How to dwell when you don’t have a dwelling

How to dwell when you don’t have a dwelling is a piece of research work with two parallel readings born of two different motivations: the desire to take an in-depth look at the concept of a dwelling and the action of dwelling, and the need to study the ability of design to provide a solution to the problem of homelessness in Barcelona.

The work starts from the premise that a dwelling is configured by two superimposed discourses: the discourse of habitability and the discourse of domesticity. The first concerns the physical conditions of this habitable space, while the second deals with the series of symbolic relationships that are created between the subjects and this space inhabited. We could say that the first enables houses and the second creates homes.

This debate about the separate worlds that make up the imaginary of house and the imaginary of home leads subsequently to the field of the homeless, a specific case that enables us to study the meaning of these concepts for people who have neither one nor the other. It also allows us to set out specific guidelines on the basis of which the ability of design to operate in each of the spheres that comprise the dwelling can be seen.

Having detected the relationship of inequality that the habitability of domesticity form design poses, the task of the research focuses on proposing three different methodological tools that can operate from domesticity with the aim of making a claim for its importance in the design of domestic spaces.

The first tool in this manual is The Needs Matrix, an expansion of the needs programme in terms of concepts that need to be taken into account and incorporating the time variable. The second, The Metaphor as Generator of Spaces, seeks to study the ability of this tool as a vehicle for treating and translating into space the personal transformation that the homeless live when they are placed in an interior space. Finally, the last tool, Dialogues Between the Architecture and the Subject, is in response to the desire to draw up a list of essential elements in the creation of any space, however, not seen from habitability, but analysed and treated with the eyes of domesticity.

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