“One might feel like having supper in the bedroom or making love in the kitchen. It boils down to a question of tackling elementary principles: the quantity of space as an aesthetic principle, an architectural aesthetic and an aesthetic of life.“
Jean Nouvel, 1987

The studio pursued the exploration and critique of generic domestic interiors by looking at a seemingly distant context: that of contemporary public housing in Portugal. After having dealt with large mixed-use ensembles and smaller terraced developments in our close vicinity, the aim of the semester was to place housing in focus precisely where it should be the most accessible and inclusive, and to interrogate its ‘aesthetic principles’.

In recent years, an unprecedented wave of competitions for public housing projects has appeared in the greater Lisbon area. While open competitions are meant to stimulate architectural thinking and nurture the possibility of new solutions to old problems, here the message seemed to be the opposite. All awarded projects reproduced the same typologies and interiors ad nauseam, as if life could only make sense within the supposed rationality of a single diagram. These generic solutions are ubiquitous in Portugal, but they are not unrelated to a large part of contemporary housing production across Europe. They reduce the domestic realm to a container of objects and people, whose illusion of neutrality serves primarily to guarantee easy insertion into the norms of the market—even when public funds are involved. However, the residential interior is inevitably intertwined with a myriad of forms of life and intimacy. This irreducible and unmeasurable aspect has made it perhaps the most important battleground in the commodification of our built environment.

By proposing alternative and economical solutions in this context, we radically rethought the very spatiality of housing, as well as the necessary divisions between the intimate and the common, between the shared and the private. We also questioned the very materials of which flats are made and their multiple potentialities. In this context, the ‘decorative’ signified a transgression of ‘rationality and control’—a sign of vitality, diversity, and intentionality on the part of interior designers; perhaps a way toward new ‘aesthetics of life’.