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.