Publication
The private single-family house model, its supposed link to a liberal political economy, and its association with a gendered and individualized domestic economy, hold a hegemonic status in the United States. This model has essentially remained the same since the founding of the country, particularly since the 1930s, and it has always been tied to a grand national narrative equating it with individual freedom. However, this narrative contradicts the mechanisms of social exploitation and the constraints linked to the unprecedented waste of resources that underpin this architecture. Within the American context from 1776 to the early 2020s, and with a focus on the single-family home model, this dissertation presents an architectural genealogy of political economies while also serving as a projective genealogy of domestic economies.
Central to this investigation is how the codification of domestic apparatuses' organizations of spatial, legal, and economic norms has been used to implement political economies aimed at optimizing specific interpretations, productions, and allocations of freedom. This genealogy traces the successive reappropriations of these apparatuses. The study is structured around three key historical moments: experiments in reorganizing the domestic economy to eliminate gendered and individual domestic work (material feminism); federal policies promoting the single-family home (domestic realism); and contemporary possibilities for reappropriating this model using computational tools.
The dissertation's goal is to propose a new historiography of domestic realism and its alternatives. This historiography extends beyond the break marked by New Deal policies, tracing the ongoing reappropriations of suburban apparatuses up to the present day alongside the evolution of liberal political economies. It explores the critical role of central banking, monetized debt, and petrodollar recycling in the current capital-destructive political economy of suburbia. It contemporizes material feminist approaches by proposing a diversion of computational tools for optimizing architecture. Ultimately, the dissertation contributes to architectural research and practice by examining the normative contexts that shape domestic space in relation to specific political economies, interpretations of freedom, and their associated goals of optimization.