The Good Banality and The Pleasure of Boredom

Abstract

We have changed the way to house our productive activities – actions that have to do with work, goods production, running the machineries of living, so called ‘services’.
We haven’t changed the way to house our non-productive activities, because instead, we have learnt not to be non-productive.
Currently, the domestic space holds users, rather than inhabitants, because of its hybrid, constantly re-defining nature. Home - as a device – is plugged to everyday life, and its spaces serve the evolving living and working habits. The physical concept of the home space – XIX century tenement houses, socialist blocks of flats or popular since mid-nineties development housing estates, are the most common form of inhabitation in Poland – according to governments statistics, in 2016, 57% of Polish society inhabited multifamily dwellings. We leave in buildings of age ranging from 100 years – XIXth century tenements, through 50 years old socialist prefabricated blocks of flats, to two decades old concept of developers’ estates. Meanwhile, the technology that we are using changes dramatically every decade, so do the social constructs and systems that we are part of. Consequently, the architectural concept of our apartments is further and further from the contemporary concept for living. Le Corbusier and other Modernists worked on the change of the plan of the apartment, but what indeed hasn’t been worked through, is the housing type in historical-social terms: the functionally differentiated house, with its family-based house-keeping regime.
What emerges, is the necessity of re-domestication, meaning exploring and defining the new ways of inhabiting, making off the home. This includes definition of user - inhabitant, but also of a community they (inhabitants) are willing to be part of. In order to go out of the old, non-contemporary-relevant patriarchal way of ruling the house, I look into social, architectural and individual practices and elements that contribute to making off a home as commonly approved concept, which I consequently deconstruct. The process of deconstruction happens in two ways. First of all, as a deconstruction of a social construct of household and domestic work. The model that is deconstructed is the patriarchal-based domestic household, that gradually lost it’s public character and aspects of commonality among different households.
It is the monogamous family with the inferior economic and social status of women and a status of man visa a vis her. Secondly, it is the spatial, material deconstruction, re-programming of the functions of the house – a clash of modernist solutions, applied on XIX century apartment layout with XXI century traces of living inside it. The spatial base of the XIX century tenement houses emerges from the layout that satisfies the living needs of the bourgeois class of the society. The ‘open-gallery type’ was introduced in the first half of the XIX century and it represented a remarkable adaptation of the Empire Style to urban multistory housing. The main feature of these apartments was the complete separation of the service spaces with only kitchen included inside the apartment, which still was a space for servants or housewife’s. The most mature form of the bourgeois apartment had a center defined by a large living room and so-called sitting room – the entire house was organized around the living, but exclusively for the rich part of the society.
Within the Architectural Project of Boredom, under examination are rooms, spaces in-between, spaces of communication, objects, services, materials, routines. The outcome concerns new spatial constellations, new social structures, and most of all, set up of the spatial principles for projects with everyday life as a main concern.