DIDACTICS OF CARE. Choreographies in the domestic space
This pedagogical experience seeks to transform the world into a place where care-related activities and dayly life occupy the physical and social space they deserve.
First, students become aware of the relationships between body and space through phenomenological exercises. Afterwards, they do housing projects, for which they are provided with indicators to self-assess the adaptation of their proposals to carrying out household chores individually or as a community.
Local
Spain
{Empty}
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As an individual in partnership with other persons
First name: Patricia Last name: Reus Gender: Female Nationality: Spain Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: CL ANTONIO TORRECILLAS, 1, 3B Town: Murcia Postal code: 30003 Country: Spain Direct Tel:+34 655 61 87 08 E-mail:patricia.reus@upct.es Website:https://personas.upct.es/perfil/patricia.reus
The cultural and social nature of the genre has influenced the design and use of spaces. This construction of the space has been impregnated with imposed roles and has been stereotyped based on the activities that are carried out in them.
This teaching innovation program is an example of critical pedagogy in architecture as a commitment to transform the world into a more just and equal place in which activities related to care occupy the physical and social space they deserve. In addition, housework entails a more intense relationship with space than other activities carried out in the home. Everything happens in immediate relation to the human body and its measurements, which requires greater attention to "detail": the location of the food, the work tools, the furniture, which is why it seems essential to train students in the observation of the dimensions and relationships that will be consolidated inside the house to complete the education in a discipline that deals with well-being in the inhabited space.
• We recognize care as an essential part of life.
• We identify a series of parameters that make it possible to visualize imbalances, inequalities or even subordination in the use of domestic rooms.
• We try to make this choreography of care work comfortably.
• We seek to project inclusive habitats that allow the socialization of domestic work since the home is the place where the path to coexistence begins and the
entity that perpetuates behaviours.
Teaching Innovation
Gender Perspective
Housing
Methodological approach
Architectural project
Patriarchy and capitalism have fed the fantasy of individuality. The concept of value has been reduced to price, cutting all relationships with nature and care, through a whole cultural project aimed at dominating the Earth and other living beings. This vision, which prioritizes the economy and productivity above all other spheres of life, has ended up conditioning the entire social structure and has made us forget our interdependence.
This teaching project in architecture is based on the certainty that an ethic of care is necessary to inculcate the contributory economy in technological education as a praxis that offers new ways of understanding and addressing the challenges of the 21st century, and that concern all aspects of daily life.
We take care of ourselves, we take care of our own, we take care of others, and we take care of the planet.
This focus on ecofeminist theories in the architectural design classroom tries to generalize the idea that care is the most essential work in the face of patriarchal and uncontrolled developmentalism that has postponed tasks related to care to the private sphere, non-productive and directly secondary.
The entitled domestic work involves the maintenance of daily life, so providing them with quality spaces is as important to maintain the rest of the paid work as the suitability of the productive spaces themselves.
The objective of this learning approach is not only to draw the attention of future architects to the issue of care but also to offer them a methodological tool that can be used as a guide to design egalitarian spaces that improve the quality of life of their inhabitants, making them more functional and inclusive for all.
Faced with traditional, hierarchical and historically designed models from a conception of care tasks as something invisible and underestimated, it is time to diversify solutions, experiment with new designs and includes care functions without complexes in the design of domestic spaces.
Statistics confirm that while for men the house is a space for rest; For women, it has been, and remains, a workplace in which she has held the responsibility of turning it into a comfortable space for others in a practically invisible and therefore unnoticed way.
The truth is that most of the homes we inhabit have been designed from a traditional perspective of the way of inhabiting and approaching daily life. So, tasks related to care have been relegated to residual spaces, with worse spatial quality, badly oriented, with poor lighting and/or far from the central places of the house, which has helped to make them invisible. For this reason, teaching how to approach the design of our homes from a gender perspective is essential to project spaces, in order not to reproduce oppression and structural inequalities. In addition, this approach collaborates in making domestic chores a less heavy burden for the people who perform them.
For this teaching innovation project, the scale of domestic architecture has been chosen as a pedagogical object for two reasons. The first one is found in the conception of the house as a "shell of family prejudices (...) formed over millennia" (Trotski, 2012, p. 35), cited in the opening pages of Atxu Amann's doctoral thesis "The domestic space: The woman and the house” (Amann, 2005, p.5). The second is enunciated by Zaida Muxí in her book “Women, houses and cities. Beyond the threshold”: “Because the house is the place of the first socialization and it is also where the first relationships between genders develop” (Muxí, 2018, p.26). Both approaches, the home as an entity that perpetuates behaviours and, at the same time, the place where the path towards equality coexistence begins, makes us consider pertinent the study of housing as the original cell of an approach that can be extended to the territorial scale.
Up to now, architecture training in Europe has drawn from the sources of the most radical modernity, sublimating aesthetic value and technological achievement moving away from more humanist approaches. In the mid-20th century, voices such as Team 10 called attention to the value of memory and context in modern architecture. In this sense, today it is also important to offer dissident discourses that provide a perspective on architectural production sensitive to the challenges of the present and one of them is the ethics of care.
Training architects who are sensitive and capable of dealing with the production/renovation of housing in these terms will produce a positive impact in this direction.
The initiative carried out in the classroom corresponds to the commitment and interest of the teachers involved. It is currently being evaluated by the Polytechnic University of Cartagena to receive support as a Teaching Innovation Project, support that will allow the consolidation of the experience and will facilitate the dissemination of this initiative among the rest of the university community. Likewise, an effort is being made to communicate the methodology that has already been published in specialized media with international impact such as INVI Magazine edited by the Housing Institute of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Chile. And it has been presented at the seminar Aesthetics of Care and Circular Economies of Design of the European Culture and Technology Lab whose mission is to:
• Promote trans/multi-disciplinarity within the European University
• Integrate research on the humanities and social sciences into the overall research of the European University
• Create a critical mass in research in the arts, humanities and social sciences within the European university.
This educational initiative with a will to transform arises from the study of reality from a gender perspective that is based on the contributions made by numerous authors and from different disciplines. These contributions are based on concepts and practices historically developed to a great extent by women and feminism.
The elaboration of this methodology has been supported by the critical work that for decades has been carried out not only in the field of feminism and architecture but also around modernity, postmodernity, consumerism or globalization. These multiple and convergent approaches lay the foundations for a position aligned with ecodependence, interdependence and reactions to the existential anguish typical of the liquid society in which we are immersed (Bauman, 2000, p.192). It is through these approaches that we move towards the generating idea that supports this exploration of a methodology that facilitates criteria for an architecture that is an accomplice in care tasks. An understanding of reality from a feminist, intersectional point of view and committed to a validation system in which the underestimated reproductive and own spheres, the care of others and ourselves are included (Muxí, 2018, 23). All this is not only a feminist claim but also a practice involved in the construction of complicity in the face of individualism that plagues contemporary societies. In fact, reference authors such as Silvia Federici began to question gender stereotypes years ago, but also the value of productive work over reproductive work. After the rejection of domestic work as the natural destiny of women, extended during the period that followed the Second World War, they began to claim the importance of reproductive tasks as the sustenance of life (Federici, 2013, p. .19). "Care work is the most essential there is" (Federici, 2020).
The intervention carried out by Andrés Jaque in the Barcelona Pavilion commissioned by the Mies van der Rohe Foundation in 2012 reflects the spirit of the proposal. That intervention laid at different points of the Pavilion an important part of the objects that are kept in its basement. A basement that has never attracted the attention of those who visit or study it and to which, however, Jaque recognizes an important role in the emergence of his architecture as a social construction.
The team in charge of the reconstruction of the Pavilion of 29 thought that the basement would facilitate the registration and maintenance of its facilities; In the basement, they ended up keeping all those materials needed to reinterpret every day the morning of May when the Pavilion was inaugurated in 1929. The basement contains everything that allows us to see the Pavilion as a perfect and timeless construction. This installation is a good metaphor for the approach that we try to address in the subject since it confronts us with a two-story architecture, in which two interdependent notions of the political dispute. A luminous upper floor, in which the extraordinary, the origins and the essences assume the entire space of perception and reflection; and a dark basement, which builds this reality every day in an invisible and undemanding way, 'the exceptional emerges in the absence of the ordinary'.
This intervention was based on the suspicion that the recognition and re-articulation of the two spheres can provide new possibilities in which architecture finds answers to contemporary challenges. This is the path followed by this subject that introduces attention to daily chores in architecture classrooms, seeking a response to the challenge of the consensual distribution of invisible domestic tasks and their participation in equitable terms in the temporal and spatial distribution that each person makes of his time.
Apart from the cultural and social differences that qualify daily behaviours in schedules, customs and relationships, daily life and domestic chores are intrinsic to human coexistence. We eat, clean, store our belongings, etc.
This methodology which is born from a feminist claim but is based on the observation of the integral reality seeks dignified treatment in spatial terms and the socialization of domestic chores.
For this, it is based on a methodology whose parts are easily replicable. On the one hand, the observation and understanding of the problem through action. On the other, the guided reaction with the help of a self-assessment system that questions the students about the response that their exercises can offer to these questions. This questionary can evolve, specify and adapt to the realities in which the schools are located.
Didactic unit 1
Faced with the eminently visual conception with which architecture has traditionally been disseminated, many authors recognize that the human body is the essential link between architecture and our existence. In recent times, these ideas have placed body-environment interaction at the centre of the pathway through which humans experience, perceive, and learn about the world.
Phenomenological exercises are proposed through which students experience with their bodies the relationships that we establish with the urban and architectural space while doing domestic chores.
Mapping of everyday life_Paella: In groups of 3-4 people the purchase is made, the ingredients are stored and paella is prepared to finally taste it.
The exercise presents two scales, on the one hand, the urban scale will tell us if our environment has local shops or if, on the contrary, it is necessary to travel excessive distances or even have a vehicle to supply ourselves. If the routes are pleasant, if they allow you to combine this task with others of daily life, if there is neighbourhood recognition, if they are attractive, stimulating... etc.
On the other hand, the scale of the house is observed and the adequacy of the space and the furniture available for the task of cooking and sharing a meal comfortably and communally is analyzed.
Didactic unit 2
After going through the experience of inhabiting the city and the house, we went on to project a collective housing building, which fosters a complex urban experience, as well as being attentive to the demands of daily life, care and climate emergency.
To do this, theoretical sessions are added to the work of critical review of the projects, in which, in addition to offering knowledge about the issues to be dealt with in the project, sustainability, memory, atmospheres, an evaluation system of home care is offered to guide the student decisions.
This project seeks to integrate the SDGs in the classroom by showing a learning experience linked to equality, equity and well-being. This last concept is understood from the perspective of authors such as Amartya Sen or Martha Nussbaum, that is, in what we are capable of doing and being and the personal satisfaction that each one feels in his life.
The pedagogical action seeks to train students aware of the paradigm shift that involves understanding care as an essential part of a full life and, therefore, abandoning the secondary role that they have traditionally had in architecture.
For this, two didactic units are carried out focused on:
Convey the criteria for an architecture complicit in care tasks:
Provide students with tools to create appropriate spaces for the tasks of caring for others and for oneself, valuing attention to daily life as an essential part of productivity. Faced with traditional, hierarchical and historically designed models from a conception of care tasks as something invisible and underestimated, it is time to diversify solutions, experiment with new designs and includes care functions in the design of domestic spaces without complexes.
Evaluate, make visible and counteract imbalances:
Initiate students in the construction of inclusive habitats that allow the socialization of the reproductive sphere of life and the elimination of hierarchies that perpetuate outdated models, through the introduction of a self-assessment tool with which to validate the design of egalitarian and consistent housing with a multidimensional approach to reality.
For this, a series of parameters have been identified that make it possible to visualize imbalances, inequalities or even subordination in the use of domestic rooms.
This pedagogical approach began in the 2020 academic year with the realization of the TFG by the student Marta Camacho, who finished her studies with honours.
During the years 2021 and 2022, the work carried out has been disclosed in the:
• I International Feminist Congress of Architecture and Care_Spain
• INVI Magazine (SJR-Q1)_Chile
• I Seminar on Collective Housing of the Tecnológico de Monterrey_Méjico
• I Seminar Aesthetics of Care and Circular Economies of Design of the European Laboratory of Culture and Technology
The method developed in the TFM has been transformed into a classroom methodology in 2023 and has been practised for the first time in the first semester with third-year architecture students.
The first pieces of evidence have been the following:
• The marks of the students have been much higher than those of previous years at the same level.
• The student's class attendance has been much higher than in previous years.
• A questionnaire has been carried out among the students that have revealed two fundamental questions:
o The good reception of the initiative
o The great distance that exists between the conception that students have of architecture and the tasks of daily care
