Exhibition | Dogma - Rooms

The exhibition Rooms explores the domestic space via its simplest manifestation: a room. Taking this as a starting point, Dogma presents the results of two distinct lines of enquiry: The Room of One’s Own, which focuses on the history and function of the private room, and Loveless, which charts the evolution of the ‘minimum dwelling’.

While the American architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974) considered the room to be the essential origin of architecture, the British author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) emphasized the private space as being vital to female creativity in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). At the time of writing, her words were a direct challenge to the patriarchal organization of the domestic sphere and, by extension, society at large. Far from being a timeless form, the room is the product of specific historical circumstances that are related to one of the most controversial and problematic issues in human history: the domestication of society. Our private spaces reveal the differences, both subtle and pronounced, that shape us as individuals. They also expose the extent to which these are influenced by gender, race and class distinctions. Using texts and drawings, the exhibition presents a concise historical overview of the architecture of the room.