Toronto Metropolitan University will be hosting a lecture with Martino Tattara, co-founder of Brussels-based architectural studio, Dogma, and associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven (Belgium).

Despite the increasing numbers of people who now work from home, in the popular imagination the home is still understood as the sanctuary of privacy and intimacy. Living is conceptually and definitively separated from work.

In this lecture, Tattara will argue against such a separation, countering the prevailing ideology of domesticity with a series of architectural projects that illustrate alternative approaches. These projects re-envision home as a cooperative structure in which it is possible to live and work and in which labor is socialized beyond the family—freeing inhabitants from the sense of property, and women from the burden of domestic labor.

The projects aim to move the house beyond the dichotomous logic of male/female, husband/wife, breadwinner/housewife, and private/public. They include the reinvention of single-room occupancy as a new model for affordable housing and a plan for a modular, adaptable structure meant to house a temporary dweller.

The Martino Tattara Dogma Lecture is open to the public.