Dogma, The Room of One’s Own, Milan: Black Square Press, 2017
The particular magic of Dogma’s research is the ability to turn the oft-overlooked, the banal, the too-close-to-home into something entirely novel and nuanced. Led by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara, the Brussels-based studio prepared their entry to Chicago’s 2017 Architecture Biennial, titled The Room of One’s Own. An extension of their research into domestic space, it was also published in an eponymous book. Here, Aureli and Tattara posit the domestic room — a construct so familiar that it often evades our critical attention — as essential to evolving notions of both individual identity and community management.
A prefatory essay, drawings, and extended captions narrate a genealogy of 112 rooms from the ancient Levant to Lower Manhattan. A series of plans and exquisitely detailed interior line drawings illustrate each room’s form, furnishings, and the occupant’s possessions. The individual lifestyle and social organization embodied in each interior is understood to be i…