GO LO GO HI : Tracing the Development of Masculine Domesticities from the Garage to the Penthouse — A Multi-Modal Exploration in Architecture, Urban Environments, Film, and the Arts

Abstract: GO LO GO HI is a multi-modal enquiry into the relationship between masculine domesticities and the architectures of the suburban garage and penthouse apartment. The project adopts the garage and the penthouse as sites of enquiry, which means thinking through architecture as a cultural phenomenon, the agency of which includes but is not limited to spatial design, material compositions, visual representations, and historical contexts. While adhering to specific architectural typologies, both sites are assemblages of technology, consumption, leisure, and labour. The project presents the two sites as dialectical opposites—the suburban garage is embedded in the material world of the ground, the family, and the generic; the penthouse maintains a symbolic relationship to the production of the image, the individual subject, luxury real estate, and the city’s horizon. In this context, architecture operates as a spatial container that responds to and facilitates domestic encounters which are fluid—that change within and between sites, construct and contest social hierarchies, and offer refuge from (and at times entrapment within) social, political, and economic forces. By further assessing their representation in the arts, film, advertising media, and literature, this project also takes on board the cultural representations of these sites, moving beyond the conventional boundaries of architectural typologies. This interdisciplinary, practice-based approach is supported and interlaced with ethnographic writing, photodocumentaries, installations, and project proposals designed to reveal how these sites leak out into collective and private spaces within the city.