The Table of Egalitarians: Notes on the Architecture of Sophie Delhay

Abstract

In the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, the family with stable, heteronormed relationships, and founded on women's housework, has lost its status as a model for defining strategies and configurations of domestic living rooms, in Western, European and North American capitalist society.  

Some architects have reacted to the social changes in domestic life, with the design of new systems of relations between rooms to the point of trespassing into variable devices of freely combinable units, in which people become the protagonists of encounters, participation, appropriation and new agreements, or “protocols”, capable of articulating radical relations between individuals and collectivity, and arriving at a new kind of Habitat. The search for that Habitat, which characterises the most experimentalist studies and realisations of the 21st century, had become a goal of so-called “radical” architecture during the 1960s and 1970s, when the first decisive social revolutions were underway, which, however, due to the conditions of the market and society, were then destined to translate into a conscious act of refusal to build according to the dictates of the profession.   

Alongside the radical experiences, in the rethinking of domestic space towards the form of the Habitat, the writings of feminist authors such as Melusina Fay Peirce, Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, and essays such as The Grand Domestic Revolution by Dolores Hayden, played a crucial role in the definition of a theory of architecture in which the role of female emancipation in the conception of contemporary space is considered.  

Delimiting Not Limiting intends to question the transformations of a domestic space that has become Habitat, in the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries, from radical experiences to contemporary realisations, privileging the analysis of the conditions that have led to the birth of a different and alternative female consciousness, which became antagonistic during the 20th century.   

A decisive witness to the historical transitions between the uprisings outlined at the time of Radical Architecture and the concrete phase of experimentation and verification of the new role of women in society, in the family and in the profession, is the figure of Sophie Delhay, an architect in charge of a professional studio based in Paris.  

The theoretical impulse that animates Delhay's projects and realisations stems from her considerations on the ways of life of contemporary society, which led her to design residential complexes in the form of systems with “géométries organiques”, evolutionary and “unpredictable” like “machines naturelles et vivantes”. Through archive documents and interviews, the essay will analyse Sophie Delhay's housing projects, framing them in a network of references ranging from Radical Architecture - including its feminist derivations - to the projects of Riken Yamamoto and Anne Tyng, the poems of René Char, and the work of Sophie Calle.