Living and Working by Dogma, the design and research team led by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara, brings together ten years of design research and historical inquiry in a single volume. Both focus on the dichotomy that emerged in the West between the private and the public, between ‘home’ and ‘workplace’. Domestic, ‘reproductive’ labour was thus, as it were, ‘naturalised’ into typically female, unpaid ‘labour of love’.  The paradox is that today the home is not only supposed to protect against the ‘hostile outside world’ but has also become an object of speculation. Both the historical study and the designs demonstrate, from a Marxist-feminist perspective, the questionable and fundamentally political nature of that view.

Dogma begins its historical study, following in the footsteps of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, with hunter-gatherers. However, they construct this argument strictly on the basis of a study of surviving architectural plans. They interpret these as the spatial translation of a social order. Hunter-gatherers lacked any notion of property or accumulation. They therefore had no separate spaces for these purposes. Similarly, they had no separate spaces for reproductive labour, work and vita activa. The authors derive this distinction from Hannah Arendt. Reproductive labour is the daily labour – washing, cooking, care – that sustains the group. ‘Work’, on the other hand, concerns the production of exceptional objects, from household goods to sculptures or texts. Finally, the vita activa encompasses social relations. Hunter-gatherers brought these three forms together in surprisingly complex temporary dwellings.

It is only with the Greeks that the authors see a clear separation between private life – the sphere of women – and the sphere of work and the public sphere. Here, for the first time, the image of the home as a haven of peace emerges, under the watchful eye of the Lord of the House. The Greek home thus expressed a socio-political organisation that was not free from oppression, but presented it as ‘natural’. When the Romans developed this model, they added the notion of ‘otium’: time spent free from external pressures. This desire for seclusion would take on new forms in monasteries and colleges modelled on the English system.  This led to complex layouts, with increasing functional specialisation. The corridor, as a connecting and separating element, originated here.

In the life of the average medieval person, however, the distinction between the three forms of labour remained paper-thin. Only the large urban palazzi were able to implement the logic of functional differentiation, with a strong public-private gradient. That model only became dominant in the modern era, from the late 17th century onwards, with the development of terraced houses and flats for increasingly smaller families. ‘Production’ was thus increasingly forced out of the domestic sphere. That process of ‘domestication’ met with considerable opposition, however. Russian revolutionary architecture of the early 1920s is a famous example of this, but many counter-models also emerged in Europe and even in the USA. The image of the ‘successful’ home that would ultimately ‘prevail’, however, was that of the private house that turns its back on the world. That model was, partly through social housing policy, also imposed on the lower social classes when it became clear that decent housing and the prospect of capital appreciation were indispensable for keeping them under control.

Today we find ourselves in a stalemate. Property has become a speculative commodity, with a plot’s location being its primary exchange value. The use value and political significance of the ‘classic’ home, however, are rarely the subject of discussion. Dogma does not claim that the home as a place of tranquillity is reprehensible, but questions the link between a home’s market value and the privatisation of reproductive labour. The latter could also be organised differently, in a more collective manner. The recent interest in collective forms of housing, however, is mainly limited to leisure spaces. Reproductive labour such as care for the elderly and children remains out of the picture, just as alternative, non-speculative forms of ownership do (although cooperatives and CLTs are tentatively gaining ground). Little thought is given to the integration of work and living spaces either – apart from the proverbial ‘desk’ in a corner of the living room. Yet Dogma believes the benefits of this could be enormous, as it enables forms of mutual help and support that make both life and work more fulfilling.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, of course. The fourteen projects in this book offer plenty of food for thought on that point – pun intended.  Three projects clearly illustrate the evolution of Dogma’s practice. Live forever: the return of the factory (2013) is a linear block of flats along disused railway land in Tallinn, Estonia. The project is based on 6×6×6 m cells, designed for two people. These cells can be linked to form larger units as required. There is vertical circulation for every five cells. The name ‘factory’ refers, with a great deal of irony, to Le Corbusier’s ‘Machine à habiter’, specifically to the self-sufficient Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. The difference is striking: Dogma exchanges Le Corbusier’s rigid organisation for an equally strict repetition of the same units. However, if one disregards technical objections, this is endlessly adaptable. It thus offers a real alternative to the home as we know it.

Longhouse (2021) is a proposal for a structure that provides communal spaces for work and care in godforsaken areas on the outskirts of Rome. Maintenance and use are carried out on a collective basis. The project is related to Live forever through its modular, non-functionally specified organisation, but differs from it in its attention to technical detailing, including climate control and construction. You can thus see how it can be built and how it can function.

Particularly familiar to Belgians is The opposite shore (2021), a project for the redevelopment of the fragmented Dender valley. We wrote about it previously following the project’s presentation at the Venice Biennale in 2021. It is a provocative, and not entirely implausible, proposal for functionally flexible live-work structures with a strong collective element that gradually take over the fragmented landscape of small plots.