An Extended Family

We are relating in new ways. We are living alone, unmarried, childless (or childfree, if you prefer), and for longer. We are living with our partners’ children, with strangers and siblings, with multiple generations in the same home, with more fluid understandings of gender and domestic roles and work and love. We are reconfiguring and even leaving behind fundamental Western ideas of family—as genetic ties, as a safe haven from the world, as a building block of society.

These new forms of arrangement have become normal almost without us noticing; powerful myths of family are shifting beneath our feet, even as politicians continue to invoke them. In the 20th century, the single-family home was the most obvious site of architecture’s engagement with ideas of family, often a certain, static idea of family. But what have been key moments of change in conceptions of the family as expressed in architecture? And how can architecture accommodate kinship beyond the traditional family?

On June 2, the CCA premieres a virtual event, What, if not the family?, that brings together multidisciplinary perspectives around these fault lines. Like a television news show, the program includes presentations by architects, designers, and artists whose work points to ways architecture might equip itself to address shifting ideas of family, or the new relationships and networks that might take its place. 

The artist and filmmaker Miranda July will share how she creates families in film. The architects Grace Morlock and David Neustein, of Other Architects, will present their approaches to subverting the suburbs. Elena Schütz, Julian Schubert, and Leonard Streich, of Something Fantastic, will propose that we rethink how we use apartments during the day and the night. The designers Edit Collective will tell us about their concept of “gross domestic product.” And the artist Marisa Morán Jahn and the architect Rafi Segal will explain their work for Carehouse Baltimore. Other special guests include the activist Nahira Gerster-Sim and the architects Frida Escobedo, Kumiko Inui, Johanna Hurme (5468796 Architecture), and Emanuel Admassu (AD-WO). The event will be streamed on the CCA YouTube channel and on Facebook.

The conversation continues through July 15 in the lecture series An Extended Family. As part of the series, earlier this month, Jamie Jacobs has traced the invention of the family room, and Wendy Gamber reread boarding houses, the urban antithesis of the single-family home.

This Thursday, May 27, Valentina Davila discusses recent policies in Venezuela that aimed to reconfigure the relationship between domestic labourers, marginalized workers who typically live in their employers’ homes, and domestic space. In coming weeks, Naomi Stead will seek out radical families (June 25); Sophie Lewis will swim in the gestational workplace (July 8); and Frida Escobedo will open a door to domestic quarters (July 15).

On June 10, the conversation Designing intimacy, now? explores what urban and architectural ideas emerge in response to the current moment of tension between desires for social connection and desires for greater individual security. In conversation with CCA Director Giovanna Borasi, Dustin Couzens and Ben Klumper of MoDA, Betsy and Shane Williamson of Williamson Williamson, and Estelle Le Roux Joky and Pascal Huynh of Village Urbain, will discuss questions of collectivity, privacy, and economy. The event is presented in collaboration with the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC).

The lecture series is part of Catching Up with Life, a year-long CCA project that recognizes how slow architecture has been to react to the societal shifts defining life today. Through web issues, a publication, an exhibition, and programs like these, the project asks how architecture and urbanism can better respond to contemporary questions related to family, love, friendship, work, labour, governance, ownership, debt, consumerism, fertility, death, time, retirement, automation, and digital omnipresence—among other topics that require our attention.

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