Welcome ‘home’ — to the site and subject of debate and redefinition, across three days of intimate conversations between leading architects, thinkers and design practitioners from across the world. Prada Frames: Being Home, the third annual symposium is held during Milan’s Salone del Mobile 2024. This year, the international and transdisciplinary array of speakers will explore the enervated entanglements between man-made environments and natural ecologies.
If Home is the site of eternal return, it is also a subject to which we return as architects, designers, spatial thinkers: a critical condition to contemplate fundamental, pragmatic and existential questions of how to dwell.
If Home is the site of eternal return, it is also a subject to which we return as architects, designers, spatial thinkers: a critical condition to contemplate fundamental, pragmatic and existential questions of how to dwell. Prada Frames: Being Home — curated by the design and research studio FormaFantasma and co-hosted by Alice Rawsthorn and Natalia Grabowska — embeds itself in the domestic, in order to address planetary and contemporary challenges: mounting crises of ecology and housing, questions of comfort and identity, tensions between societal norms and constant evolution.
Take the subject of gender — negotiated within one’s private or personal space, one might think. The closet? The bathroom, a zone elucidated by Jack Halberstam and Andrés Jaque — or the bedroom perhaps, which jurisdiction falls under the domain of Philippe Rahm, Gülsüm Baydar and Matthew Wolf-Meyer. Then again, isn’t this actually worked out at a far more intimate scale, that of biology, the cell, androgens, chemistry? To consider the same issue at the scale of infrastructure, one may note that contemporary questions around gender extend from public restrooms through fiscal and legal systems, to the responsibilities of international law.
Or even the classical notions of the domestic versus the political sphere. In antiquity, these were distinct; politics were played out in public, whereas the management of the home included economy, derived from oikos — relating to the home, or rather, the normative family unit. A cross section of scholars and makers, including Mabel Wilson, Beatriz Colomina and Françoise Vergès and Elvira Dyangani Ose will reflect on the changing spheres and expectations of the domestic. Thinking about domestic economies and global politics against notions of property, inheritance and even layout — particularly in the lavish domestic setting of Milan’s Museo Bagatti Valsecchi — the home becomes both a microcosm and a palimpsest of principles, on the shape of everyday life as much as contemporary geopolitics. The shape of contemporary life and its necessities is inherent in the work of Keller Easterling, Jack Self and Anna Puigjaner, while the notion of safety and freedom in the domestic realm will be interrogated by Brigitte Baptiste and Jayden Ali among others.
The current dwelling space is under pressure, at once refuge and repository; a precarious sanctuary from which we passively witness current crises and the turbulent narratives of international conflict.
The Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, as host to these discussions, offers a setting that we may critically review — almost a century and a half later after its creation — as a particular kind of domestic paradigm: an extraordinary example of domestic technology and taste, in which all sorts of hierarchies and power structures play out in their historic particularity. The current dwelling space is under pressure, at once refuge and repository; a precarious sanctuary from which we passively witness current crises and the turbulent narratives of international conflict, through the influence of multifarious media and the compression of work and leisure. Seen in the rearview context of today’s urgencies, the museum is a static slice of yesterday’s opulent ‘ideal’ — all the better to illuminate future fractures in terms design values, from the domestic to the political in scale.
Recalling that time-tested tool of domestic management and cohabitation, the curators FormaFantasma together with Prada have devised a ‘rota’ of simultaneous discussions, themed by room and distributed across five areas of the home.
Recalling that time-tested tool of domestic management and cohabitation, the curators FormaFantasma together with Prada have devised a ‘rota’ of simultaneous discussions, themed by room and distributed across five areas of the home: Bedroom, Library, Bathroom, Dining Room and Living Room. Not all of the speakers have been mentioned here; further luminaries include Paola Antonelli, Kate Crawford, Mark Wigley, and many more, listed below. KoozArch is delighted to present a comprehensive and exclusive audio series, so that you can listen along to intimate conversations between each of the leading architects, thinkers and design practitioners at Prada Frames: Being Home at your leisure and from the comfort of your own home.
The podcast "Prada Frames: Being Home" is a project produced by KoozArch in partnership with Prada. You can listen to the episodes on Spotify and Apple Podcasts starting from 17 April 2024.
Rooms
Bedroom: Gülsüm Baydar, Philippe Rahm, Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Library: Michelangelo Frammartino, Anna Kauber, Mary Kuhn, Isabella Rossellini, Jack Self
Bathroom: Jack Halberstam, Helen Hester, Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier
Dining Room: Aric Chen, Sam Chermayeff, Dominique Petit-Frère, Anna Puigjaner
Living room: Jayden Ali, Paola Antonelli, Brigitte Baptiste, Beatriz Colomina, Kate Crawford, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Keller Easterling, Alva Gotby, Jack Halberstam, Andrés Jaque, Kirstin Munro, Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Marta Segarra, Françoise Vergès, Mark Wigley, Mabel O. Wilson
Hosts: Simone Farresin & Andrea Trimarchi [FormaFantasma], Natalia Grabowska & Alice Rawsthorn.
About
Prada Frames is a multidisciplinary symposium curated by FormaFantasma for Prada that explores the complex relationship between the natural environment and design. The collective effort aims to frame, analyse, contextualise, and define new perspectives on a plethora of themes. For its third edition titled ‘Being Home,’ Prada Frames examines the living environment as a framework to address contemporary challenges. The home is not merely a source of comfort; it acts as a shelter and an infrastructure of services. The extensive program of events takes place during Milan’s Salone del Mobile from Sunday, April 14 through Tuesday, April 16 2024 at the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi in Milan.
FormaFantasma is a research-based design studio investigating the ecological, historical, political and social forces shaping the discipline of design today. Whether designing for a client or developing self – initiated projects, the studio applies the same rigorous attention to context, processes and details. Formafantasma’s analytical nature translates in meticulous visual outcomes, products and strategies.
