project expanded to explore the idea of the city becoming one big garden.

De Weerd and Wegenast both engage, albeit uncritically, with the idea of biophilia, a term that was first used by the psychologist Erich Fromm in his 1964 book, The Heart of Man, where it was defined as a “psychological orientation of being attracted to all that is alive and vital” (Fromm 1964, 21). Satisfying that craving, it was believed, led to a state of psychological well-being, a reduction in stress levels, and the promotion of physical health. Although many scientific experiments have set out to evidence that fact, in the early twenty-first century biophilia remains a belief, albeit one that feels culturally in tune with today’s environmental turn.

The global and the local

Although, through an acknowledgment of the detrimental impact of global transportation on the climate crisis and the growing refugee crisis, by 2022 the utopia that was associated with the idea of the “global traveller” had become a dystopia, back in 2014 it was still being celebrated. Makkink and Bey’s Nomad Furniture, mentioned earlier, was a vision of a future home in the context of collective and public spaces. Understanding that moveability and transformation are key concepts in a world defined by impermanence, the typologies of window, bed and table were mixed with those of backpack, cane, and carrycot allowing for multiple functions of the foldable home. The use of fabric allowed the furniture to be lightweight, foldable, and expandable but most importantly easily moveable. Behind the practical functions, Makkink and Bey emphasised the need for mental spaces and privacy for a sense of home represented through natural materials but also the fact of moving with these essential items which makes the project a call for reflections on value, consumption, and desire.

Technologically enabled nomadism was also found in a collage from Superstudio’s Gli Atti Fondamentali (1971) series whose “plug in” grid imagined a world of global connectivity that anticipated the advent of digital connectivity just two decades later, even if it did not, or rather could not, anticipate the ecological consequences of such technological advance, including on the pastoral landscapes that they admired (Figure 9).

Figure 9 Superstudio Gli Atti Fondamentali 1971. c. Cite du Design.

The idea of a connected world that Superstudio argued for was also the focus of the final section of the exhibition. This was the section most informed by the experience of Covid, and in two distinct ways; be it the reliance on digital technologies in connecting people, globally, with both distant friends and family as well as vital services, or the renewed realisation of the importance of local neighbourhoods and communities. The section was dedicated to a reaction against the globally situated, and often opaque and exploitative, relationships that define much of the home’s relationship with the outside world; in other words, a more ecological understanding of the domestic interior. It was informed by the imposed restrictions to our homes and surrounding environs during the Covid lockdowns in the UK and most of the world in 2020 and 2021, and the enforced realisation of the vital connectedness offered through neighbours and local communities.

In response, we included several contemporary examples of housing and urban design that offered connectedness on a range of scales. At the smallest scale was a component that was both exhibition design and exhibit; a plywood “parklet,” specially created by the exhibition designers, and which contained seating, planting, and angled shelving for displaying photographic exhibits (Figure 10). As well as offering a practical piece of exhibition furniture, the object introduced visitors to the parklet concept, which was instigated in 2005 in San Francisco by local urban design studio Rebar. They temporarily transformed a parking space through the installation of artificial turf, a bench, and a tree, creating an inhabitable outdoor space that Joanna Merwood-Salisbury and Vanessa Coxhead position as an example of an “exterior interior” (Merwood-Salisbury and Coxhead 2017); another manifestation of how an ecological approach can challenge the boundaries between interior and exterior space. Instigated as a form of “tactical urbanism,” the San Francisco Parklet Program has now been adopted by twenty countries across the world, including Sweden, Iran, Japan, and Argentina.

Figure 10 Parklet, Plaid. c. Sandrine Binoux.

Offering a similar ethos was Intermediate Garden in Rotterdam, captured by the photographer Annet Delfgaauw in 2011, wherein residents (including an architect) transformed a vacant lot in a row of houses into an intermediate garden equipped with furniture that soon became pivotal to the local neighbourhood as a space for gardening, socialising, and feeding the local community.

While both the parklet and garden were about outdoor, small-scale interventions, we also wanted to explore how a combination of interior and exterior environments, and considerations of how these knit together, are key to community formation on a larger scale. Nearby the Intermediate Garden was Mehr als Wohnen (2012–2021), a housing development in Zurich, Hunziker Areal. Run by a housing cooperative, the development involved architects and residents in the transformation of a former industrial zone into a new neighbourhood where the concept of community defined the design of homes of different scales and densities for residents with a variety of ages, incomes, and backgrounds. Local amenities, spaces for crafts practitioners, schools, community gardens and ample public space define the development. It was designed following the goals of the 2000-watt society which was achieved by reducing the consumption of resources and energy, and ecological and pollution-free construction. The largest scale project included in this section was La Ville du Quart Heure, an idea conceived by the France-based urbanist Carlos Moreno who first proposed it in 2016. Building on historic conceptualisations, such as the early-1900s garden cities movement and Jane Jacobs’ 1960s community-focused urban activism, La Ville du Quart D’Heure proposed a new concept of the city where all the necessary amenities and services are located within fifteen minutes of the home, reducing the need for lengthy cross-city travel (in the process reducing inhabitants’ reliance on cars and also their carbon footprints) and ensuring the vitality of local neighbourhoods across an urban area.

Conclusion: Planet City—an ecological understanding of the home

The final exhibit in the exhibition explored the theme of connectedness on a planet-wide scale. Liam Young’s provocative film Planet City (2021) envisioned a future in which the entirety of the world’s ten billion population inhabits a single city, approximately the size of a US state. Beyond the confines of the city nature was left to rewild. Inspired by Edward O. Wilson’s Half Earth concept (Wilson 2017) in which mass extinction could be avoided if half of the earth’s surface was set aside for nature, Young’s film depicts a city of densely packed mountains, whose residents reap the harvests of indoor and vertical farming and are brought together by continuous celebrations of different cultural festivals. With its utopian vision, ecological approach, provision of housing for all, and opportunities for collective gatherings that speak to the identities of different communities, Planet City presents uncompromisingly, what Bridle has called “the utter entanglement with the more-than -human world” (Bridle 2022, 11), and the need for these relationships and networks to be considered in the creation, inhabitation and understanding of the home.

This holistic approach served to bring together all aspects of the new readings of the ecological implications of the domestic interior that were presented in At Home: Panoramas de nos vies domestiques. As has been demonstrated in this article, the curators set out to show that looking through an ecological lens disturbs our preconceived notion of home. Their aim was to encourage the audience to reflect on the home as a place where the artificiality of the boundary between the inside and outside is challenged; which, rather than existing in isolation, is directly connected to the gardens, neighbourhoods, communities, and cities that surround them; and which supports the circular movement of materials, products, and services that extends beyond its walls. Given its inception during the period of Covid-19 the subject of ecological disaster was certainly at the forefront of our minds throughout the curatorial process and undoubtedly exerted a powerful influence on our choices of exhibition themes and exhibits.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Penny Sparke

Penny Sparke, Professor of Design History, Department of Critical and Historical Studies, Kingston University. E-mail: [email protected]

Cat Rossi

Cat Rossi, Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture and Design, University for the Creative Arts. E-mail: [email protected]

Jana Scholze

Jana Scholze, Associate Professor, Department of Creative Industries, Kingston University. E-mail: [email protected]