Lecture date: 2015-01-29
Andrea Bagnato, Joseph Grima, Sam Jacob, Justin McGuirk, Cat Rossi, Maria S Giudici, Marina Otero Verzier
A conversation about domestic space, to present the book SQM: The Quantified Home (edited by Space Caviar and published by Lars Müller; produced for the 2014 Biennale Interieur). The home, once a site of architectural investigation, experiment, and potential social change, is being transformed into a commodity—a “bitcoin for oligarchs” in the words of Bruce Sterling. The domestic interior registers a new social paradigm whereby postwar welfare has given way to neoliberal visions of sharing. Privacy, comfort, and stability are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
How has this shift occurred, and what does it entail? The editors and contributors of SQM will engage external guests and the audience in a discussion on whether the home, as we knew it, still exists.
Maria S. Giudici recently obtained her PhD from TU Delft. She is the studio leader, together with Pier Vittorio Aureli, of AA Diploma Unit 14. Sam Jacob was co-founder of FAT Architecture, and co-curated the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. He runs the AA Night School.
Justin McGuirk is director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of Strelka Institute in Moscow. His latest book is Radical Cities (Verso, 2014).Marina Otero Verzier was formerly director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, Columbia University. She is co-curator of the forthcoming Oslo Architecture Triennale.
Catharine Rossi is senior lecturer in Design History at Kingston University, London. She has written extensively on the Italian architecture avant-garde.
Joseph Grima is the former editor of Domus; since 2013 he leads Space Caviar, a design research office based in Genoa, Italy. He is co-director of the forthcoming Chicago Architecture Biennial. Andrea Bagnato is a researcher at Space Caviar, and is part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial team. He was the managing editor of SQM: The Quantified Home.
