Lecture 02: Domestic Space

Lifestyle, housing, and the collective were the topics that defined Caroline Constant's lecture. She spoke of the home as an evolutionary entity, adapting to its era and the ideals embodied in it. Starting with the Palladian villas she spoke of private versus public spaces and the method of advancement through the home as definitive of the relationship/proximity to the owner. This shifted all the way to modernism, with an emphasis on Le Corbusier in which clear distinctions of social roles were outlined. He believed in living isolated, but partaking in collective endeavors. His spaces reflected this with a strict adherence to bourgeois ideals. The most captivating was the Rietveid Schroder house in which the challenge became the conventions of a typical home. Program and space began to interweave and adapt, changing with movable partitions to the demands of the family on a given day or even at a given stage of life.

[image courtesy of http://www.the-artfile.com]