On-demand Domesticity
Modern digital technologies offer innovative solutions for living in a globalized world, connecting people and places, and creating new landscapes of everyday living space. Our home is no longer an unchanging space for our belongings, but a space that can be expanded and decreased according to our needs through the use of apps and platforms that encourage the field of sharing economies. Some examples include people selling a meal cooked from their own kitchen, turning their kitchen into a restaurant, or renting out their living room or bathroom during work. These current digital sharing economy platforms blur the lines between private and public and allow people not only to work from home, but also to market their home and their domestic services online. With these technologies, houses and workplaces grow increasingly closer to one another. The house becomes a space of production, where leisure and labour merge into a non-stop 24/7 basis.
The project On-demand Domesticity explores the impact of sharing economy platforms on domestic spaces and questions how these may be altering the meaning of home. By suggesting a critical architectural proposal, the project challenges the intersection of private and public home-sharing, while proposing a co-existing future between the home, the office and the hotel typologies.
The project envisions a new urban agent that meets the city and its diverse characters in Nørrebro, Copenhagen. The project proposes a social and economic environment for a new generation, where sharing can be a form of luxury rather than a compromise.
Research
11 years after the beginning of Airbnb, the digital platform is now morphing from an amateur operation into a slick professional one, and has drastically altered the way we eat, live, work and travel. Airbnb has expanded its business to a global market, providing access to more than 6 million places in 100.000 cities over 191 countries and regions. Statistics from 2015 show that Airbnb has an average of 425.000 guests pr. night, which is 22% higher than Hilton Worldwide. The sharing economy business is therefore starting to have a significant impacting on the traditional housing and hospitality marked, as well as the life of cities. Homes that could have been a young couple’s starter apartment is now just another asset, and stands empty half of the time. The sharing platform Airbnb is pushing away locals because of business related interest and lack of regulations in many countries.
A new way of inhabiting, belonging and connecting
This project defines sharing as a space occupied by two or more people, where its use and resources have to be negotiated. By developing a housing model, that no longer serves the traditional family structure, the project suggests a radicalized domestic proposal, providing a new inner variation and a new experiment of ownership.
On-demand Living
By suggesting a new way for private home sharing, the project challenges the intersection of horizontal and vertical sharing, combined with a new future between the home, the office and the field of hospitality. When the home itself becomes as a whole financial unit, the negotiation of space is no longer driven by economic competition but solitude, and sharing can finally start to be a form of luxury rather than a compromise.
The project envisions a housing model that no longer serves the traditional family structure but instead emerges the urban dweller with the short stay visitors. The project suggests a new way of co-living where the architecture responds to the challenges of sharing, and thereby foster a new way of inhabiting, belonging and connecting.