SQM The Quantified Home /anglais - Tapa blanda

The way we live is rapidly changing under pressure from multiple forces - financial, environmental, technological, geopolitical. What we used to call home may not even exist anymore, having transmuted into a financial commodity of which the square meter is the basic unit. Yet, domesticity and the domestic space ceased long ago to be present in the architectural agenda. SQM, produced for the 2014 Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk, Belgium, charts the scale of this change using data, fiction, and a critical selection of homes and their interiors - from Osama bin Laden's compound to apartment living in the age of Airbnb. With original texts by: Rahel Aima, Aristide Antonas, Gabrielle Brainard and Jacob Reidel, Keller Easterling, Ignacio Gonzalez Galan, Joseph Grima, Hilde Heynen, Dan Hill, Sam Jacob, Alexandra Lange, Justin McGuirk, Joanne McNeil, Alessandro Mendini, Jonathan Olivares, Marina Otero Verzier, Beatriz Preciado, Anna Puigjaner, Catharine Rossi, Andreas Ruby, Malkit Shoshan, Bruce Sterling

In 1968, the first Interieur Design Biennale in Kortrijk marked a point in time when the home was the main site not only of investigation, but for potential social change in the work of architects and designers. Yet the domestic realm progressively disappeared from the agenda over the subsequent decades, in parallel with the increasing marketization of real estate. As the financial crisis of 2008 made visible, homeownership became one more financial instrument to generate revenue--at the same time excluding the younger generations from the property market for the foreseeable future. The square meter can be regarded as the basic unit of a new condition of unstable domesticity. The extent of individual movements, new social patterns, and different family models are all reshaping the very objects that surround us. Yet, this change has gone largely uncharted. By mapping the multiple fluctuations and meanings of one square meter, this project explores how global forces are transforming the scale of the home, from the urban scale down to furniture elements. SQM will draw on contributions from architects, designers, artists, and theorists, in order to bring the space of the domestic interior back into the debate.