To build a house for himself (or parents, being the closest kinship) is dangerously euphoric for an architect.  In this position, an architect’s interior and exterior are forced to collide.  It is either a fairy tale where no conflict is allowed, or a hide-out where antagonism is consciously avoided. But the process of designing is not quiet, nor romantic.  It is developed with a mute violence.

 

In his statement for Father’s House, an edifice originally designed and built for his father, Ma Qingyun, one of China’s most prolific young architects, hints at how domesticity, often considered peripheral to the public domain but conversely central to the individual’s development, may resurface as a complex site for self-definition. Here, where ‘interior and exterior are forced to collide’, the house is a space where different, and sometimes conflicting, notions of ‘home’ are played out. In Father’s House, the concepts of origin, Ma’s ‘Chineseness’, the authorial father figure and a domestic scene influenced by sentiments of filiality become key. These aspects highlight contemporary architectural questions of ‘home’, couched in an East Asian architectural context, albeit one that has been become much more global in the last two decades.

 

The paper attempts to unpick, connect and offer a critical iteration of such questions. In doing so, it explores a kind of domesticity, which may be described as strategically ambivalent in terms of its aesthetics and possible interpretations – neither global-capitalist nor localvernacular; neither patriarchal nor non-patriarchal; neither Chinese nor non-Chinese.