Burning Farm: A Journal on Architecture and Domestic Space

Burning Farm is an online open-access journal that publishes essays on architecture and domestic space. Its goal is to build a discourse on domestic space by linking current concerns with the analysis of historical precedents. Burning Farm publishes both new and old material; at Burning Farm, we believe that a torch that sheds light on the present can sometimes be found in the past. The journal promotes long-form writing that takes the risk to rethink narratives on architecture and its relationship with politics and economy. Rather than celebrating domestic space as the realm of intimacy, Burning Farm aims to defamiliarize the house as a construct which defines its subjects in terms of class and gender. In an age when domestic space and its modern version—housing—is no longer defined by its use value, but by its potential as a financial asset, it has become more urgent than ever to rethink what domestic space really is, its historical manifestations and present conditions.

Questions that Burning Farm will attempt to answer are: what are the historical origins of the permanent crisis of housing? How can we trace a history of architecture from the vantage point of social reproduction? How does political economy shape architectural typologies? What really informs the form of architecture? What could be a renewed critique of architectural ideology vis-à-vis the seemingly inescapable imperatives of climate change? How can we rewrite the history of housing in terms of class struggle? How can we reclaim categories like “queer,” “common,” and “care” beyond their superficial overuse? 

Burning Farm is produced by the Laboratory of Theory and Project of Domestic Space (TPOD) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). The journal publishes incrementally, issuing around two essays per month. Burning Farm encourages a form of critical writing that is patient in terms of research, and urgent in terms of concern. Burning Farm cultivates a way of thinking that is both disenchanted about and committed to architecture. 

*Image above: Diagram for the calculation of minimum surface norms for apartments in post-war France, first published in Techniques et Architecture, 1959.