THE NEW DOMESTICITY: FURNITURE ISSUE
The New Domesticity Project aims at rethinking domestic life in a living space, designing furniture that corresponds to this life in the broadest sense, in a conceptual way.
Furniture reveals its real possibilities of form and function when it is critically assessed as a supplier of function (fourniture) or ‘movables in a dwelling place’ (mobile), other than conventional archetypes such as tables, chairs, cupboards or sofas. Once the design of furniture is freed from a purely pragmatic perspective the designer is able to escape categonical/ paradigmatic congestions, and thereby elude the conventional and easy formulas of profess ionalism, to establish a mental and physical space of uniqe and unconstrained design activity. This project is based on the idea of going beyond the conventional tools and practices, benefiting from Istanbul’s co-existing pre-industrial, industrial, post-industrial manufacturing methods within a holistic perspective.
While exploring the critical position of furniture in both domestic and urban context and discussing the theoretical and historical background of the issue, a speculative domesticity took shape through a collective work with furniture and other elements. The project consists of four main phases; research, design, production and setup.
The thresholds just inside and just outside of the window form a small but critical living space inhabited for a short while by the resident(s). The window threshold becomes an interface of the relation between the resident -of a house mostly without a bay or balcony- and the outside World. Thus, looking at the window front/edge/threshold where the interior is about to end, and the exterior begin, has its possibilities. We can settle in this narrow space – A leftover of other furniture-, designing with and for the physical -curtain, window ledge, heater core…- and environmental -sound, light, heat, sight…- elements.
