THE SERVANT’S TALE: Vertical residency: creating a live-with accommodation for your modern domestic worker
2024 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master of Fine Arts (Two Years)), 20 credits / 30 HE credits
Student thesis [Artistic work]
Abstract [en]
🌟 Welcome to this blue written thesis! 🌟💙 It is dressed and communicated through bold colours 🎨✨ and big letters 🔠. It demands to be seen 👀 and read 📖. However, seeing the same bold colour out in the city 🏙️ on the modern domestic worker does not warrant any sort of real attention 🚶🙅. This is an active but subconscious participation in the creation of an invisible food courier 🛵🍽️. You are the one looking away 🙈👎, but don’t take blame personally 😊😻💙. This is an architectural urgency 🏛️⚡ which this architectural master thesis seeks to address. The gig-economy 💰 is, through its very spatial construct, setting the stage for a social norm that fosters our invisible domestic worker 🚴💙. The servants delivering food are everywhere 🌍🍲, but the spatial infrastructure is nowhere 🏚️. The toilet 🚽🚻 for personal relief, the lunch table 🍽️ for dining, or the electrical socket 🔌 for charging is not provided 🚫.
This project provides an architectural prototype 🏗️🛠️💙 that seeks to address this urgency 🚨✅. Aiming to set the standard for a new radical domestic servant 🛎️💪💙: the visible domestic servant 👀 as opposed to the invisible domestic servant🤩. The prototype is tested on site in Umeå 🗺️, where the design takes on a bold statement of a high-rise multi-purpose dwelling 🏢🏠💙. This is a radical domesticity 💥🏡, where contemporary hierarchies between people of labour 🛠️👷 and people of leisure 🛋️😌 are challenged and ignored 👂❌. The program provides a mix of an open office 🖥️🚴 built for a food courier as well as family apartments 🏠👨👩👧 designed for the standard body of one who works as a domestic servant 💙💵. The new acknowledged standard of gig-workers 🚴🔧 guides the design into allowing for a bike 🚲💙 or similar modes of transportation to travel all the way from the ground floor to the top level 🚶️⬆️ and inside to and within the apartments. The bike being equally important as the people within the building 🚲🏢, a similar hierarchy to the car 🚗 in suburbia.
As it stands now, the food courier 🚴💙 is working a job that they can’t afford to live on 💸, but at the same time can’t afford to say no to 😓💔. As an architect, the urgency starts with making visible 👁️ the invisible domestic worker🌐💙 to give spatial recognition 🌟 and qualities 🎉💙 to the modern domestic worker.
RQ: “How to make visible of the invisible modern domestic worker through spatial infrastructure of labour?”
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2024. , p. 52
National Category
Architecture
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-230063OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-230063DiVA, id: diva2:1901346
Subject / course
Master's Thesis, Master of Fine Arts in Architecture and Urban Design
Educational program
Architecture Program
Supervisors
Examiners
2024-10-242024-09-272024-10-24Bibliographically approved