ADAPTIVE DOMESTICITY
Furniture joints → Room heatmaps → Apartment genomes. Reverse-engineering 200 years of housing rituals.
A Tokyo apartment: kitchen flows into living room, no threshold. A Paris apartment: kitchen hides behind a door, always. An Istanbul apartment: guest salon separated, living room fluid.
Why? Not aesthetics. Not regulation. Cultural muscle memory. Every door position, every corner treatment, every circulation ritual carries encoded social contracts. Privacy gradients. Hospitality protocols. Proxemic boundaries that shift by culture.
These aren't design "preferences." They're spatial grammars—as consistent and decodable as language syntax.
The Hypothesis
If domestic patterns are cultural encodings, they can be: extracted (furniture joinery) → measured (occupant movement) → parameterized (apartment typologies).
Research Phases
Furniture Joinery Analysis
Scale 01
Computer vision analysis of 3,200 furniture pieces from 8 cultural regions, extracting joint typologies, material transitions, and proportion systems.
Room Occupancy Heatmaps
Scale 02
Time-lapse analysis of movement patterns in 47 apartments across Istanbul, Tokyo, and Paris. LiDAR + depth cameras track morning routines, evening gatherings, sleeping transitions.
Apartment Genome Mapping
Scale 03
Floor plan analysis of 856 apartments from 1920-2024. ML extracts: room adjacencies, proportion ratios, circulation hierarchies, privacy gradients, hospitality zones.
Foundational Thinkers
Gottfried Semper
"The origin of architecture lies in four elements: hearth, roof, enclosure, and mound."
Semper's Der Stil (1860-63) traces architecture not to form but to making—textile weaving, carpentry, masonry. Furniture joinery IS architecture at its origin.
Gaston Bachelard
"The house is our corner of the world... our first universe."
La poétique de l'espace (1958) analyzes domestic space phenomenologically. Corners protect us, attics dream, cellars store fears. Space is not geometric—it's emotional.
Junichiro Tanizaki
"We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows."
In Praise of Shadows (1933) articulates how Japanese culture values penumbra while Western culture values illumination. Lighting design encodes cultural values.
Edward T. Hall
"Space speaks."
The Hidden Dimension (1966) introduced proxemics—the study of human spatial relationships. Hall demonstrated that comfortable distances vary dramatically by culture.
What We Discovered
Furniture joint complexity correlates with apartment spatial hierarchy: cultures with elaborate joinery (Japan, Scandinavia) show more nuanced room transitions.
0.73 correlationTurkish apartments show 2.3× more 'buffer zones' (entryways, lobbies) than Tokyo apartments—hospitality protocols encoded in circulation.
2.3× more zonesParisian kitchens average 40% smaller than Tokyo kitchens in same-m² apartments—privacy gradient prioritized over culinary space.
40% size deltaMorning movement patterns in Istanbul peak 25 minutes later than Tokyo—urban rhythm affects domestic choreography.
25 min offsetCurrent Limitations
Sample bias: 47 apartments ≠ statistical significance. We observe patterns, not proven laws.
Class blindness: All apartments were middle-class urban. We cannot claim findings apply to social housing or luxury segments.
Observer effect: Cameras change behavior. 'Natural' movement patterns may be performative.
Temporal gap: 1920s floor plans vs. 2024 occupancy. Building stock evolved faster than our analysis.
Interested in Domestic Research?
We're documenting housing patterns across cultures. Reach out if you'd like to contribute data or collaborate.