The question of transparency is central to contemporary societies. Phenomena of ecologic and social impact only reach arenas of public debate when they are ‘rendered visible’ in terms of data, tracking and information. Whereas Modern Architecture built its discourse upon the paradigm of visual – or phenomenal – transparency, contemporary Interior Architecture envisions the discipline as a web of social, material and media associations.

PRODUCTION LINE explores how Interior Architecture operates at the intersection between physical and social constructs, addressing how individual buildings are always part of a larger web of material, energetic and social associations. Whereas in the 19th century the term was associated to the centrality of products in the assembly chain, our vision puts people and their associated ecologies, both global and local, animal and vegetal, natural and artificial, at the centre of the architectural discourse.

When Caritas arrived to Geneva in 1901, it encountered a city where the concepts of space and fashion design were not associated to social and ecological urgencies. Today it serves hundreds of people in precarity and it has a network of spaces encompassing housing, education and selling facilities aimed at reinserting these very people back into society. It is, by large, one of the largest social actors in Geneva. Its economic model is based on the reinsertion of outdated goods and materials, from apparel to furniture, appliances to chinaware, into the selling cycle. By doing that it puts precarious people back to work, creating both economic and moral value. However, over the last decades its model has been challenged by low-cost retailers. Caritas needs to reinvent its spaces as much as its identity, and shift from recycling to upcycling.

The studio envisions a new identity for Caritas as both space and institution. Starting with a series of interviews with the Caritas community and studies in sustainability and socio-political tools in architecture, the semester engages with both local and global dimensions in space design, involving a broad network of practitioners and theoreticians. The semester investigates the technologies, networks and forms of social design deployed in interiors and their associated ecologies. Students are thus taught how to reduce global warming or working precariat through interior architecture, a trade in which the ecological and social impact of every technical and material choice is never neutral. 

Javier F. Contreras
Leonid Slonimskiy