This chronicle is a quick walk through the production and contemporary representation of domestic space. Unlike other periods of the past century, the current scene is characterized by an ever growing heterogeneity of interests and procedures. Our aim here is to come up with a useful image of the attitudes that have generated channels of work in the domestic sphere, and to point out emerging behaviors. In sum, the idea is to extract from the present panorama a series of practical conclusions that would enable us to re-think the manner in which we go about defining it. This run-through will be necessarily circumstantial and deliberately incomplete – a state of the question, so to speak, or an instantaneous summary.

The past years have seen a superabundance of texts, publications, congresses and monographs devoted to domestic space. Archilab 2001, one of the recent events dedicated to housing (or more specifically, new forms of living), endeavored to present those practices most intensely in line with the latest research, and can serve as a reduced model of reality and the themes, tools and interests that contemporary practice is putting to work...[+]