Circulation of home-emotions: The critique of architecture through reality TV

Abstract

This paper reveals how a popular UK reality TV programme Your Home Made Perfect mobilises emotions to challenge conceptualisations of architecture while simultaneously reinforcing regressive ideas of race, class and sexuality. Drawing on our thematic analysis of fourteen episodes of Your Home, the paper shows how architectural entertainment is uniquely positioned through the use of VR technology, to generate and mobilise client emotions, towards critique. This includes the critique of architectural drawings and the power imbalances of architect-client relationships. We trace how ‘happy’ emotions are tied to being able to read architectural visualisations through virtual reality (VR) rather than the ‘sad’ emotion enforced by traditional architectural forms of communication; how positive emotions fostered through care-in-action attach to the architecture and home. By foregrounding clients' emotional responses to the redesign of their homes by architects, the paper reveals architectural entertainment programmes as popular and powerful forms of architectural critique that nonetheless simultaneously reinforce exclusionary social logics that limits owner-occupation for the white middle class. In so doing, this paper contributes to unpacking both the emotional value of architecture and how this complex form of taste-making occurs within popular culture, that is, conveying to people the place of architecture within society.