A Theory of Everything
41: Family Planning
Out of stock
As family configurations evolve and atomize, and “exceptions” become the norm—divorced, blended, solo, cooperative, childless, single-parent, widowed, queer, aging, migrant, transnational, foster, adoptive, multigenerational—the material construct of our homes, institutions, and cities asks to be reconsidered.
This issue of Harvard Design Magazine is based on the premise that we need to imagine new, different spaces for living together. It confronts the persistent myth of the nuclear family and reconsiders the architectures that contain and reproduce it. It examines how family realities influence, and are influenced by, the spaces we inhabit, and the patterns of our existence in cities, suburbs, and the countryside. Do these spaces correspond to the way we live, or want to live? Do they enable and support, or dictate and confine? And how do other social constructs—corporations, institutions, communities—mirror or redefine familial configurations?
“Family Planning” looks at spaces of home and belonging, and notions of property, ownership, and connection, addressing questions of what constitutes a family and the legal overtones of inclusion, citizenship, and basic rights. In doing so, it interrogates and reimagines the space of the family unit, presenting alternatives, past and future, for diverse family configurations to flourish in the built environment.
Articles
Table of Contents
Editors' Letter
The Round Table
Jennifer Sigler
Column
A Feminist Vision for Going Solo
Daphne Spain
A Theory of Everything
Claire Barliant
Built Gendering
Saskia Sassen
Child Migrants at Home
Jacqueline Bhabha
China’s Disappearing Family
Ou Ning
Doing Family: At Home in Polymedia
Mirca Madianou
Half of Everything
Sam Jacob
Households and Families: A Legal Mismatch
Katharine Silbaugh
Knife and Spork
Angie Keefer
Renotopia
McKenzie Wark
Ship Shape
Alex Kitnick
Essay
Breaking with Tradition
Christopher Herbert, Jennifer Molinsky
Building Stories: Unsettling Family in Mumbai
Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao
From the Old Family—to the New
Christina E. Crawford
My Grandparents’ Shanghai Home: A Guided Tour
Jie Li
Not One of the Family: The Tight Spaces of Migrant Domestic Workers
Rachel Silvey, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
Not-Family
Jeremy Till
Post-Familial Communes in Germany
Niklas Maak
Production/Reproduction: Housing beyond the Family
Martino Tattara, Pier Vittorio Aureli
Queer Communes: Living in Flux
Michael Bronski
TV Generations
Lynn Spigel
Wild City? The Migrant Settlements of Kampung Tower
Stephen Cairns
Interview
Destroying Family
Delia Duong Ba Wendel, Michael Hardt
Dispersing Intimacy
Bijoy Jain, Mohsen Mostafavi
Dragons, Poets, and the Real World
Martti Kalliala, Ursula K. Le Guin
Living on the Edge
Dolores Hayden, Hilde Heynen
The Is Mine
Drucilla Cornell, Lisa Haber-Thomson
Photo Essay
The Notion of Family
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Artifact
A Dream Realized, but for Another Time
Sarah Lynn Lopez
Diversity of Lifestyles, Diversity of Incomes
Susanne Schindler
Home Making: The Power of Ordinary Politics
Brent Pilkey
Home Staging
Mohsen Mostafavi
On Children’s Noise
David Huber
Picnic: Iranian Style
Faryar Javaherian
Scenes from an Other Marriage
James Voorhies
Soft Architecture
Eva Díaz
The Exploded Bunker
Fabrizio Gallanti
The Unwanted’s Guide to US Housing Policy
Ellen J. Pader
To Design Is to Plan and Organize
Robert Wiesenberger
Zoned Out: Buildings and Bodies
Lori Brown
Insert
Album Beauty
Erik Kessels
Plus
Control Points
Daniel Rauchwerger, Megan Panzano
Orphan City
Michiel van Iersel, René Boer