Chloé Darmon, Marianna Janowicz, and Elke Krasny
Proposals by: 15.10.2026
Dirty Laundry is an architectural and feminist inquiry into how washing reveals the spatial organisation of social life and environmental relations. From rivers and communal wash places to social housing laundries, domestic interiors, laundromats, industrial facilities, and global textile infrastructures, washing connects bodies, materials, water, labour, technologies, and landscapes. Yet despite its fundamental role in sustaining everyday life, laundry has rarely occupied a central place within architectural histories and theories. It has not been invisible; rather, the spaces, practices, and labour relations through which washing is organised have often been naturalised, feminised, displaced, or excluded from architectural narratives.
Moving from river to machine, this volume examines washing as a spatial practice through which social, political, and ecological relations are mediated by architecture and the built environment. It explores how relations of labour, gender, class, ownership, coloniality, welfare, public health, wealth, whiteness, hygiene, cleanliness, technology, water, detergents, chemicals, and waste systems become organised through space — shaping the distribution of bodies, resources, responsibilities, and forms of belonging. Washing reveals how ideas of modernity, health, respectability, domesticity, and care are not only social values and economic conditions but spatial arrangements, materialised through buildings, infrastructures, landscapes, and everyday environments.
While the Frankfurt Kitchen became an emblematic architectural response to domestic labour, efficiency, and the organisation of everyday life, it also generated feminist counter-imaginaries that challenged the spatial confinement and unequal distribution of domestic work. The kitchen became not only an object of architectural reform but a site from which feminist activists, artists, and practitioners reimagined relations between labour, care, and space. Laundry offers a different but equally significant field of inquiry. There is no equivalent canonical figure through which washing has entered architectural history. This absence raises questions about how laundry has been imagined, designed, and spatially organised, and what forms of architectural and feminist counter-planning might emerge when washing becomes the starting point. Dirty Laundry seeks to examine … read more and source (Web).
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