Open House: Designing Spaces for Living

Looking beyond the popular fascination with trendy tiny houses, this book is a much-needed, substantial contribution to international debates about temporary housing.
 
The phenomenon of tiny houses fascinates as much as designing a home and is currently trending in various media. Yet interest in this architectural form is often superficial, driven by fantasies and lifestyle trends. In times of large migratory movements due to climate change, conflicts, or poverty and lack of economic prospects, however, there is an urgent demand for new types of temporary shelter. Open House discusses the topic of temporary housing in architecture, art, design, and humanitarian aid. Eighteen international authors explore the intentions behind such constructions, their underlying principles, and the lifestyle they convey. Their contributions reveal how these concepts relate to the very notion of habitat, to space, to pragmatic criteria, as well as to the time in which they are elaborated. Moreover, they address various issues of individual housing through the featured original installations and spatial experiments.
 
OpenHouse is published in conjunction with a two-year research project and an open-air exhibition of the same title in Geneva in summer 2022. Together, the book and exhibition comprise around forty designs by artists, architects, designers, architecture schools, research institutions, and humanitarian organizations, such as Andrea Zittel, Anupama Kundoo, Atelier van Lishout, Bruce Nauman, Carla Juaçaba, EPFL Laboratoire ALICE, Frida Escobedo, Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zurich, Jean Prouvé, John Armleder, Kengo Kuma, Kerim Seiler, Matti Suuronen, Maurizio Cattelan and Philippe Parreno, the UNHCR, and others.

Simon Lamunière is a curator based in Geneva and director of the Open House project and exhibition in 2021–22. He has previously been engaged in large-scale projects such as the Art Unlimited art fair (Basel), the Domaine du Muy (Le Muy, France), the Neon Parallax (Geneva), the eleventh Swiss sculpture exhibition Utopics (Biel/Bienne), and the documenta X website.