Productive Domesticities
An Arrangement for Living in a Work-from-Home Era
Princeton, NJ
Vertical Studio
Anda French
Princeton School of Architecture
Fall 2020
For those who used to spend days at schools, studios, and offices, the pandemic has upended traditional boundaries between “home” and “work,” productive and reproductive labor. Yet these boundaries were already eroding. Indeed, they have long been a mark of privilege. “Work” for many involves aspects conventionally conceived as part of domesticity: it requires emotional or reproductive labor. It takes place in a home—your own or someone else’s. It happens at unusual hours and involves enlisting support networks that Fordist economies sought to render obsolete.
Meanwhile, suburban realities have separated from suburban myths. For decades, suburbs have hosted myriad productive and commercial activities. Increasingly they house diverse populations and even concentrations of poverty. And though suburbs have also seen denser development, the developer’s vaguely New Urbanist multifamily building is usually a bedroom community that reinvents the exclusions that defined suburbs of another age.
Productive Domesticities is a co-housing project conceived to support the precarious home-worker whose productive activities have been pushed to the spatial and economic margins of an emerging post-pandemic economy, and whose work, for any number of reasons, evades the relatively easy transition from a computer at an office desk to a laptop on a dining room table.
Located on the busiest corner of the Princeton Shopping Center’s Harrison Street edge, the project takes the productivity of contemporary domesticity as a given. To do so, seriously, must not only challenge the tidy boundaries of modernist urban planning dogma but also challenge the still-tidy boundaries of contemporary “mixed use.”
A hairdresser who started cutting friends’ hair at home during the lockdown might set up a home salon and work from their apartment on a permanent basis.
A computer technician or a jeweler might set up shop at home, given sufficient floor space.
An out-of-work chef might retrofit their apartment with a small commercial “ghost” kitchen and fulfill takeout orders via seamless.
A parent caring for friends’ children on a casual basis might expand their operation into a certified home daycare, if their apartment met regulatory requirements.
Architecturally, the project begins from the individual unit. If a conventional apartment organizes space into semi-flexible living areas and semi-fixed “service cores,” here the logic of the service core is extended to the entire reproductive program.
Kitchens, dining tables, bathrooms, bedrooms, and lightwells slot into a narrow stripe, leaving more than half the apartment as a linear blank slate, available to be fit out as needed to support occupants’ productive activities. A household might stage multiple activities in enfilade along the unit’s linear open space.
The units also provide spaces with differing levels of publicity: a secluded “back door” at the top of a lightwell is a more intimate point of access than a “front door” shared with clients or customers, off a main, semipublic corridor, or a storefront entrance adjacent to the shopping center.
This circulatory armature is threaded through the co-housing complex. Its corridors serve as semi-public access, while its nooks and crannies offer and spillover spaces of collective domesticity—compensating, in part, for the domestic space surrendered by the units.
At a larger scale, the project intensifies these multiple readings of front and back, public and private, domestic and commercial, house and shed. Its façade gestures to the “striping” of its plan, while playing on the uneasy image of a building that defies easy programmatic or typological characterization.
Urbanistically, it turns its back to the busy Harrison street, instead facing the shopping center and gently mirroring the shopping center’s outer courtyard with an outer courtyard of its own.
This outer courtyard initiates a series of collective indoor and outdoor spaces that cut diagonally through the project: an inner courtyard, which acts as the main point of entry; the common house, and another outer courtyard on the Harrison street side.
The two ends of the building develop subtly different relationships in plan and section between units, circulation, and the street, in order to create a diversity of conditions for different kinds of productive activities.
On the southeast end of the building, where the sunken outer public courtyard buffers apartments from the shopping center, it is the interior hallway that offers the most public “front door.” Behind the courtyard, ground floor units with double-height spaces provide a more conventional kind of double-height studio live-work space.
On the northwest end of the building, ground floor units front directly onto the street, with facades that ambiguously offer the possibility of use as storefront, office, or private dwelling. The main corridor pulls back to a more sequestered second floor.
