Domestic Boundaries: Defining Space in Temporal Urban Interiors

Alyssa Kuhns

With more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas and with this number expected to rise over the next 50 years, the demand for housing is ever-pressing. Due to financial and spatial limitations, urban dwellers are more willing to live in unconventional housing situations that redefine domestic boundaries, both physical and mental, within the home.

Urban residents mark territory within their homes through a variety of methods. In the case of rental units, which are most prevalent in large urban areas, tenants have less control over their fixed environment and rely on objects to form impermanent boundaries. As the elements that define spatial boundaries become more associated with the architecture, they become more permanent. The most permanent and effective element is the partition wall. However, the qualities that make the wall successful at facilitating static separation are the same qualities that make it unaccommodating to changing trends in domestic convention.

In the home, physical interaction with the wall is limited. Its location, often predetermined by someone who will never occupy the space, restricts movement and dictates routine. The wall cannot be altered by its urban occupants, which creates a temporal quality to the idea of home. To ‘move’ a wall means to destroy it and rebuild it. Therefore, its permanency creates inflexibility to its ever-changing occupant.

By investigating ways domestic boundaries can adjust to accommodate a multitude of functions and users, this research brings Stewart Brand’s idea of ‘loose fit, long life’ to a different environmental scale: the urban interior. Collected through photographic documentation of urban domestic interiors and analyzed through diagrammatic studies, this research explores existing relationships between urban dwellers and spatial boundaries and proposes solutions to how boundaries, in particular partition walls, can be re-imagined to allow domestic interiors to response to changing conventions.

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