The Domestic Uncanny: Material Imagination in Everyday Life Habits

My research on the Material Imagination began during my Ph.D studies (2009) and has been foundational to my thinking and pedagogy, having taught three successful courses and published widely on the subject. In 2015, for example, I published an essay on the sense on smell in relationship to intuition and the work of Carlo Scarpa in the book, The Material Imagination: Reveries on Architecture and Matter (Ashgate). As a result of my extensive research in the field, I was included as a named team member for the recently awarded DFF Grant in Research Lab 2 at Aarhus School of Architecture entitled: Material Imagination: Reconnecting with the Matter of Architecture. The Domestic Uncanny project continues the line of research, reflecting upon the
relationships between the material imagination and the cultural, technological and psychoanalytic structures of the domestic everyday life realm. The point of departure confronts the works of Gaston Bachelard, one of the founders of the notion of the Material Imagination. His work, Poetics of Space (1958), a widely known text
among architects structured around notions of home, will be explored through his research on matter and materials, two parts of Bachelard’s thinking that have not been connected before. What is the materiality of the domestic? What is the role of architecture in participating within such emotional structure of belonging? What
are the cultural translations of materials within the intimate horizons of the homely?