CFP - Housing: Domestic Plot

[Matthew Heins]

There's a CFP on the topic "Housing: Domestic Plot" for a future issue of the journal ARQ. Submissions (of articles, opinion pieces or projects) are due January 9; sorry for the short notice! However, they will also issue two more CFPs on the topic of housing in the very near future, so stay tuned for those.

It's copied below or can be seen at https://files.cargocollective.com/c1700685/Open-Call-ARQ-122_ENG.pdf. The journal's website (in English) is https://edicionesarq.com/Revista-ENG-1.

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HOUSING: DOMESTIC PLOT

If taken literally, housing is the origin myth of architecture. If less so, we might say that it is in housing where the discipline has found one of its most persistent questions: the relationship between space and ways of life, between production and reproduction. Home is that interior where, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, its walls record both the traces of subjectivity and the rise of capitalism in the modern city.¹ It is also where a social order is rehearsed and perpetuated: the hierarchy between rooms and users, the division of domestic labor, and the distinction between what is visible and what remains out of sight. Historian Robin Evans warned that it would be foolish to believe that a floor plan forces people to relate in a certain way, but even more foolish to think that it cannot prevent —or at least hinder—certain relations from taking place.²

Not going much further: the corridor or hallway—that discreet invention of the sixteenth century—redefined movement and the notion of domestic privacy; Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen introduced a Taylorist ideal of efficiency, transforming domestic work into pure sequence. In the field of landscape, even the word “paradise,” associated with the myth of the Garden of Eden as the original dwelling, comes from the Persian term pairidaēza (2.000 BC): walled garden. Before the image of an ideal home in nature, paradise was a space of delimitation and enclosure.³ We could venture that domesticity (from the Latin domus, or house, and that which pertains to it) is less a place than a practice: how to shelter, how to order, and especially how to draw the limits between private and public life.

The domestic plot, then, is not just a set of rooms nor a lot enclosed by walls. It is a set of relations—material and immaterial, built and imagined— that define how dwelling is organized in relation to society. Its design encompasses the spatiality and sequence of rooms, the objects and technologies that mediate it, the plant life that is incorporated or excluded, and the reconfigurations that inhabitants introduce—or are denied. In this sense, housing is not only a refuge: it is a stage where modern categories such as family, gender, nature, property, or care are reproduced, transformed, or dissolved.

Works and Projects

If functionalism aspired to universalize a domesticity without friction, today, on the contrary, housing is defined by social, economic, and environmental frictions that appear both necessary and inescapable: the nuclear family is no longer the only model; the financialization of housing has made it exponentially less accessible; ecological crisis and population aging are changing the ways of dwelling. For a generation that will hardly have access to housing under the conditions their parents once did, the domestic realm has become a laboratory where architecture should offer at the very least, a position—and ideally, alternatives: other formats for social life.

This issue of ARQ explores the domestic as a critical field. How do architecture and landscape architecture negotiate between intimacy and exposure, care and control, habit and change? What is the house today? How do architects and landscape architects rethink its limits, its programs, its economies? We seek works and readings that question the contemporary domestic plot—and what it might become.   

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

Friday January 9, 2026 

SUBMISSION FORMATS

Readings

Editable text file (.doc, .rtf), maximum 6,000 words. The texts must be unpublished —or at least not previously published in Spanish— and should adhere to academic standards, including an abstract and a bibliography.

Opinion

Column or critique. Editable text file (.doc, .rtf), maximum 1,500 words. The texts must be unpublished —or at least not previously published in Spanish— and should adhere to academic standards. Including a bibliography is recommended.

Works and Projects

PDF file in US letter size, of no more than 10 pages, including: project description and relevance to the call (max. 500 words), architectural drawings, images, and relevant technical data.

Thesis Projects

Outstanding diploma or thesis projects from Chile and/or abroad. Submit a PDF file in US letter size, no more than 10 pages, including: project description and relevance to the call (max. 300 words), plans, drawings and images. The PDF should include: name of the institution and study program, supervising tutor(s), and graduation year.

Submit material to: rev...@edicionesarq.cl / Subject: “Material ARQ 122 - Section” (Section: “Readings”, “Opinion”, “Works and Projects” or “Thesis Projects”)

More information: www.edicionesarq.com/Open-call 

Issue publication date: April 2026 

ARQ is a bilingual, peer-reviewed academic journal published by Ediciones ARQ at the UC School of Architecture in Santiago, Chile. The journal has been published continuously since 1980. It is indexed in Clarivate WoS, DOAJ, Elsevier Scopus, Avery Index, Latindex, and SciELO. The digital editions of the journal on SciELO receive an average of 45,000 visits per month.

Notes 

1 Walter Benjamin. "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" in Reflections (Schocken Books, 1986), 155–6. 

2 Robin Evans. Translations from drawing to Building and Other Essays (AA Publications, 1997), 89. 

3 Olivia Laing. The Garden Against Time (Picador, 2024),30.