Liquid Domesticity

This thesis looks at how cities have evolved over time, showing how they reflect changes in values, beliefs, and technology. By exploring the symbiotic relationship between architecture and urbanism, the study delves into how design principles shape and are shaped by urban dynamics, particularly in suburbia in Porto, at the site of an old existing slaughterhouse.

The most important feature of the suburbs was the strict separation of life and work and the full privatisation of domestic labor as the housewives' responsibility. Suburbs in Europe today are in steep decline as both social and environmental constructs. The Liquid Domesticity is a project that challenges the status of suburbs and rethinks their future as a cooperative settlement for living and working.
The project puts forward a new live-work housing prototype for artists, workers, and freelancers in the industrial suburban neighbourhood of Matadouro in Porto. By reorganising domestic functions into a highly specific cabinet of living and labor, the generic character of the home is reclaimed. A collective dwelling is proposed, in which every adult is provided with a minimum but adequate, independent habitable room, where all domestic services such as cooking and housekeeping would be collectivised, supported by shared domestic facilities for living and working. Liquid Domesticity is a project for political recognition!

While there is no easy way to offer the best form of communal living in today society, the project's goal is to shed light on a probable strategy that it can be test to get us there. I hope to show the role of communal and being collectivised, in which a new urban typology visioned, rooted in trust and community benefit, where the environment is constantly re-invented through the potentials of the everydayness and mysterious ordinary of our life.

Text von Javad Mahsefat.