The modern apartment is the index of a process that constructed the nuclear family as the “natural” unit of Western society. This talk traces the genealogy through which the dwelling was scripted into a diagram of asymmetric relationships, separating production from reproduction and crystallising power hierarchies. Intimacy and love have been forced into a rigid heteronormative pattern, but is architecture ultimately the real villain in this ongoing story?

Maria Shéhérazade Giudici is the founder of research platform Black Square and the Head of the PhD Programme at the Architectural Association.