Home in a Box: A Feminist Critical Spatial Practice to Speculate on a Careful CAAD in The Home

The inevitability of Computer-Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) in architectural practices leads architects to imagine the homes they design as contained in and constrained by the three- dimensional digital models they produce. This process is often highlighted as efficient, rational and certain, yet produces ‘empty homes’. Although inhabitants are co-producers and potential users of similar CAAD technologies themselves, architects’ empty home representations imagine them (the inhabitants) as invisible. Moreover, these represented homes lack a domestic narrative and reinforce the discourse which locates CAAD as beyond the inhabitants’ capability. I critique this lack of embodied narrative as symptomatic of the way CAAD and its practices are configured. The thesis explores an alternative by introducing design as a situated practice where the designer is held accountable for the knowledge they claim and a tool to critique/challenge the status quo design cultures. It offers a methodology that creates and initiates a dialogue about CAAD and domesticity from within home (and beyond architectural practice), especially as experienced through the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, I propose and develop the idea of Home in a Box as a feminist critical spatial practice that rethinks design as a tool for architectural inquiry at home and seeks ‘another’ creative way of knowing CAAD and domesticity to enable meaningful engagement with inhabitants. Through analysis of several architectural practices, spatial analyses of my own home and participatory research at Park Hill in Sheffield, this thesis critiques the taken-for-granted, technoscientific cultures that shape architecture design practices, configure ‘the architect’ figure and formulate prescriptive imaginaries of their so-called clients. Home in a Box highlights the necessity for a feminist approach, attentive to more caring ways for CAAD use and domestic spaces enquiry which also challenges the discourse of the necessity and inevitability of CAAD in architecture. Using Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care and Hélène Frichot’s concept of Feminist power tools as main theoretical accounts, this thesis attends to a feminist ethos through persistent practices that overlap thinking and doing, reflected in how it is done and written. The thesis is composed of written narratives that weave theory and practice with conversations with architects, autobiographical notes and semi-fictional stories from Park Hill. The structure of this thesis follows my encounters with four main practices, organised into four parts: the Utilisation/ Exploitation of Computer-Aided Architectural Design (CAAD), Social housing design practices, Thinking Home in a Box, and Doing the box. The first part follows architects’ scepticism profounded by the instrumentality of CAAD tools. The second part explores social housing design’s digital and cultural intricacies in architectural practices. The third part relates to my encounter with thinking Home in a Box and sheds light on the box’s theorisation. The final one is written from within sites of the box’s engagement, constituted of two-fold practices of doing the box as a means of production and collaboration. This thesis aspires to contribute to ongoing academic debates that aim to engage with how design is rigidly structured and how CAAD and home are approached and defined in the architectural profession. Introducing Home in a Box as a feminist critical spatial practice contributes to architectural knowledge by offering a feminist approach to home that engages inhabitants in the critical debates of techno-domestic practices. The thesis also contributes to strategies to engage with fieldwork ‘remotely’, providing some tools and experience of conducting research through a pandemic.