Professor Barbara Penner

Barbara Penner is a Professor in Architectural humanities at the BartleH School of Architecture, UCL. She is author of Bathroom (2013) and Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America (2009). She is the co-editor of Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects (2021), Sexuality and Gender at Home (2017), Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009), and Gender Space Architecture (Routledge, 2000). She contributed the foreword to the reissued classic Modern Housing by leading American houser (1934; republished, 2020). She is a contributing editor to the online journal Places for which she has most recently written on t.v. chef, Julia Child’s kitchens and how they inspired the Universal Design movement. Other recent essays and chapters explore the Austrian Jewish female émigré architect, Ella Briggs, the home engineer Lillian Gilbreth, and the nineteenth-century bestseller author, Fanny Fern.

Ella Briggs: Domestic Exile, Domestic Reconstruction

‘Our optimism, indeed, is admirable, even if we say so ourselves.’ – Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’ (1943).

This talk approaches the theme of ‘Domesticity under Siege’ both literally and laterally, through the themes of exile and reconstruction, dislocation and resilience, loss and hope.

Our guide to these themes is the Austrian Jewish refugee architect, Ella Briggs (1880-1977). Briggs was one of the first women to receive professional training in architecture in Germany. She established a very successful practice in Vienna and then Berlin, when the rise of the Nazis forced her into exile in England, aged 56.  Briggs experienced siege in a literal way: she was forced from her home and homeland, like so many others during World War II. This talk follows what happened to Briggs after, in her precarious exile in England, as she sought to rebuild her life. But Briggs, as a housing architect, also directly engaged the question of how to reconstruct the domestic lives of others: what would a more resilient form of postwar domesticity look like?

This talk will move between Briggs’s personal and professional activities, examining the individual and collective construction of domesticity. The example of Briggs allows us to trace the experience of domesticity in exile, which is very distinct from the cosy, stable and normalizing version of domesticity this conference seeks to destabilize. Rather it is built accretively, on a foundation of displacement and loss. Yet, as Briggs also demonstrates, this experience of exiled domesticity can also become productive, folding back to influence the rethinking and reconstruction of collective forms of living.

Professor Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press), on the spatial politics, visual rhetoric, ecologies, and long colonial traditions of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. She is the author of Minnette De Silva: Intersections (Mack Books), and her book manuscript Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva analyzes the politics of heritage environments through the work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier. Siddiqi is the editor of Architecture as a Form of Knowledge and co-editor of Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration and Spatial Violence.

The Domesticity of Enclosures – From Camp to Commons and Beyond

From the scale of the dwelling to the scale of the state, the domestic interior is founded upon the principle of enclosure. The enclosure of land, a legal practice inaugurated through seventeenth-century English parliamentary acts of private property creation, has formed a territorial logic, itself conditioning diverse domesticities. This talk opens ways to imagine contradictions in this logic of enclosure, in particular, through the camp. Thinking with forces of itinerant mobility and collective inhabitation in historically- and culturally-specific settings that draw on yearslong research on the refugee camps at Dadaab, Kenya, this talk examines how originary violations of land find form in successive enclosures. Through aesthetic practices in the exhibition Dadaab Commons, this talk reimagines the camp in a speculation on the commons: questioning the problematic root of each in the enclosure, and the domesticities it contains.

Professor Suzie Attiwill

Dr Suzie Attiwill is Professor of Interior Design, School of Architecture & Urban Design, RMIT University, Australia. She has degrees in Interior Design, Art History, Indian Studies and Weaving. Research is conducted through practice and experiments with new productions of interior and interiority in relation to modes of living, inhabitation, subjectivity and pedagogy. Collaborative research projects include urban + interior an international publication; beyond building with the Australian Childhood Trauma Group; Abacus Learning Centre for children on the autism spectrum. Suzie has published widely and supervises PhD candidates as part of RMIT Practice Research Symposium in Melbourne, Barcelona and Saigon.

“Could interior be thought ….”

Picking up the beginning of proposition from an essay by Mark Taylor – Architecture + Interior: A roam of one’s own, 2001 – and continuing it here as a line – a line of thinking, a ritornello/refrain through the territory of domesticity. I read Mark’s text back in 2001 and have returned to it, and him, over the passing years and decades in conversation with my thinking and writing. A connection and shared problematic that one values deeply; this is different to a reference and act of citation. While we took off on different lines of flight, Mark’s proposition resonated and continues to resonate with my thoughts in which I repose ‘interior’ inspired by encounters with ideas of Deleuze and Guattari. The invitation of this conference continues this refrain.

Domesticity is always under siege. As an environment associated with maintaining a sense of home, it is created through processes and practices to ensure stability and familiarity. Interiors are domesticated environments; they are places where the exterior and outside forces have been slowed down, organised, selected and arranged into a spatio-temporal composition that enables inhabitation. In a sense extending the idea of domesticity to domestication – interior designing as a process of taming exterior forces. These ideas effect a skewing of the framing of interior as necessarily enclosed space, and re-frames interior as a relational dynamic with/in an exterior. While the binary/dialectical either/or dynamic produced by interior/exterior space is part of this refrain, other potentials emerge as the concept of interior is opened in an outside.

A collection of ideas that re-pose interior in relation with exterior will be presented to problematises the concepts of interior and domesticity. Could ‘interior’ be thought of as a dynamic relation to/with/in the outside and how forces of power and possession are implicated. And in doing so, situate domesticity as a practice of interior designing in a milieu of planetary and posthuman concerns.