GEN 21 - Together Alone
Flanders (BE)
Domestic Research
2018 - now, in progress

Together Alone is an ongoing research project on domesticity in Flanders. The project looks at the relationship between the subjectivity and forms of life lived in Flanders and the suburban typology of housing that is most prevalent in Flanders. The various private houses that Generiek has been commissioned throughout the years are used as devices in which to observe, analyse and understand how domestic in Flanders, beyond just something benign, is inherently charged with political intentionality and how its prevalence within the territory of Flanders helps propagate a certain mindset and way of life that is centred around the development of the nuclear family and home-ownership.

The research consistently looks at how plot divisions, dimensions and the regulatory framework around it(including line-of-sight rules, plot setbacks etc.) are all mechanisms to isolate the architecture as a singular and socially-isolating bubble. Therefore, these rules and regulations are in fact, active enforcers in propagating the association between the domestic, individualism and ownership. In effect, domesticity became a space of self-constructed narrative, isolated and alienated.

As such, within the typology of the domestic architecture that Generiek has designed are embedded the possibility of repetition, while still keeping within the regulatory framework of construction that has been imposed. By doing so, thereby overriding the social engineering that is enforced through these regulations, but through typology, when multiplied to the scale of a neighbourhood, introduces the possibility of a more collective and connected manner of living together, and not merely alone.