Krasny
rth. Arkitektforeningen. Parcelhusdilemmaet. dominique + serena (eds.). Agenda Earth. Arkite
TER HE LEAR USE
INTRODUCTION dominique + serena Across the Global North—and far beyond —the single-family house has come to stand as a quintessential symbol of the good life. Since the rise and mass-proliferation of suburbia, the ideal of the detached house with its private garden has been carefully cultivated as a sanctuary for the nuclear family. It has also become a built expression of a mainstream desire for accumulation—of wealth, comfort, and social status—while promising retreat from the world, secured through ownership. Within this mythology, the house is no longer merely a dwelling but a spatial system, quietly scripting everyday life, structuring aspirations and naturalizing a particular vision of freedom. Thus, as the single-family house has expanded—growing in size, energy demand, and territorial reach—it has become a clear lens through which to view the fundamental dilemma of our time: that our dreams of the good life and the planetary realities no longer align. What once appeared as a promise of autonomy now reveals itself as deeply entangled in ecological, material, and social dependencies. Through short essays by leading scholars and practitioners, this series of pamphlets explores how single-family neighborhoods might begin to transform. By refracting the house through multiple lenses— climatic, social, economic, and affective —we seek to unsettle its taken-for-granted status and open new trajectories for its evolution. The ambition is not merely to reduce the carbon footprint of cities but to evoke alternative, more compelling imaginaries of the good life—visions in which new forms of collectivity, care, and moderation are experienced as new spatial and cultural possibilities.
AFTER THE NUCLEAR HOUSE: UNSETTLING THE CORE, BEFRIENDING UNFINISHED DOMESTICITY Elke Krasny
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The house we think we know is not simply a shelter, a private refuge, or a container of family life. It is a material formation through which modernity has organised relations of belonging, property, care, inheritance, and inhabitation. The nuclear house is the theoretical concept this essay introduces to name a particular architectural formation: the onefamily house understood through the social and political history of the nuclear family. If the nuclear family named a supposedly natural unit of kinship, reproduction, and inheritance, the nuclear house names the material form through which this social order became spatial, territorial, and ecological. It is the architectural nucleus through which modernity organised not only who belongs, but who owns, who cares, and how human inhabitation became materially inscribed upon the Earth. To introduce the concept of the nuclear house is therefore both an architectural and a feminist proposition. It asks architecture to recognise the house as a contested social and geological formation rather than merely a 2
container of domestic life. It asks feminism not only to rely on the existing critique of inherited domestic arrangements but to develop practices capable of transforming them. The nuclear house is not introduced as an object to be preserved, nor as a form to be abandoned. It is introduced as an inherited material condition that must be critically befriended to be inhabited otherwise. Befriending the nuclear house does not mean accepting the histories it carries or reconciling ourselves with the relations it has organised. The nuclear house has been a powerful architecture of exclusion, enclosure, gender hierarchy, private ownership, unequal and invisibilised distributions of care, and concealed dependencies on the Earth’s resources. It has long been surrounded by devoted companions: fantasies of natural family order, inherited belonging, private security, and heteropatriarchal prosperity. It has also been sustained by strategic allies: political, economic, and social formations that have reinforced its promises of ownership, inheritance, and belonging. These attachments and alliances 3
have narrowed its possibilities. To befriend the nuclear house is to seek a different relation, not to defend what it has been, but to open what it might become. THE NUCLEAR HOUSE AS MODERNITY’S UNIVERSAL The one-family house is one of modernity’s core imaginaries: aspirational ideal, normative horizon, and, for many, persistent nightmare. It is where ideas of belonging, security, intimacy, inheritance, and futurity have been given architectural form. More than a building type, it is the material expression of a social imaginary and the architectural consolidation of one of modernity’s most enduring political alliances: the alliance between heteropatriarchy and capitalism. The one-family house is not simply the home of the nuclear family. It is the patrimonial house of modernity. The nuclear family and the family house have historically reinforced one another as a social and spatial core: a seemingly natural arrangement through which property, inheritance, 4
kinship, gender, care, reproduction, and land became bound together. Through this binding, the house became a mechanism for transmitting wealth, privilege, and belonging across generations while simultaneously securing territorial claims and naturalising regimes of ownership. The family house does not only organise who belongs; it organises who owns, who inherits, who cares, who reproduces, and who has the right to occupy space. Precisely through its organisation of domestic life, it has informed demographic norms, family policies, and projects of population management, apartheid, and colonialist racialised zoning in many different parts of the world. It has structured landscapes, patterns of settlement, infrastructures, resource consumption, and ecological relations. The seemingly private arrangement of the household became a means through which states, markets, and societies organised reproduction, habitation, territory, and the distribution of resources. The history of the one-family house therefore belongs not only to social history but also to planetary history. Its material 5
reproduction has transformed land, energy systems, extraction processes, and ecological relations. The nuclear house has not simply provided shelter for modern life; it has participated in shaping the conditions of life on Earth. This is what we call the nuclear house in theoretical terms: not a building type but the architectural expression of the nuclear family as a social and political formation and, through its material proliferation, a force that has participated in rewriting Earth’s history. The nuclear house names the entanglement of kinship, property, inheritance, gender, care, land, and ownership that condensed into one of modernity’s most powerful domestic imaginaries. It is the architectural form through which a particular way of inhabiting the world — the private household, the privately owned house, and the individually possessed plot of land — became naturalised as a universal aspiration. To understand how this architectural formation became possible, it is necessary to return to the category that helped organise its social imaginary: the nuclear family. 6
The term “nuclear family” was consolidated in the twentieth century as sociology and anthropology sought to identify the basic and universal structures of human social organisation. Within this search, functionalist approaches examined family and kinship through the social functions they were understood to perform, while the nuclear family was formalised as a supposedly universal social unit. Such accounts defined the family through functions including sexual regulation, reproduction, economic cooperation, and socialisation, transforming a historically specific arrangement into an apparently timeless model of human organisation (Malinowski 1927; Murdock 1949).
At the same historical moment, modernist architecture was also seeking universal solutions to what were understood as universal human conditions. The house was redefined as a rational, functional, and standardis able object: a spatial answer to questions of hygiene, efficiency, reproduction, and everyday life. The nuclear family and the modern house therefore became mutually reinforcing imaginaries: one organised social relations, 7
the other gave those relations spatial form. Together, they produced a powerful vision of domestic life centred on privacy, autonomy, and the self-contained household, a shelter to be defended, a property to be secured, a home to be insured and protected. FEMINIST INTERRUPTIONS: CARE, PROPERTY, AND THE HIDDEN GROUNDS OF DOMESTICITY Under the sign of the nuclear family, the alliance between capitalism and heteropatriarchy organised life into a deceptively simple arrangement. Men were tied to waged labour; women to unwaged care. Property accumulated within the household. Dependency was privatised. Social reproduction was hidden behind the front door. The costs of sustaining life were displaced from the state and the market onto families, and within families onto women. The labour of sustaining life was rendered natural, intimate, and therefore economically invisible. The nuclear house gave this arrangement not only shelter but a spatial routine. Through its rooms, boundaries, and everyday repetitions, it transformed a political 8
order into a lived habit. Walls, corridors, kitchens, bedrooms, gardens, and property lines did not merely contain family life; they organised it. The house produced a particular habitat of intimacy, dependency, ownership, and care — a habit of living that made the nuclear family appear natural. Feminist critiques unsettled this apparent naturalness by revealing the political and spatial arrangements hidden within domestic life. They challenged the isolation of housework and care by asking how alternative forms of housing and collective infrastructure could reorganise domestic labour, while exposing the household as a central site in the organisation of capitalist accumulation, where reproductive labour was appropriated, devalued, and rendered invisible (Hayden 1981; Federici 1975). These distinct analyses converge in
showing that the problem was never domesticity itself but the particular historical form through which domesticity was privatised, feminised, and tied to property. Feminist critiques fundamentally unsettled the social organisation of the nuclear house by exposing the privatisation 9
of care, the invisibility of reproductive labour, and the gendered distribution of dependency. Yet the same logic of invisibilisation extended beyond social reproduction. This material formation did not only conceal the labour that sustained human life; it also concealed the living grounds and material relations upon which domestic life depended. It occupied the land on which it stood, transforming living ground into a parcel of property. The Earth beneath the house became a foundation, a surface to be owned, secured, inherited, and transferred, while its histories, relations, and regenerative capacities disappeared from view. THE NUCLEAR HOUSE UNSETTLED The nuclear house became the defended core of modern domesticity. Today, this core is simultaneously being unsettled and forcefully reappropriated. It is unsettled by ecological limits, changing forms of kinship and care, housing inequalities, and feminist and decolonial critiques of property, labour, and belonging. Yet it is also aggressively reclaimed as an 10
image of security, stability, and social order. The nuclear house no longer corresponds to the diverse realities through which life is sustained, yet it continues to carry powerful political desires and ideological investments. Domesticity itself is not the problem. The house remains fundamental to the continuation of life: it is where care is performed, where generations meet, where maintenance and repair take place, and where relations of attachment and responsibility are formed. What is in crisis is the particular form through which modernity organised domestic life: the privatised, autonomous, inherited household that concentrated care, property, and belonging within a bounded family unit while rendering invisible the labour and relations that sustain life. Across many regions, houses built for nuclear families stand almost empty, while inherited properties become difficult obligations, immobilising land, materials, and resources within outdated forms of ownership. At the same time, many of these properties are situated in hard-to-reach 11
locations, where geographic inequalities hinder their adaptation, occupation, or transfer to new uses. Demographic change has revealed another contradiction of the nuclear house: many people remain isolated within their houses, designed for family continuity, without being woven into wider networks of care, reciprocity, and collective life. The patrimonial house persists even as the social arrangements that once justified it have shifted. It continues to occupy territory while obscuring the ecological and collective conditions upon which life depends. THE NUCLEAR HOUSE CAPTURED At the same time, the nuclear house is becoming a political terrain: a material and symbolic formation through which struggles over belonging, inheritance, gender, and social order are being organised. Far-right and white supremacist imaginaries mobilise the traditional family home as a symbol of purity, inheritance, gender hierarchy, and belonging. They redefine who counts as a family and what counts as a home. Yet this capture does not simply restore an older domestic 12
ideal. Its power lies in making sexism sexy: recoding gender hierarchy as lifestyle, choice, intimacy, and beauty. Under the conditions of digital capitalism, it is simultaneously being reformulated through new infrastructures of visibility, entrepreneurship, and monetisation. The political capture of the nuclear house cannot be separated from the resurgence of authoritarian and fascist imaginaries that mobilise the private home as a symbol of social order. In these imaginaries, the house becomes a boundary marker of belonging, a site where gender hierarchy, inheritance, racialised identity, and continuity are materially and symbolically assembled. The danger lies in the capacity of capitalism and fascism to become mutually reinforcing through the same nuclear imaginary: the equation of one family, one household, one property, and one legitimate form of belonging. The nuclear house materialises this equation. It gives spatial and social form to a world organised through enclosure, inheritance, hierarchy, and possession. Within this formation, capitalism and fascism can 13
attach themselves to the same domestic ideal without becoming identical: capitalism through the intensification of property, accumulation, and entrepreneurial selfhood; fascism through the restoration of hierarchy, purity, inheritance, and exclusionary belonging. It becomes the site where these forces can converge through a shared promise of a bounded, protected, and inherited world. Yet this reactionary capture does not occur outside contemporary economic transformations. The contemporary tradwife phenomenon is one expression of this wider shift: it does not simply revive an older ideal of domestic femininity but transforms domesticity into spectacle. Housework becomes performance, femininity becomes a brand, and the household becomes a stage for visibility, consumption, and economic production. The private home becomes a public display of order, security, and belonging, while the labour and dependencies required to sustain life remain selectively concealed. This reveals the double capture of the nuclear house. First, it is captured as a symbol of a supposedly natural social order: 14
gender conformity, inherited belonging, private property, and familial stability. Second, it is captured through the selective absorption of feminist demands for the recognition and value of domestic labour. As feminist critiques have shown, emancipatory demands can be incorporated into capitalist logics in ways that redirect aspirations for liberation toward individualised forms of entrepreneurialism. The nuclear house reveals a new spatial form of this cunning of history: the domestic sphere itself becomes an entrepreneurial resource (Fraser 2009). The promise is no longer necessarily that women must leave the home in order to enter economic life. Instead, the home becomes the infrastructure through which economic life is performed. The patrimonial house becomes workplace, studio, marketplace, and media stage. The house is not abandoned as a site of labour; it is intensified as one. The second capture concerns the transformation of domestic labour itself. Feminist demands for the recognition of housework challenged the private household as a site of 15
exploitation and insisted on the value of the labour required to sustain life (Federici 1975; Toupin 2018). Under platform capitalism, however, rec-
ognition can be detached from redistribution. Care becomes a marketable capacity, domestic practice becomes content, and the household becomes a site of entrepreneurial self-commodification rather than collective transformation. Making money in and through the nuclear house becomes the new promise: the home is no longer only where unpaid labour is hidden, but where domestic labour, identity, and lifestyle are converted into economic value. Yet this spectacle conceals the extensive material and ecological hinterlands upon which it depends. The self-contained household remains a fiction. Behind the image of domestic autonomy lie global supply chains, extractive industries, infrastructures, and unequal forms of labour that sustain the performance of prosperity. The nuclear house continues to operate as a device that renders certain relations visible while keeping others out of sight. The result is a new image of heteropatriarchal prosperity: the promise that women 16
can achieve economic power without leaving the home, while the home itself remains organised around gender conformity, private property, and individual responsibility. What appears as empowerment through visibility and monetisation can therefore reinforce the privatisation of care and the hierarchies of belonging that feminist critiques sought to expose. The nuclear house is not simply restored; it is technologically updated and politically repurposed. The nuclear family is once again presented as a timeless and natural arrangement rather than a historically produced formation. In its most reactionary appropriations, the nuclear house becomes the material and symbolic anchor of an imagined social order, one organised through hierarchy, inheritance, property, and exclusionary belonging. The result is not simply a return to the past but a newly appealing synthesis: heteropatriarchal prosperity articulated through platform capitalism and mobilised as a political promise of property, security, and order.
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BEYOND CRITIQUE AND CAPTURE Capture does not exhaust what the house is or what it might become. The contradictions of the nuclear house cannot be resolved by either defending it as a natural form or abandoning it as a historical failure. The house has long served as an architecture of hierarchy, exclusion, privatised care, and unequal relations of labour, property, and belonging. But the task is no longer critique alone. The question is how the inherited house might be transformed. This requires a praxis that does not seek the implosion of domestic space as the solution but its insurgent reorganisation. THE UNFINISHED HOUSE: TOWARD A FEMINIST ETHICS OF INHABITATION The contradictions of the nuclear house cannot be resolved by either defending it as a natural form or seeking its implosion as a failed structure. Feminist critiques have exposed the house as a site where gender hierarchy, heterosexism, privatised care, and unequal relations of labour and ownership have been organised and concealed. Yet the 18
feminist challenge is not only to refuse the inherited house but to ask how it might be transformed. The nuclear house has provided a durable spatial framework in which heterosexual coupling, biological reproduction, private ownership, and intergenerational inheritance have been treated as the normative foundations of domestic life. At the same time, its contemporary recoding through digital platforms does not make the home less material. The platform economies that transform the house into a site of visibility, entrepreneurship, and income generation depend on vast hidden infrastructures: data centres, energy systems, mineral extraction, global supply chains, and networks of labour. The apparent immateriality of digital life expands rather than diminishes the planetary hinterlands required to sustain domestic life. Yet demolition is not the answer. The problem is not the house as shelter but the relations it has been made to organise. The challenge is therefore not to replace the nuclear house through another gesture of tabula rasa but to practice critical 19
remembering: to recognise the histories, exclusions, and planetary consequences embedded within inherited domestic forms while opening them toward different futures. The modernist impulse to solve complex social problems through the removal of physical structures, famously condensed in the demolition of Pruitt–Igoe, rests on a recurring architectural fantasy: that eliminating a form can eliminate the relations that produced it. Yet the removal of a structure does not remove the social, economic, and political conditions through which it emerged. Indeed, demolition often serves not as a mechanism of transformation but of expansion, as smaller single- family houses are replaced by larger dwellings that further privatise everyday functions and intensify the material and labour demands of domestic life. The unfinished house, which we imagine not as a heroically expansive and monumental object but as a humble structure, occupies this difficult middle: critical, insurgent, and caring. It neither preserves the nuclear house as an inherited ideal nor abandons domestic space as a failed form. It recognises 20
houses as material inheritances shaped by histories of power, exclusion, labour, and ecological transformation. The house is not only a social formation; it is also a geological formation: a way of organising relations between bodies, materials, territory, energy, and the living ground from which it is built. Yet inheritances are not only constraints. Houses also carry capacities for alteration, reinterpretation, and other forms of life. The unfinished house is not a new building type but an ethic of inhabitation. Architecture matters because it gives social imaginaries a material life. The nuclear house became powerful not only because it represented a particular idea of family, but because it rendered that idea durable, embedding it in a spatial form designed to endure across generations. A political alliance between the ideals of the nation state and economic systems became a plan for the nuclear family. An ideology became a habit of inhabitation. History teaches us that built forms often outlive the social imaginaries that 21
produced them. Houses persist after the family structures, labour arrangements, and aspirations they were designed to support have changed. They also remain as material deposits of particular relations to land, resources, extraction, and ecological transformation. The form endures, even as the world that gave it meaning continues to transform. But this persistence is not only a problem; it is also a possibility. Built forms are never exhausted by their original intentions. They carry histories, but they can also become sites of renewed political struggle, where meanings are contested and reappropriated. The same material form that can be mobilised to restore fantasies of gender hierarchy, private ownership, and inherited belonging can also be opened toward other relations, other forms of care, and other ways of inhabiting the Earth. The house carries both the violence of its histories and the possibility of other futures. It is this unresolved tension that makes feminist befriending both difficult and necessary.
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BEFRIENDING THE NUCLEAR HOUSE The question is not how to erase the inherited house but how to inhabit it otherwise. After critique, what forms of inhabitation become possible? This requires neither nostalgia nor rejection but befriending: a feminist ethic of “critical care” (Fitz and Krasny 2019).
Feminists have long been the nuclear house’s unwanted friends. They have refused its claims to naturalness, exposed the relations of gender, labour, ownership, and inheritance embedded within it, and revealed the exclusions concealed behind its promise of security and belonging. Yet feminist critique has never only been a refusal of domestic space itself. It has also remained attentive to the question of how life is sustained, how care is organised, and how the spaces of everyday existence might be transformed. Critical care understands care not as a private obligation, moral sentiment, or individual virtue but as a political and material practice of attending to the relations through which life is sustained and contested. It asks how architecture can recognise 23
dependency, vulnerability, labour, maintenance, and ecological interconnection rather than conceal them. Care is not simply something that occurs within buildings; it is one of the forces through which buildings, settlements, and forms of collective life are produced. Yet care is not only a question of recognition. It is also a question of power. A feminist ethics of inhabitation must therefore reclaim the sovereignty of care: the capacity to determine how care is organised, valued, shared, and sustained (Krasny 2026). The nuclear family historically organised care through a private household structure that depended upon asymmetrical relations of gender, extraction, sacrifice, and devaluation. Care was enclosed within the family, feminised as obligation, and separated from the wider social and ecological relations that made it possible. The nuclear house organised the sovereignty of property over care. Through the enclosure of domestic life within the private household, care became attached to ownership, inheritance, gendered obligation, and 24
unequal dependency. Befriending the house seeks the sovereignty of care over property: not the rejection of material inheritance but the transformation of the relations through which houses organise belonging, responsibility, and collective life. Befriending does not mean reconciliation with the nuclear house, nor acceptance of the relations it was designed to reproduce. It is a feminist practice of transformation. The house is not liberated by escaping its materiality but by transforming the relations materialised within it. The task is not only to expose the house as a site of domination but to reclaim its capacity as a site of collective life, reciprocity, and social and ecological transformation. This ethic can become material and spatial. It can reshape existing houses without requiring their erasure: by opening rooms and boundaries, redistributing resources, accommodating multiple generations and chosen relations, and reconnecting domestic life with the living ground upon which it depends. Befriending the house means entering into a difficult relation with an inherited 25
structure — neither preserving its past nor denying its material presence but transforming what it can hold. From an ecofeminist perspective, this ethic must attend simultaneously to the social and the geological. The nuclear house has organised relations between humans — through gender, kinship, care, labour, inheritance, and property — while also organising relations between humans and the Earth — through land, materials, extraction, energy, and ecological dependency. These histories cannot be separated. The house is a social formation and a geological formation at once: a place where ways of living together and ways of inhabiting the Earth have been materially assembled. The feminist question of the house is no longer only who lives together, but how living together is connected to the Earth that makes life possible. Friendship introduces an ethic different from the genealogical obligations that have historically organised the family house around descent, inheritance, and property. Where the nuclear house has privileged 26
inherited relations as the primary basis of belonging, friendship is grounded in choice, reciprocity, affinity, and sustained attention. This does not mean abandoning families formed through parenthood, kinship, or intergenerational relations; rather, it asks how family itself might be redefined beyond a single inherited model. The everyday distinction between “family and friends” already reveals a wider field of attachment and responsibility. Queer kinships, chosen families, friendships, and other expanded relations do not replace existing attachments but transform the ways in which care, responsibility, and belonging can be organised. To befriend the nuclear house therefore means opening the core. It means transforming the house from a bounded unit of private security into an architecture of generosity: one capable of accommodating multigenerational living, chosen families, collective forms of care, and relations that exceed the nuclear household. It also means recognising the house as a planetary formation, entangled with land, resources, materials, and the living ground upon which it stands. 27
The task is not to abandon the house but to redefine what it can house. At the core: not enclosure but relation; not ownership but belonging; not completion but unfinished possibilities. Elke Krasny, PhD, Professor for Art and Education and Head of the Art and Education Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Her scholarship and her international lectures address ecological and social justice at the global present with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, curatorial work, and contemporary art. References Bristol, Katharine. 1991. “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”. Journal of Architectural Education 44 (3): 163–171. Federici, Silvia. 1975. Wages Against Housework. Bristol: Falling Wall Press (for the Power of Women Collective). Fitz, Angelika, and Elke Krasny, eds. 2019. Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fraser, Nancy. 2009. “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History”. New Left Review 56: 97–117. Hayden, Dolores. 1981. The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Krasny, Elke. 2026. “Care Sovereignty”. In Situated Ecologies of Care, edited by Oren Lieberman and Alessandro Zambelli. London: Routledge, 81–85. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1927. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London: Routledge. Murdock, George Peter. 1949. Social Structure. New York: Macmillan. Toupin, Louise. 2018. Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–77. London: Pluto Press.
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This essay was produced on the occasion of the event CARE: The Single-Family House as Architecture for Care as the second in a series of essays within the project The SingleFamily House Dilemma. The Single-Family House Dilemma is part of the wider initiative Agenda Earth, which develops visions for future built environments and landscapes, and explores the regulatory frameworks required to enable them. The initiative is led by the Danish Association of Architects and is continuously developed in collaboration with Dreyers Fond, which also supports the project. The project forms part of the transformation track within Agenda Earth and is led by the architectural practice dominique + serena, by Dominique Hauderowicz and Kristian Ly Serena, who are also curating the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2027, where the theme will be presented to an international audience.
Published on the occasion of CARE: The Single-Family House as Architecture for Care Published by The Danish Association of Architects Editors: dominique + serena Dominique Hauderowicz Kristian Ly Serena www.dominiqueserena.dk info@studiods.dk Co-editor: Urszula Kozminska © Elke Krasny / d+s, 2026 / The Danish Association of Architects
Graphic design: Studio Atlant Proofreading: Cornelius Colding Printing: Frederiksberg Bogtrykkeri
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