City Ideas (Ideas de Ciudad) is a laboratory for research, dissemination and debate on the spatial and social transformations of the contemporary city. The aim is to create a city laboratory, an open research platform geared towards exploring the future of cities as spaces for culture and the generation of new social, technological and innovation paradigms.

The eighth conference of the cycle is that of Anna Puigjaner, whose work focuses on domestic architectures that deconstruct gender stereotypes and prejudices. Her work understands that Architecture has played a fundamental role within heteropatriarchal societies in the establishment of social norms and behaviours, and in the definition, under the umbrella of a supposed “normality”, of a disciplinary system that is profoundly unequal. In particular, the archetype of the home has been essential in the creation of gender relations within the domestic and social spheres. Its development over the last two centuries has reinforced asymmetries and increased the commodification of everyday life, while at the same time overlooking other broader sexual and gender realities. Specifically, the technological changes fostered during each industrial revolution reinforced conflicting definitions of productive and reproductive labour, transforming not only the way in which a home was designed, but also how it was understood and for whom it was intended.

Anna Puigjaner is a Doctor of Architecture and cofounder of the MAIO architecture studio. She is currently a teacher at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation GSAPP - Columbia University. She was editor of the Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme magazine (2011-2016) and she received the 2016 Wheelwright Award for her “Kitchenless City” research, awarded by the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research work endeavours to reveal alternative realities and architectures of resistance from the emergence of the first industrial processes to the current digital revolution.