Our Design DNA
At The Bartlett School of Architecture, we have been publishing annual exhibition catalogues for each of our design-based programmes for more than a decade. These catalogues, amounting to thousands of pages, illustrate the best of our students’ extraordinary work. Our Design Anthology series brings together the annual catalogue pages for each of our renowned units, clusters, and labs, to give an overview of how their practice and research has evolved.
Throughout this time some teaching partnerships have remained constant, others have changed. Students have also progressed from one programme to another. Nevertheless, the way in which design is taught and explored at The Bartlett School of Architecture is in our DNA. Now with almost 50 units, clusters and labs in the school across our programmes, the Design Anthology series shows how we define, progress and reinvent our agendas and themes from year to year.
2019 Description, Invention, Reality
David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata
2018 Strategies Against Architecture David Di Duca, Simon Kennedy
2017 Hyper-Architectures of Play Simon Kennedy, Gabby Shawcross
Description, Invention, Reality
David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata
Description, Invention, Reality
David Di Duca, Tetsuro NagataArt and design have historically challenged and explored our society. Our unit continues this by observing and forming critical positions on what we see around us. We are interested in how architecture is able to evoke emotion and prompt conversation. We consider our role as active observers and participants, and are interested in testing out theories by making films and 1:1 installations. There is a common misconception that architects design experiences, but in PG26 we would rather suggest that architects design places and objects to be experienced. This position leads to a design process with a focus on how people perceive, interact with and remember space, and the connection between body, imagination and memory.
The world around us is changing fast and, with it, the ubiquitous and continuous exposure to technology is making audiences to digital arts less responsive, as new possibilities arrive faster than they can be explored. Personal data, connected technologies, and interactive and predictive products are all current topics of debate. Cynicism towards technological progress is not new but we are experiencing a rapid rise in anxiety about automation and surveillance, which is leading to a growth in neo-luddite, off-grid lifestyles. Architecture is integral to this, as cities and buildings can increasingly be seen as systems to utilise technology to control the currents of weather, nature, power, heat, water and data. In PG26 this year, we looked at how we can embrace, ignore and disrupt these ‘controlled’ systems and, as a result, the architectures that the unit designed were both reactive to, and interactive with, the uncontrollable.
We began the year by creating small-scale installations in a brewery in Walthamstow that explored how buildings can react to the actions of people and the environment around them. Embracing the performative aspects that this brought, we moved towards largerscale architectural proposals in London and beyond. We actively encouraged our students to work with varied approaches: to utilise the workshop to fabricate haptic devices, develop code and electronics to test interactivity, and create physical and virtual spaces to evoke emotional responses and challenge ideas. We produced films incorporating four-dimensional drawings and viewer-driven non-linear narratives. Above all, our work was iterative and reflective, and we learned to criticise and question our own processes.
Year 4
Alexander Borrell, Darren Buttar, Andrei-Ciprian Cojocaru, Ross Gribben, Sze (Viola) Poon, Ryan Tung
Year 5
Pitchaya Chayavoraprapa, Jolene Hor, Klaudia Kepinska, Kin (Glynnis) Lui, David Majoe, David Park, Baifan Tao, Artur Zakrzewski
Thank you to: Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Stephen Gage, Alexis Germanos, Stefana Gradinariu, Mike Hutchison, Simon Kennedy, Ted Krueger, Henry Pelly, Henrik Pihlveus, Grace Quah, Daniel Sonabend
Sponsor: BAT Studio
26.1, 26.5 Pitchaya Chayavoraprapa, Y5 ‘Mundane to Mad’. The process of imagining spaces and places for others’ needs is based on assumptions about shared experiences and our ability to empathise with others. Assumption is a device rather than a fact; we all experience the world uniquely depending on our past experiences and physiology. This project explores how the imagination is as potent in our experiences as the physical things around us. The work culminates in a non-linear interactive film, which viewers engage with by moving in space, relative to the screen and a tracking camera. 26.2–26.4 David Park, Y5 ‘Insta[nt] Virality’. Instagram is directly influencing our engagement with the public realm. If a place sees a spike of interest on Instagram, it leads to a corresponding popularity in real-world visitors. These visitors post images of the places and the cycle becomes self-fulfilling. This gives Instagram’s algorithms increasing influence on our urban behaviour, especially relating to tourism. This project explores what this means and imagines a figurative architecture designed for this emerging scenario in which the social media representation of a place is as important as the physical.
26.6 Darren Buttar, Y4 ‘Digital Theatre’. Site-specific theatre and arts have become increasingly popular and technology has resulted in the prevalence of installation work. However the majority of this work either relies on found spaces or adapting work into traditional theatres and galleries. This project imagines a new typology of theatre and arts building to facilitate new types of performance.
26.7 Andrei-Ciprian Cojocaru, Y4 ‘Date Hub’. Responding to the brief for a public house, a place for socialising beyond one’s domestic environment, this project evolved from an interest in how people form new personal relationships. The proposed building, an architectural representation of a dating algorithm, is a reaction to relationships mediated through smartphones.
26.8 Sze (Viola) Poon, Y4 ‘Made in Camden’. The site currently occupied by a large supermarket in Camden is due to be transformed into a residential development, creating a new community for thousands of people. This project proposes a garden and craft centre which would form an ambitious community asset and social hub for this new development.
26.9 Alexander Borrell, Y4 ‘Cloud Courts’. This project proposes a parliament building for the age of digital communication and data-based capitalism. The design strategy employs the metaphor of ‘echo chambers’ surrounding a debating hall through which disputes in the digital world are resolved. These disputes might range from the petty to the extremely important; either way, the outcomes are cast in iron and placed into a public garden for all to see.
26.10 Ryan Tung, Y4 ‘Amphibious Living for Later Life’. This building is designed for a specific community group; people who live on canal boats in London. As people grow older and their mobility decreases, living on a barge becomes increasingly difficult. This project imagines a retirement home for a boating community in Camden, enabling people to live on their boats for as long as possible. Ideas related to the slow way of life, travelling by canal are used as a design metaphor throughout the building.
26.11 Ross Gribben, Y4 ‘Post-Primark’. This project facilitates slow conversations between strangers, and explores the changing social activities surrounding retail. It proposes a future building on Oxford Street based around ethical clothing production, recycling and mass-customisation.
26.12–26.13 Klaudia Kepinska, Y5 ‘Digital Memories’. This project imagines a landscape museum and archive based on the life of a Finnish architect who is largely forgotten. The project explores the boundaries between documentation, facsimile and imagination. It directly acknowledges the role of the designer’s own imagination as a source of inaccuracy but also creativity in the process of representing a history that cannot be recreated. The project is portrayed using experimental film and drawing techniques.
26.14–26.15 Jolene Hor, Y5 ‘Unprivate Mansion’. Our society is heavily influenced by aspirational lifestyles portrayed through various forms of media. This project began with an examination of architectures created for reality television. This led to a test installation which explored the ideas, and a parallel thesis focused on domesticity and privacy. The project culminates in a film which extrapolates observable behaviours in our current society, portraying a unique and potentially disturbing building in a near-future Camden. 26.16 Artur Zakrzewski, Y5 ‘ Ministry of Wellbeing’. GDP and continuous growth as a measure of development are a capitalist constructs which are no longer compatible with the challenges of climate change and social inequality we face. Progressive societies are starting to value measures of happiness and wellbeing. This project imagines a new ‘Ministry of Wellbeing’ for London. The proposed building, in the most prominent of locations, the Serpentine lake, features a skin which is animated so that people may perceive the building as expressing emotions. 26.17 Kin (Glynnis) Lui, Y5 ‘West Pier Life Garden’. The project’s key themes are transition, in-between states and rituals associated with loss, mourning and reinvention. The project developed through an experimental installation which combined animation and tactile objects to depict the serendipity of transitional states. The major project is sited in the remains of Brighton Pier, a building famous for being lost multiple times and existing in states of transition for long periods. It draws on ideas from winter festivals, seasonal cycles and rebirth. 26.18 Baifan Tao, Y5 ‘Metropolitan Yu’. This project imagines a near future in which the urban realm can be augmented and themed depending on a persons mood or interests. The project was researched and developed through a series of augmented reality apps, and culminated in a composited film shot on location in Chongqing, depticting a journey inspired by a famous Chinese myth. 26.19–26.22 David Majoe, Y5 ‘Haptic Virtuality’. This experimental project comprised practical research and a thesis-led investigation into how perceptive traits can be explored and exploited in virtual reality. The project aspires to create new forms of architecture that may transcend the possibilities of the conventional palette. In the near future, the plausibility of things we encounter and the mixed sensory inputs we receive from both the physical and virtual components of our environment, will become part of the architect’s armoury of design tools.
Strategies Against Architecture
David Di Duca, Simon KennedyStrategies Against Architecture
David Di Duca, Simon KennedyYear 4
Pitchaya Chayavoraprapa, Jolene Hor, Klaudia Kepinska, Kin Lui, David Majoe, David Park, Baifan Tao
Year 5
Juan Escudero Pablos, Ezer Han, Cheung Hong Ivan Hung, Yan Yi Lee, Yiran Ma, Miten Mistry, Carl Pihlveus, Hannah Lucinda Sargeant, Carina Tran, Songyang Zhou
Thank you to our consultants and critics: Alexis Germanos and 3x Architecture; Mike Hutchison and Momentum Engineers; Helen Di Duca and Jason Bruges Studio; Anam Afroze Hasan, Hal Currey, Andy Downey, Stephen Gage, Pedro Gil, Timo Haedrich, Stephen Harty, Christine Hawley, Shaun Murray, Grace Quah, Fiona Zisch
We are grateful to our sponsors, BAT Studio
Unit 26 chooses to define architecture as ‘the underlying structure of anything and everything’. Architecture is everywhere and this year Unit 26 was against it. Taking inspiration from the transitional and tumultuous times we inhabit, we interrogated the idea of exiting structures, hierarchies and systems.
We freely exchange our personal data for services and access to emerging means of communication. All the while, we are bombarded by subversive and sophisticated modes of advertising and manipulation. Energy companies are valued in the trillions, but to mobilise more than a fraction of their resources would make life on our planet impossible. An elusive cartel of internet companies hoards assets of fabulous value: data, information and intellectual property, alongside cash reserves too large to spend. Value and power have evolved. However, outside the cartel, the information age has disrupted the traditional monopolies of power: information is free, the truth is uncertain, the transfer of knowledge and opinion has been open-sourced and democratised. Traditional power structures struggle to maintain control and new economies based on barter and exchange are beginning to thrive. Is this how architecture of the next age will be procured?
This year, the unit has produced work which is both propositional and critical. We have imagined new futures and alternatives to the present, satirised established social norms and questioned our control over our own environments.
Strategies Against Architectural Representation
The structures that surround us embody ideas translated from social and historical contexts. But nothing is static, everything is volatile and dynamic. Time-based media offer us revolutionary tools both to develop and to communicate ideas. Unit 26’s ideas are developed and portrayed through film and filmic techniques. We seek to expand the modes of the cinematic medium, incorporating non-linearity and interactivity into designed spatial experiences.
Los Angeles
The unit visited Los Angeles, exploring sites including the LA River and Universal Studios, Sony Pictures and Venice Beach, and sought out hyper-real architectural manifestations in Hollywood and Las Vegas.
New Forms of Practice
We have created filmic architectures and architectural films that explore animated and augmented relationships between people and place. Our techniques included scriptwriting, hand-drawing, storyboards, stopmotion, four-dimensional drawing, hyperlapse, motion-matching, models and interactive mock-ups.
Fig. 26.1 Juan Escudero Pablos Y5, ‘The Church of Science’. The project depicts a future in which The Church of Science has emerged to control knowledge, therefore deriving from it political and economic power. Located in Death Valley, the new order is structured as a religion, obscured by smoke and mirrors and shaped as a useless machine. This mystification is understood through the ontology of the cyborg, a new almighty messiah. Figs. 26.2 – 26.3 Yiran Ma Y5, ‘The Cloud Project’. Chinese culture divides the year into 24 phases or seasons; this intimate, detailed connection to nature is an integral part of Chinese culture. The infamous pollution of Beijing has a hidden consequence: it is slowly depriving the city’s inhabitants of this connection. This project imagines a future where the vast and increasing gap between the wealthy and
the poor has led to the creation of megastructures to purify the air. The structures create seasons on demand while the city around them becomes habitable only by machines and humans with breathing apparatus.
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Figs. 26.4– 26.5 Ezer Han Y5, ‘The Korean Reunification –The Architecture of Nostalgia, Transition and Unity’. The centre represents the first of many steps towards a unified Korea, the possibility of which draws nearer due to unprecendented recent movements by the two governments. The building uses shared, traditional architectural tropes to spatially facilitate reconnection and familiarisation of the two nations. The programmes within the centre enable a gradual intermingling of the now disparate cultures, building compassion and understanding in anticipation of a unified future. Figs. 26.6 – 26.7 Miten Mistry Y5, ‘D.R.E.A.M. Centre For Hackstivism’. Cutting-edge technology, driven by algorithms and powered by big-data is being sold to police forces to aid in the prediction of future crimes. These algorithms are inscrutable, and while
they are assumed to be ‘scientific’ and ‘fair’, they actually conceal embedded racial and locational biases, encouraging self-fulfilling downward spirals within vulnerable communities. South LA’s kaleidoscope of cultures and history of racial tension is the testing ground for confronting these tools. The centre will create and disperse mischievous deployable structures around the city, challenging the validity of surveillance technologies and usurping the power of the algorithms.
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Fig. 26.8 Hannah Lucinda Sargeant Y5, ‘Lutando Contra Fogo Com Fogo’. Set in the large, derelict agricultural estate of Rio Frio, the project explores the current struggles surrounding the management of forest fires in Portugal. The project proposes a three-pronged attack: fire fighting and detection devices, refuges for people trapped by a forest fire and a radical approach to provide a sustainable, long-term solution –deforestation. Figs. 26.9 – 26.10 Cheung Hong Ivan Hung Y5, ‘The School of the Enigmatic’. This proposal for the LA river contains two schools, one teaching film and the other architecture. The two programmes wind around and through each other, splicing views and connections for ideas and people. Designed through intimate analysis of the films of Wong Kar Wai, the project is holistically developed through
filmic techniques and modes of representation. The spaces are designed from key views, composing textures, colours and depth of field in response to the luscious and enigmatic scenes constructed by Wong Kar Wai in In The Mood For Love Fig. 26.11 Carina Tran Y5, ‘The Allure Of Nostalgia’. The American Dream has been a staple of cultural representation for the last century; a hard to define aesthetic of nostalgia and compliance, control and aspiration, frequantly applied to both utopian and dystopian visions. This thought provoking sci-fi film satires the imagery and tropes we are so often encouraged to digest. The project proposes an academy for would be American dreamers, with a floating dream home as the prize for qualification.
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Figs. 26.12 & 26.15 – 26.19 Carl Pihlveus Y5, ‘Luliwa’. Science-fiction has predominantly been written by Western cultures. Middle Eastern cities, which have developed via rapid economic growth, appear on the surface inspired by Western visions of the future. Cultural and religious reasons have meant there are few Middle Eastern science-fiction idioms –the project therefore responds with strategic architectural devices, designed and reinterpreted from traditional, vernacular and symbolic architectural typologies. The project is manifested in a cinematic film which reimagines some of the most famous examples of Western science fiction. Figs. 26.13 – 26.14 Yan Yi Lee Y5, ‘The Quest for a New Utopia in Digital Society’. The project is a critique of the hedonistic digital world, where new forms of work, economic systems and
architecture have appeared. Human value has been lowered to fulfilling mundane tasks in order to fine tune artificial intelligence algorithms. Tangible currency no longer exists. This ironic future scenario shows the dark side of life and technology; it speculates how value is changed when the behaviours of individuals are recorded and backed up by a cloud system.
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Figs. 26.20 – 26.22 Songyang Zhou Y5, ‘The Ad-Runner’. Virtual Reality is an emerging habitable medium with different limitations and new possibilities to those of the world we normally inhabit. It is both a means of representing and a space to be experienced in its own right. This project explores how architecture can be created and experienced in virtual reality. Emerging from this research the virtual construct follows an imagined character, Ad-Runner, living in a future world where the virtual and real have merged.
Hyper-Architectures of Play
Simon Kennedy, Gabby Shawcross
Year 4
Juan Escudero Pablos, Ezer Han, Ivan Hung, Clara Lee, Yiran Ma, Miten Mistry, Henrik Pihlveus, Hannah Sargeant, Carina Tran, Songyang Zhou
Year 5
Cui (Bob) Chang, Qidan Chen, Grace Quah, Dionysis Toumazis
Thank you to our collaborators Jason Bruges and Adam Heslop of Jason Bruges Studio, film composer Kevin Pollard, screenwriter Andrew Gow of Raindog Films, designer and filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda, Kevin Haley of Aberrant Architecture
Thank you to Tim Sloan of Levitate Architects for Design Realisation support, and to Aran Chadwick of Atelier One for structural engineering consultations.
Thank you to: Pau Bajet, Jason Bruges (Jason Bruges Studio), Aran Chadwick (Atelier One), Hal Currey (HAL Architects), William Firebrace, Professor Stephen Gage, Alexis Germanos (3X Architects), Andrew Gow (Raindog Films), Kevin Haley (Aberrant Architects), Stephen Harty (Harty and Harty), Adam Heslop (Jason Bruges Studio), Ifigeneia Liangi, J-J Lorraine (Morrow Lorraine Architects), Keiichi Matsuda, Ana Monrabal-Cook (Roz Barr Architects), Kevin Pollard, Tim Sloan (Levitate Architects), Graeme Williamson (NORD)
Hyper-Architectures of Play
Simon Kennedy, Gabby ShawcrossPlay
This year the unit investigated play: the interplay between architecture and occupant, play in architecture and architecture in play.
We looked to play and games as culturally significant activities – spatial, relational human practices that can inform the design and production of architecture. We probed logic, interface, interaction, tactics and strategies to discover architectural potential in the ambiguity, modality, atmosphere and delight of games and play. Light and sound, colour, texture and temperature were brought into play. Dynamic structures reconfigured while digital surfaces observed and responded to our every move. The unit played their designs and designed ludic structures for their players.
Hyper-Architectures
We proposed ‘Hyper-Architectures’: those that were intensified, and those that responded to and created a reality above and beyond the present. Hybrid, combining the real and projected, they were time-based, energising the transitory, ephemeral and the emergent, actuating the dynamic, volatile and the variable. Interactive virtual technologies represent an as-yet ill-defined new cultural layer, which architects must use to their advantage. Intensification could occur in both physical and virtual planes, separately and/or simultaneously. Synthetic spaces are the present! (and the future!).
New Forms of Practice
Unit 26 is a film unit. Our aim is to explore the potential of the moving image to develop new forms of architectural practice. We create filmic architectures and architectural films that explore animated and augmented relationships between people and place. Predicated on the belief that architecture is experiential and time-based, we use cinematic techniques to investigate, simulate and speculate.
Our techniques include storyboards, stop-motion, hand-drawing, four-dimensional drawing, hyper-lapse, motion-matching, models and interactive mock-ups.
Workshops, Talks and Visits Unit 26 benefits from a broad network of associated professionals, whose contributions serve as a counterpoint to the conceptual and theoretical discourse within the unit, as well as providing inspiration and practical guidance.
This year, workshops introduced students to filmmaking principles and innovative techniques. Studio visits connected students to inspiring practitioners in the worlds of interactive art, architecture, film and gaming.
Fig. 26.1 Juan Escudero Pablos Y4, ‘Cockaigne Island ’. Recognising that shopping is (almost) all that is left of public space in the 21st century, Cockaigne Island is a new, aspirational super-mall. Offering an extreme vision of consumerism where everything that can be experienced is for sale, visitors are invited not only to spend, spend, spend but also to change their appearance, even their bodies. Retail units manifest as ever-changing exhibits that are constantly rebuilt and replaced in a theatrical spectacle of continuous profit.
Figs. 26.2 – 26.3 Dionysis Toumazis Y5, ‘Interreality’. Set in a transitional period between contemporary work culture and a post-work, post-scarcity near-future, the project proposes a new typology for housing virtual reality activities. Faced with vocational obsolescence, visitors to the building seek meaning
and change in their lives by digitally sampling other realities. The ‘Interreality’ experience places users in an interactive feedback loop between virtual and physical worlds, transforming their attitudes and behavioural patterns for the better. Figs. 26.4 – 26.5 Yiran Ma Y4, ‘The Museum Of Disappearing Landscapes’. The museum stores and curates digital data collected from endangered and rapidly changing sites around the globe. Using water spray projection, arrays of lasers and other holographic techniques, the museum translates the data into sophisticated new spatial journeys. Situated opposite the Royal Victoria Dock, the museum uses water from the Thames to create mist projections at a vast urban scale.
Fig. 26.6 Ivan Hung Y4, ‘Publicised Peace’. The project proposes the relocation of the UN Security Council to a busy site in Silvertown. Containing housing for the representatives, a Council chamber and library/archive, the scheme consists of a vividly transparent building. The structure publicises the internal activities on a vast, exterior digital display, presenting an iconic view to aircraft passing overhead, and allowing the public to move freely through the lower levels without compromising the security of its occupants. Fig. 26.7 Clara Lee Y4, ‘Brexit Negotiation Chamber’. The project proposes a floating structure, constructed at minimum cost and at furious pace, to house the ongoing Brexit negotiations. Featuring a debating chamber with public viewing platforms and broadcast facilities, maze-like forests secrete tiny, darkened meeting
rooms where the real negotiations take place. Constructed and initially located in Silvertown, the building can be towed anywhere in the world. Figs. 26.8 – 26.9 Songyang Zhou Y4, ‘Mirror’. Floating in the water next to the Excel Centre, the project recognises the power and increasing ubiquity of virtual reality devices, and proposes a new type of conference centre capable of bringing together occupants from all over the world. Remote users manifest as ‘avatars’ – floating drones that display facial characteristics of the remote user in real-time. The building creates new types of space that accommodate humans and avatars equally.
Fig. 26.10 Carina Tran Y4, ‘Escape From London’. A yoga retreat situated in the water near the Thames Barrier, the project contains a series of carefully sequenced spaces and walkways. Progression from one part of the structure to another takes time, hopefully engendering a sense of calm in the user. The building has an intimate relationship with the site and its tidal variations, sometimes allowing the water to flood the structure, causing parts to be submerged entirely, and cutting users off from the bank and the rest of the building.
Fig. 26.11 Henrick Pihlveus Y4, ‘Made In Silvertown’. Responding to the history of the site and seeking to reinvigorate a declining industry, the project proposes a boat building factory where professionals and unskilled members of the public can collaborate in the production of sophisticated
industrial objects. Film is specifically used as a tool to test the project, supported by time-based drawings. Fig. 26.12 Cui (Bob) Chang Y5, ‘CESDS’. The physical world is on the brink of a major technological breakthrough that will revolutionise the way architects conceive of space, closing the gap between the digital and the physical. The project imagines a near-future spatial design school merging the disciplines of architecture, game design and film effects, using the immersive technologies of augmented reality, virtual reality and holographic projection. These technologies are not only employed to develop and test designs, but are also used to display the designs to the general public, via an urban scale mixed-reality park and huge installation towers.
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Figs. 26.13 – 26.15 Qidan Chen Y5, ‘Wonderland’. Inspired by ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and its various interpretations in films and theme parks, the project proposes an inhabited bridge structure that spans the Royal Victoria Dock. Providing space for players of multiple game types, from croquet and tabletop games to video games and underwater chess, the building itself is experienced as a type of game, with access to lower, more complex levels only granted when players are successful in upper arenas. Fig. 26.16 Grace Quah Y5, ‘Silvertown Plug-In’. The project investigates the gendered division of domestic labour by exploring the spatial possibilities of automation. The design addresses the site of Silvertown as a remnant of industrialisation, examining the impact of labour on urban forms and the amount of work still undertaken in the
home. Capitalising on the untapped £1.1 trillion value of domestic labour to the UK economy, the project is a communal housing scheme that performs all necessary housework. Housing modules ‘plug in’ to an infrastructure of automated dishwashing, cooking and cleaning facilities as a critique of the role of technology in the design of the modern home. Through film, the building embodies mechanical as well as human-like qualities. As the traditional gendered sphere of ‘invisible’ work becomes visible, domestic chores become an urban, spatial performance.