Who does make the domestic space?

In the last year, pandemics’ spreading has forced people to rethink their relationship with their homes due to both the lockdowns and a general feeling of uncertainty. Our home walls are the ultimate border against a possibly unsafe environment, but in the meantime, we need to overcome them to work, go to school, and stay in society. The domestic space has always been a core topic of housing design, but we have to re-think it and do it necessary to understand 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” is rooted in the Latin word Domus and means something that belongs to the home. The point is that the domestic concept of space is liminal between the house’s typological features and the psychological ones, or more precisely, it matters what turns the first into the second. Several issues make the place where we live home, and most of them concern what makes the domestic space. It is a matter of limits. Space changes a lot whether walls bound it or not. In the modern and contemporary history of domestic architecture, there is constant effort to get over the walls’ limits, questioning the concept of the room. Likely, domestic space’s idea lies on balance between the search for freedom and the need for shelter. Even thanks to the gaze that overlooks a landscape, the first can support our spirit, especially when phenomena like the pandemic make us stay home for a long time. Apart from giving us protection against weather, the second sets our move-ment’s range and sets the scale between the corporeality and the world. Ac-cording to the typological method, the paper analyzes some examples that can be considered representative of a way to handle the relationship be-tween limits and free space. Among a large number of examples, the ones that belong to Barcelona and Milan Modernism have been chosen. The author has been working on this topic since 2014 and this paper is part of wider research about the relationships that focus on domestic space. In conclusion, architecture “makes” space setting the limits giving them a shape and handling how they can be crossed. It becomes “domestic” when an interaction is triggered between the designer and the users. Space is never given only by the project but by a relationship between body, mind and construction. The project does not end with the construction of the house but continues over time with a process of appropriation of the space similar to the evolution of a language that remains alive and can change when it is spoken, practised and traveled as a language.