The new domestic landscape. Enquiry into Contemporary Living

How do people live today in Milan? In what kind of homes do we dwell? Which are the most important rooms? And the most meaningful objects? Which form and distribution do we prefer? What is the relationship between the interior space and the close exterior space, from the proximity of the corridor to the neighborhood? Is the home like an island in an infinite and undifferentiated space, or does it still have roots in a territory, a place where to walk for a coffee, to buy the newspaper, to go shopping having a chat? Is it possible to recognize evident relations between ways of living and urban shapes? And what about the home we dream? What relation is there between the real and the ideal home? And, still, what relation is there between real and virtual? How do the limited and local space of the home connect and project itself into the global network? How do we build our virtual space online? What do we tell about our real space and what do we project of the imaginary one?

Starting from these issues, this enquiry aims to explore the domestic space of common people living in Milan: people you can meet in the street, or along a subway line, near one of its stops. That's way the first tool chosen for this exploration is actually the use of a subway line (the line 2, the nearest to the NABA) as a random and transversal crossing line to sample the whole urban territory, from the suburb to the center, still to the suburb, using some of the stops to localize a series of interviews, to residents and users of the area.

Given the subway line as the trace to follow in order to make a tranche de ville of Milan, the other main strategy proposed to enter the domestic landscape is the dialogue, or the interview, based on a series of questions to invite people to tell about themselves. Together with this first way of approaching to the dwelling space (a sort of indirect look but from within as produced by the dwellers themselves), three other approaches based on collecting pieces of evidence (a sort of look from outside) will be used: looking at the home's windows (what can we see literally looking at what appears on the outside?), at the shops' windows (what do furniture shops tell us?), and at the images (what do magazines tell about homes?).

The aim of this research is to produce a knowledge about dwelling through a practice of listening and collecting of informations directly on the city's ground, starting from the dwellers' words, activating different forms of inquiry that, without violating the intimacy of the subjective territory, could create an overview on the main issues of the contemporary living. Starting point is the human voice, the hand-to-hand of the dialogue, of the questioning and telling, of the listening to the lived space. The goal would be words, objects, concepts, forms of the contemporary living.