User's Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution

User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution is a year-long project developed as Casco’s contribution to Utrecht Manifest – Biennial for Social Design. The project deals with the evolutionary and collaborative process of “living” research in the contemporary domestic and private sphere – particularly in relation to the spatial imagining (or the built environment). It aims at re-articulating while exercising the notions of the social, the public and, eventually, the commons. For this purpose, an apartment in the Casco’s neighborhood (Bemuurde Weerd oz 18 b, Utrecht) is rented to be both a symbolic and functional base of the project. The actual use and transformation of space and multiple forms of activities in and out of the apartment intertwine with cross-disciplinary research and imaginative practices. The apartment is open to the public from Tuesday till Sunday from 12.00 till 18.00

The project appropriates its title from the book (1980) by architect and urban historian Dolores Hayden. Departing from the late 19th century era in the United States, Hayden illuminates the feminist design practice, and articulates the momentum of socializing isolated domestic space and (domestic) labour, reorganizing neighbourhoods and cities which she names “a grand domestic revolution”. Drawing from this work, the project questions the actuality, necessity, and/or possibility of contemporary forms of “grand domestic revolution”. This will be done with cross-disciplinary research, actual use and transformation of space, and multiple forms of activities. A number of practitioners and colleagues including artists, designers, architects, writers, educators as well as institutions, organizations and “neighbours” are invited to be successive and temporary residents, hosts, guests or “users” of the apartment in order to strategize and realize the issues at hand. Also, a monthly reading group, “town meetings”, and other forms of ongoing collaborative projects are being organized.

The apartment is equipped with a spatial device ‘Many Furniture’, designed by ifau+Jesko Fezer, who also designed Casco’s interior architecture. ‘Many Furniture’ functions as a colour coded and flexible social system whereby a pallet of colours differentiates the abundance of “furniture” to prompt private construction, collectivity or publicity in support of both representative situations and informal ones. A growing ’GDR library’ consisting of different research materials such as books (including ‘The Grand Domestic Revolution’), articles, images, dvds (artist’s videos, films) as well as a ‘User’s Manual’ (#1 of DIY periodical) are installed in collaboration with Annie Wu, artist and designer whose endeavour calls for neighbourly collaboration. A group of students from the Dutch Art Institute will also join this year-long path and apply their respective approaches to the subjects at hand.

Up to date information about current residents and an agenda of upcoming / an overview of past activities can be found on a special ‘Grand Domestic Revolution’ weblog: http://www.cascoprojects.org/gdr