The Commodification of Everything

Space Caviar, the Genoese design research collective headed by long-time collaborator Joseph Grima, plus Tamar Shafrir and Andrea Bagnato (and building into a very interesting wider group, incl. SImone Niquille) had asked me to write a piece for a Lars Muller-published collection about domestic space, aka the home.

The book is SQM: The Quantified Home’, Space Caviar (ed.), Lars Muller Publishers (2014) (More at Space Caviar)

The way we live is rapidly changing under pressure from multiple forces — financial, environmental, technological, geopolitical. What we used to call home may not even exist anymore, having transmuted into a financial commodity measured in square meters, or sqm. Yet, domesticity ceased long ago to be central in the architectural agenda; this project aims to launch a new discussion on the present and the future of the home. ‘SQM: The Quantified Home’, produced for the 2014 Biennale Interieur, charts the scale of this change using data, fiction, and a critical selection of homes and their interiors — from Osama bin Laden’s compound to apartment living in the age of Airbnb.

My piece addressed the latter few words there, and sat alongside others by the likes of Aristide Antonas, Keller Easterling, Sam Jacob, Alexandra Lange, Justin McGuirk, Joanne McNeil, Alessandro Mendini, Bruce Sterling et al. Do pick the book up —…