Kto tworzy przestrzeń mieszkalną? (Who does make the domestic space?)

Last year a pandemic began to spread, which has forced people to rethink their relationship with their homes due to both the lockdowns and general feeling of uncertainty. Our home walls are the ultimate border against a possibly unsafe environment, but in the meantime, we need to come out to go to work, to school and remain present in our society. The domestic space has always been a core topic of housing design, but we have to reexamine it and highlight the importance of understanding which players ‘make’ it. The concept of domestic space blends architectural design with the field of interior design. Apart from the ordinary meaning related to the family or household, the word ‘domestic’ has its roots in the Latin word Domus and means something that belongs to the home. The point is that the concept of the domestic space is liminal, there are typological and psychological features that define the house and it matters what makes the former shift into the latter. There are several issues with what makes the place where we live our home, and most of them relate to what makes the domestic space. It is a matter of lim-its. Space changes a lot whether walls bound it or not. In the modern and contemporary history of domestic architecture, efforts are constantly made to overcome the limits of the walls, to question the concept of the room. It is likely that the idea of the domestic space lies on balance between the search for freedom and the need for shelter. Even the view of the landscape, which relates to the former, can support our spirit, especially when phenomena like the pandemic make us stay at home for a long time. Apart from providing protection against the weather to us, the latter sets our range of movement and the scale between the corporeality and the world. Following the typological method, the paper analyses some examples that can be considered a representative way of handling the relationship between limits and free space. Among numerous examples, the ones that present Barcelona and Milan Modernism have been chosen. The author has been working on this topic since 2014 and this paper is part of a wider research concerning the relationships that focus on domestic space. In conclusion, architecture ‘makes’ space by setting the limits, giving them a shape and establishing how they can be crossed. It becomes ‘domestic’ when an interaction is triggered between the designer and the users. Space is never established only by the means of the project but also by a relationship between body, mind, and design. The project does not end with the construction of the house but continues over time through the process of appropriation of the space, which is similar to the evolution of a language that remains alive and can undergo change when it is spoken, practised, and when it travels.