Nuove forme dell'abitare

With the crisis of Fordist capitalism and the rise of “cognitive capitalism”, the ‘knowledge worker’ became a crucial figure in contemporary cities. In such a context, once away from the sphere of the family, after concluding the university studies, for these new subjects, terms like flexibility, precariousness and mobility defined new modus vivendi. The research “New Forms of Dwelling” deals with the manifestation of these ways of life, of how these knowledge workers live and work. The thesis focuses on the domestic aspects, housing affordability and the inadequacy of actual dwelling typologies for the new working class. It assumes the definition of ‘collective dwelling' given by the Czechoslovakian avant-garde poet ad critic Karel Teige in his book 'The Minimum Dwelling' of 1932 as a main architectural topic. This work, matured through the collaboration with Dogma in Brussels in the research for the book 'Loveless: The Minimum Dwelling and its Discontents', investigates the relation between the personal realm of the room and the possibility of integrating into housing collective spaces (related mainly to intellectual and domestic labor), together with other communal facilities related to education and knowledge (like programs of lifelong learning), essential for how these 'eternal-students' work. Oxford and Cambridge medieval Colleges, Jeffersonian campuses, 20s American Residential Hotels and soviet Dom-Kommunas defines both spatial paradigms of dwelling and different habitus that anticipated those of today’s knowledge workers. In this PhD thesis, these organizational models represent the main case studies analyzed in parallel with the history of the knowledge worker, from the invention of the student to the American white-collar and soviet intellectual subjects, and to the modern precarious worker. The thesis also implies research by design output, concluded in the theoretical project titled "Long Nights", an atlas of typologies, designed according to specific prototypes and protocols of use and implementation. This part of the thesis puts forward a scenario that is possible only through the invention of a new Welfare model, supported mainly by European institutions, able to provide for every single worker, a place that could be called ‘home’ everywhere.