The Architecture of Family - Samaneh Moafi and Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia

7 December 2017
AA XX 100
Chaired by Léopold Lambert

Looking at the social structures of family and their spatial implications across three very different contexts, this conversation between architect Samaneh Moafi and geographer Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia will explore these issues through the lens provided by their respective disciplines. Governance through housing in Iran is the focus of Samaneh's PhD research and the ways in which women adapt and assimilate their homes in their day to day practices of dwelling. Melissa’s research has looked at the transformation of social housing regimes in Puerto Rico and Brazil, their entanglements with family, nation, work and domesticity, as well as some of the implications for the women inhabiting such homes. Following short presentations by each speaker, we will break into a wider discussion on common themes such as the role of family in shaping space, issues of gender, class and race, and the lack of specificity to context and social structure that accompanies housing projects in the Global South.

Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia is a Lecturer in Urban Futures at Lancaster University (based jointly in the Department of Sociology and the Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Arts). Her work focuses on the socio-material home as a critical realm of inquiry where historical desires, everyday life and future aspirations intersect.

Samaneh Moafi is an architect and researcher based between the UK and Iran. She is a PhD candidate at the AA and a Research Fellow at Forensic Architecture. In her work, she examines natural environments and realms of domesticity as apparatuses of governance. She has previously taught in universities such as the Royal College of Arts, the Bartlett, the AA, and the University of Technology, Sydney.

Léopold Lambert is an architect, writer, editor, and podcaster. He is the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist, a print+online magazine dedicated to “the politics of space and bodies,” associated to a blog and a podcast. He is the author of three books and many articles about the intrinsic violence of architecture and its necessary political instrumentalization, in particular in Palestine and in the French colonial and postcolonial space.