In a world of change we cling to constants that comfort us while catastrophes lure behind cut corners. We compartmentalize and channel our focus into cones of concentration when confronted with choices. Many might decide to do so with intention while others simply try to cope with the complexities. While we are no strangers to change, this current historical conjuncture presents extremities and emergencies that invite conjecture on normalcy and its fragility, challenges to status quos and rapid adaptation to revised realities.
As everyday life is turned on its head, the home remains a physical and metaphorical locus of our greatest aspirations and deepest anxieties. A performative and pervasive space where fictions become realities and rearranging furniture and fixtures constitutes political acts with planetary consequences. Today’s dense time offers us glimpses of a myriad of hybridized and alternative modes of domesticity that demand our shared attention and careful critical inquiry before they are once again lost to routine.
I, Like Many Things is a story of contemporary life and architecture that begins with everyday domestic practices and the notion of “home” as a literal (and literary) space—a space which simultaneously structures and is structured by our relationship to each other and the world. To tell this story, twenty-six authors from far-flung fields and geographies collectively narrate four fluid chapters of a thick history of the present.
Across four chapters and three visual catalogs, I, Like Many Things presents anecdotal stories, fictions, academic research, poetry, and visual essays. One chapter explores nascent and invasive virtual worlds. Another hones in on ongoing ecological collapse and climate disaster. A third chapter finds ground in social movements and political organizing, while a fourth ponders selfhood, imagination, and the possibilities of “off-time.” As timely distractions between chapters, catalogs present past inquiries by us and open call participants.
I, Like Many Things is for those to whom the pandemic was an exercise in spatial design. Those who consider themselves architects or designers and those who do not. Those of us who engage with, push back on, and negotiate the spaces we inhabit, consciously or unaware, expanding our collective field of action. I, Like Many Things insists on the critical interdependencies of all social, political, and environmental struggles, and attempts to maneuver ambiguities, complexities, imaginaries, and chaos as stepping stones toward more integrative and sensitive spatial practices. It can be read as an unreliable guide to alternative ways in many directions.
With contributions by Kyriacos Christofides, Meera Badran, Francesco Casetti, Stefano Masserini, Raqs Media Collective, Rachael Marie Scicluna, Michelle Millar Fisher, Lee Scrivner, Kathryn-kay Johnson, Nathalie Frankowski, Cruz García, Zachariah A. Michielli, Adonis Archontides, Jennifer C. Nash, Simone C Niquille, Simon Strøyer, Patricia Domínguez, Athar Mufreh, Joshua Tan, Luísa Sol, Nikolaj Schultz, Ellen Blumenstein, Markus Miessen, Pinar Yoldas, Deirdre Barrett, Oxana Timofeeva, Martina Potlach, Shahla Alharthi, Leidy Karina Gomez Montoya, Andrea Sanchez Moctezuma, Rachel Ghindea, Athiba Balasubramanian, Konstantinos Ballis, Abhishek Ambekar, Katie Colford, William Beck, David Bruce, Dhruv Gulabchande, Edgar Papazian, Andrew Economos Miller, Chase Ireland, Anthony Iovino, Giada Puccinelli, Pete Pham, Sofia Guzman, Nick Massarelli, Sangji Han, Ethan Lethander, Helen Farley, Megan Panzano, Drew Doyle, Alondra Correa, Renata Cesar, Michelle Nguyen, Christina Zhang, Michelle Bunch, Rukshan Vathupola, Matthew Liu, Anishwar Tirupathur, Mari Kroin, Montgomery Balding, Jessica Jie Zhou , Miguel Astete, Hoby Horak, Benjamin Tan, Tarranum Akhter, Jonathan Bolch, André Caetano, Katie Lau, Elias Vera Carrion, Nathan Garcia, Morgan Anna Kerber, Yanara Formandoy, Rhea Schmid, Olivia Epstein, Abby Sandler, Shreya Suman, Robbin Juris, Viet Nguyen, Katharine Blackman, Rachel Skof, Christina Anastase, Kaitlin Baker, Deirdre Plaus, Tyler Krebs, Aaron Payne, Lisann Mahnke, Sofia Alfaro Pailacura, Araceli Lopez
“In the search for a spatial politics of liberation, anti-capitalist imaginaries render another form of home as the ultimate challenge to the Modernist dream of the house as a machine for living, which was turbo-accelerated during and after the global pandemic of COVID-19. The interruption of the symbolic separation of dwelling (to use a Corbusian term) and work, is the ultimate acceptance that the boundary that kept the tidal wave of extraction from flooding the home was never real. Working from home is nothing new; it has always been what domestic labor is all about. Closer to the plantation, where the domestic sphere didn’t quite exist (slaves were laborers, and their dwellings not much more than human storage for minimal rest to maintain the cycles of exploitation), the post-colonial condition dissipates whatever illusory distinction remains between house and work. Where the planetary wretched once had to take care of the domestic chores, there is no longer a place to hide for the global majority. The metropolis is the plantation. Work is everywhere, and home is nowhere.”
— Excerpt from the essay “Manifesto for a Lazy Home” by Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia, WAI Architecture Think Tank
