Blanka Valcsicsák
Living Together The Grafton Centre is surrounded by a variety of historical terrace houses, and new micro-flat housing developments. It’s a domestic landscape which lacks identity, and fails to respond to the diversity of society. This context calls for a new approach to housing, which carries greater care towards the subject and scale of its architecture; because the housing crisis is not only a crisis of scarcity and affordability, but also of ideology. My proposal challenges ideas of domesticity and private ownership to imagine a spatial framework that allows new ways of living together to foster forms of solidarity and trust. By refusing to be dictated by economic transactions and exploitation, it is an architecture that instead finds meaning and value in social reciprocity, mutual aid and emancipation. In this house, there are no corridors; the rooms are not assigned rigid functions; and walls become more ephemeral. The spatial conditions that emerge blur the boundaries between work, domestic labour, socialisation, rest, and exchange, creating a space where the individual burdens of cleaning, cooking, and childcare are shared. This way of living is not meant for everyone, and might come with frictions. But are these frictions really something we should avoid? Through them, the house might lose its symbolic meaning as an individual place of shelter, refuge and comfort; and become instead a place of collective rituals. 56
