Domesticity and Leisure: Radical Architectures.

Abstract

Our society's ongoing social, cultural, and climate changes are shifting how people experience domestic and leisure environments. The influence of the counterculture led by the turbulence of various social movements and the climate crisis are among the factors leading to the emergence of new lifestyles, relationships, and activities that are conditioning how we design and build new architectures. Domesticity and leisure are fast and inexorably merging and changing. House is a mental territory that extends into the broader context of the city, with leisure driving these actions. The domestic environment is adapting many of its uses and spaces to new technification of forms where Architecture and its identity are changing, evolving into a hybrid environment difficult to define. This paper follows the works of the Italian Radical Architects “Global Tools” (1973-75), set against the background of discussions in periods of energy crisis, rapid population growth, and climate imbalance; the paper reviews the design of domesticity and leisure through radical lenses. What might be their future, and how could we retool the discipline of Architecture as a kind of echo of a too rapidly forgotten historical moment?