For this installation at the PAA, located in a stately library of a former neo-Renaissance mansion, A+M decided to consider the very origins of domesticity, centuries-old debate on the origins of Architecture itself. The first known discussions of origins of architecture revolve around the making of dwellings. In Ten Books of Architecture, Vitruvius ponders on the beginnings of construction of domiciles – or the “primitive huts”. This discussion continued in the Renaissance treatises and was followed upon in the Age of Enlightenment and as recent as the 20th centuries. All agreed that the origins of architecture begin with the pursuit of a house, a domicile, place called home. This pursuit begins with a roof – in its basic form, an elevated, peeled-off ground that defines a space below. Each treatise features a (visual) description of the “primitive man” constructing a “primitive hut”, in the act of constructing this elevated artificial ground – in each case the description of the “primitive” is biased by the contemporary understanding of that term (for example the title page from Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai Sur L’Architecture). Furthermore, A+M was intrigued by the relationship of the humble beginnings of domiciles and their more grandiose exterior manifestations – the domes.

Here A+M revisits the construction of a “primitive domestic space” with “primitive domestic means” of the 21st century. The roof, and by extension, the ceiling has gone a long way from the first “peeled” ground to ornate coffered ceilings and elaborate domes of the late Renaissance to the non-descript invisible dropped ceilings and flat roofs of recent modernity. The “primitive contemporary” – the ubiquitous 2×2 suspended grid – is used to create a new version of the old basic domestic space and its dome-like visual marker. In it, a moment of repose and contemplation is offered, with a cultivated ground, a basic seat, a light source, and a library of images curated to show a version of the history of the development of domesticity.