Domestic Capital¹, a studio of many firsts, has served as a proving ground for design thrust into unfamiliar territories. Across four iterations, the studio has ventured into uncharted realm, challenging traditional notions of space and function in Singapore’s high-rise housing while responding to the evolving dynamics of work and life. This volume showcases the breadth and depth of student projects developed during these studios, each iteration building upon the last while offering new perspectives and approaches on the entangled subject of working at home. Buildings that previously distinguished productive (paid) from reproductive (domestic/care) labour are being rendered obsolete; sacrosanct boundaries between private and public realms are made ambiguous. While this phenomenon is not new, its historical significance arises from architecture’s tendencies to divide these realms, minimizing a territorial intersection with multiple social-cultural-economical-ethical-political repercussions. This is to say the home-work phenomenon remains to be conjectured. This studio finds interest in expanding architectural methods past the study of building, proposing questions of the domestic interior now made complicated and problematic with the widespread (re) introduction of work into its boundaries. The studio enacted a series of counter-situations—practices, objects, temporalities, scales, programmes, sites—which challenge the conceptions, forms and experiences of ‘work from home.’

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¹ This Design Research Studio is led by A/Prof Dr Lilian Chee and is part of Foundations for Home-based Work, funded by the Social Sciences Research Council (2021-2024).