The houses that don’t exist: Openness in domestic modular systems

Abstract

The article sets out to revisit a series of projects published in the Italian magazine Domus from the mid-1950s and early 1970s which prompt a journey in the logical of systematic thinking explored through the way domestic interiors are composed and occupied. Through these examples, modular systems are explored as project/design strategies that dictate a thinking process “from the outside in” and “from the inside out”, that is, from architecture to furniture and from furniture to architecture and the city. Some of those projects were in an intermediate position between a highly industrialized and a standardized architecture that was beginning to absorb the autonomous systems developed from the field of cybernetics in the 1960s. Others were dealing with the acceleration of industrialization and sought to reverse, control, and incorporate aspects of differentiation within serialization. Finally, the last examples reveal the ways in which the furniture absorbed the abstract order of the grid and freed itself from architecture by proposing different versions of “houses that don’t exist” and proclaiming and defending positions like “ambiguity” as a field with the potential to articulate this dialectic.