How to Cite: Pinchart Saavedra, María Pilar. "Constants of Minimal Dwelling: The Bed as the Political Core of Femininity". Dearq 46 (2026): 32-44. https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq46.2026.03
How to Cite: Pinchart Saavedra, María Pilar. "Constants of Minimal Dwelling: The Bed as the Political Core of Femininity". Dearq 46 (2026): 32-44. https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq46.2026.03
María Pilar Pinchart Saavedra
Universidad Católica de Chile
Received: August 29, 2025 | Accepted: June 25, 2026
This article examines how minimal dwelling, organized around the bed as its vital center, reveals enduring constants of individual habitation across different historical and cultural contexts. Through a critical comparative analysis of cases drawn from art and architecture—Tracey Emin, Archigram, Kisho Kurokawa, Viktor Pivovarov, and Toyo Ito—it explores how practices of care, intimacy, and memory participate in the configuration of domestic space. The cases analyzed show that, despite technological, urban, and social transformations, certain dimensions of dwelling —shelter, rest, identity, and relationships— persist as constants of human experience. Within this framework, the study recognizes that the form and symbolic meaning of individual dwelling have historically been shaped by cultural imaginaries that associate femininity with protection and intimacy (Orzechowska 2021). Despite its significance, however, modern architecture has tended to marginalize or obscure this feminine dimension of dwelling, prompting reconsideration of both the place of femininity and the role of minimal dwelling in contemporary architectural thought.
Keywords: Minimal dwelling, bed, domesticity, gender, architecture.
This article explores how minimal dwelling, with the bed at its core, reveals constants of human experience and makes visible the persistent role of femininity in domestic life. It analyzes how the spatial and symbolic configuration of individual dwelling has been mediated by cultural constructions associated with gender and how practices of care, intimacy, and memory contribute to the production of domestic space (Orzechowska 2021).
The central question is: How are the constants of individual dwelling articulated through minimal dwelling and contemporary domesticity, and in what ways does femininity shape their spatial and symbolic configuration? This reflection is framed by the Heideggerian concept of being-with (Mitsein), understood as the existential structure through which the Dasein (being-there) of othersis encountered within our world on the basis of their own being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1927/2018). Dwelling is thus not limited to its material dimension but opens onto social, political, and symbolic relationships.
Historically, housing has reflected transformations in family structure and domestic practices. This development can be traced from the near-definitive floor plan of the eighteenth-century Dutch house through nineteenth-century domestic-economy manuals such as Catharine Beecher’s The American Woman’s Home (1869/2002), which helped consolidate the domestic realm as a territory culturally associated with femininity, to the introduction of innovations such as Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurter Küche (Frankfurt Kitchen) in 1926 (Schütte-Lihotzky 1926). Domestic space has undergone formal and functional modifications that nevertheless preserve certain structural principles. In this context, the bed emerges as a material and symbolic device capable of articulating intimacy, care, and memory, becoming the minimal core of individual dwelling (Orzechowska 2021).
In cultural and spatial studies, the bed has been analyzed as a space where everyday life, sexuality, illness, and death converge. Its integration into architectural thoughts a structuring core of contemporary individual dwelling, however, remains limited. This article contributes to the debate by bringing together perspectives from art, architecture, and cultural theory to understand the bed as a spatial and political device within minimal dwelling.
It therefore examines historical examples of minimal housing alongside works by contemporary artists and architects from Tracey Emin to Toyo Ito, including Archigram—the British avant-garde architectural collective formed in the 1960s—and Viktor Pivovarov. Through these examples, it identifies constants of individual dwelling and examines how femininity and practices of care persist and adapt across diverse urban, temporal, and technological contexts.
The bed as the core of dwelling has been examined in disciplines such as art, architecture, and cultural theory, although its incorporation into contemporary architectural discourse remains limited. In the Spanish-speaking context, scholar of aesthetics José Luis Panea has conducted extensive research on the bed as a cultural object, examining its symbolic, social, and representational dimensions across diverse artistic and cultural practices. Panea emphasizes that the bed functions as a field of symbolic and social production in which memory, intimacy, care, and bodily experience converge (Panea 2020).
From an international artistic perspective, British artist Tracey Emin presents the bed as a feminine space of vulnerability, intimacy, and memory in works such as My Bed (2015) and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995). Both installations demonstrate that the enduring significance of the bed lies not only in its physical form but also in its capacity to articulate human experiences, affective relationships, and individual narratives (Orzechowska 2021; Hahn 2024; Emin 2015).
In her doctoral thesis Kitchenless City, architect Anna Puigjaner analyzes minimal residential typologies through the example of kitchenless apartments in New York, demonstrating how domestic space can be reconfigured through collective services and reduced floor areas, thereby broadening our understanding of individual dwelling (Puigjaner 2014). In “The Century of the Bed,” Beatriz Colomina, examines the bed as a device that mediates work, rest, and communication in the age of telecommunications, connecting domesticity, materiality, and technological networks (Colomina 2019).
In experimental architecture, Michael Webb of Archigram, through the Cushicle (1964) and Suitaloon (1967) projects, and Kisho Kurokawa, through the Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972), explore portable and modular forms of minimal housing, focusing on the relationship between intimate space, mobility, and the individual’s relationship to the city (Cheatle 2023; Webb 1964, 1967; Whaley 2023). In Projects for a Lonely Man, Russian artist Viktor Pivovarov proposes minimal domestic spaces that condense individual life, identifying rest, nourishment, and openness to the outdoors as constants of dwelling and presenting minimal housing as a laboratory for lived experience (Pivovarov 2008).
Finally, recent studies have introduced a gender perspective into the study of minimal housing. The work of Toyo Ito and studies by Gutiérrez-Mozó and others, show how women living alone in urban environments redefine dwelling as an extension of the city, incorporating minimal refuges into everyday life and conceiving domesticity in terms of autonomy and mobility. This approach demonstrates how a focus on femininity brings into view enduring dimensions of care and intimacy that have historically been marginalized or rendered invisible in contemporary architecture (Ito 2015; Gutiérrez Mozó et al. 2024).
In summary, the state of the art reveals a significant gap in contemporary architecture research concerning the bed as the core of individual dwelling, particularly from a gender perspective. Taken together, the approaches reviewed provide comprehensive framework that brings together art, architecture, and cultural theory, positioning the bed as a central material, symbolic, and political device in the experience of minimal dwelling (Panea 2020; Emin 2015; Orzechowska 2021; Hahn 2024; Colomina 2019).
This study adopts a critical comparative case-analysis approach. Artworks and architectural projects addressing minimal individual dwelling from the postwar period to the present were selected according to three criteria: disciplinary representativeness across art, architecture, and cultural theory; diversity of geographical and temporal contexts; and relevance to the study’s central analytical categories—the bed, domesticity, femininity, and urban solitude. The corpus includes works by Tracey Emin, Michael Webb of Archigram, Kisho Kurokawa, Viktor Pivovarov, and Toyo Ito, complemented by historical references and specialized literature.
The analysis follows a thematic rather than chronological structure, identifying in each case constants of dwelling that recur across periods and typologies. This hermeneutic approach privileges connections among ideas over positivist systematization, making it appropriate for research at the intersection of architecture, visual culture, and gender studies.
In 1998, British artist Tracey Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for her installation My Bed (fig. 1). However, criticism focused more heavily on Emin herself than on the work’s artistic value: scandalously, the feminine bed was no longer pristine but surrounded by “dirt.” Beyond the criticism centered on Emin’s gender and sexuality, the work reveals the bed as the core of dwelling—a place of rest, recovery, and identity where the everyday and the symbolic, life and death, intersect. The installation offers a radical synthesis of contemporary urban life (Emin 2015) and, through its emphasis on corporeality and vulnerability, echoes Pérez Royo’s account of the relational experience of the body onstage (Panea 2025).
Figure 1_ Line-drawing interpretation of Tracey Emin’s installation My Bed. The image presents the bed as the minimal core of dwelling and as an exposed scene of intimacy, vulnerability, and memory. On the gallery walls, figures drawn from Francis Bacon’s paintings stand watch, introducing a bodily and expressive dimension that extends the vulnerability embodied by the bed into the exhibition space. Source: Image generated using artificial intelligence and subsequently modified by the author.
When we move into an empty house, every piece of furniture can wait except the bed: the bed is home. The work emerged after Emin spent four days in bed, semi-conscious following a depressive collapse; when she awoke, she found her room in complete chaos. Contrary to appearances, the “trash” is not in the bed but around it. The white sheets preserve a “clean” place—not immaculate, but not wholly violated either. Around the bed, remnants of a life—a bottle of vodka, used condoms, a stuffed toy, cigarette butts, and other intimate objects—condense both social and individual meanings.
“Understood through a gendered lens,” a woman’s bed—which, by cultural mandate, is not permitted to be unmade or excessive—”emerges not only as an object of rest but also as a scene of tensions between what is permitted and what is transgressive in relation to femininity” (Orzechowska 2021). Emin foregrounds the bed as an object by emphasizing its temporality: the possibility of remaking it, changing the sheets, washing the bedding, or moving the bed does not negate its symbolic persistence as the minimal core of dwelling—a place of rest, recovery, intimacy, and connection that transcends eras and contexts (Orzechowska 2021).
Chilean poets Gonzalo Millán and Enrique Lihn wrote Veneno de escorpión azul: Diario de vida y muerte (Millán 2007) and Diario de muerte (Lihn 1989) from hospital beds during the final stages of cancer. Similarly, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s Mi nacimiento, Argentine painter Guillermo Kuitca’s sleepless beds in Nadie olvida nada (1982), and Chilean artist Nemesio Antúnez’s La última cama (1983) express the convergence of life and death through the prostrate, horizontal body, in dialogue with the vulnerability and horizontality of the staged body proposed by Pérez Royo (Panea 2025). In Austrian writer Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil (1945/2019), the bed represents a threshold between life and death and between shifting states of consciousness. Together, Emin’s bed, Kahlo’s work, and these other visual and literary works demonstrate how a relational, political, and artistic experience of the body is activated through a recumbent position (Broch 2019).
From a Heideggerian perspective, Dasein begins in bed: from there, we experience what changes, what remains, and our relations with others. This centrality of the body in domestic space has also been observed in modern architecture, in which, as Beatriz Colomina notes, the domestic interior is reorganized around the care and observation of the body, to the point that “everyone became a permanent patient who needed a new kind of medical care at home” (Colomina 2019, 147). By transposing the bed into the vast space of a gallery, Emin relocates the intimate within the public realm and shows how the bed condenses life and death while also serving as a space of work and representation in the contemporary era, as Colomina (2019) observes. At the same time, it resonates with Pérez Royo’s relational experience of the body on stage (Panea 2025). Emin cites Francis Bacon as an influence and places the bed beneath one of his paintings:
To express that life can be lived as you please [...] which implies accepting that it can be chaotic, that we can sleep with whomever we want, or do what is necessary to survive even if it does not conform to what social norms expect (Emin 2015, 1).
The Caterpillar asks Alice, “Who are you?” She replies, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present … I think I must have been changed several times since then” (Carroll 1865/2015). This uncertainty about an identity that is changing, fragmented, and never fixed finds a spatial correlate in dwelling. Throughout our lives, we share space with many people, but our intimate space, centered on the bed, opens to only a few during cycles of personal change.
In Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, Emin inscribes the phrase “With myself, always myself, never forgetting” on the floor of a blue igloo-shaped tent. Across the interior, she appliqués 102 names representing people with whom she had slept—not necessarily sexual partners—including her grandmother, as well as two numbered fetuses representing her abortions.
Through these intimate memories and names, femininity becomes an operator of identity connected to an architecture of remembrance. Intimacy “reformulates how the subjective and the public intertwine differently according to gender” (Hahn 2024), while, according to Maya Orzechowska (2021), intimate bonds operate in architecture as repositories of profound experiences. Emin preserves the relationships that marked her life, thereby lending permanence to what is inherently transitory: the presences and absences that shape us. “Never forgetting” points to the lessons and traces left by these bonds. Naming those with whom we sleep marks that intimacy as worthy of preservation (Hahn 2024; Orzechowska 2021).
My Bed and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 reveal minimal spaces of identity and memory: portable, adaptable, and symbolically persistent architectures. In architectural terms, they demonstrate that certain intimate spaces, such as the bed, repeatedly emerge as cores of dwelling. The perennial thus lies not in the physical permanence of the object but in its capacity to be continually reconfigured in response to constants of human experience (Orzechowska 2021).
According to Spanish journalist Anatxu Zabalbeascoa (2011), architects tend to treat the room independently of its furniture, although the design process usually proceeds in the opposite direction: from furniture to room. As Emin demonstrates, the room is an extension of the bed, while bedding forms part of the bed itself; everything else is conceived from this core. Architect Xavier Monteys (2014) identifies as many as sixteen distinct terms for the bedroom and notes that, until well into the seventeenth century, the bed was a public place where visitors were received during the day because the available seating was uncomfortable. It constituted the center of domestic life. Beyond economic conditions, this arrangement responded to both climate and custom: beds measuring up to 3 × 3 m could themselves constitute rooms and accommodate several couples. Daily life unfolded in and around the bed until divans and sofas gradually appeared in the seventeenth century (Monteys 2014).
From then on, customs changed radically, as did the life within the bedroom. Beds began to be concealed—stored in wardrobes, dismantled in the morning, reassembled at night. In neo-Gothic interiors, draperies and canopies transformed the bed into a room within a room. A modern conception of intimacy began to emerge only at the end of the eighteenth century, introducing a new dimension into the culture of dwelling and transforming both the configuration of the bedroom and sleeping practices (Zabalbeascoa 2011). Furniture intended for reading and embroidery was also introduced. During and after the Industrial Revolution, this cultural transformation of privacy was accompanied by economic and social changes that decisively reconfigured housing:
The gradual emancipation of women and the growing impossibility of maintaining an entire house for those who began working or moved to cities (...) led to rooms being rented furnished. A single room served as both living room and bedroom, while bathrooms and the kitchen were shared by several tenants (Zabalbeascoa 2011, 126).
This furnished, shared room—bedroom and living room combined in a single space and shaped by women’s emerging economic autonomy—anticipated the logic of functional compression that twentieth-century housing capsules would later adopt.
In the decades following World War II, the effort to accommodate all an individual’s needs within a minimal floor area in the metropolis demonstrated that the bed was not simply another piece of furniture in the bedroom but its organizing precondition. It also revealed that practices of care exceed beyond strictly functional considerations (Orzechowska 2021).
In the 1960s, Michael Webb pushed Archigram’s fascination with the housing capsule to an extreme by transforming the suit into a minimal dwelling and envisioning a paradigm shift in postwar society. His proposals for the Cushicle (1964) and Suitaloon (1967) (fig. 2), conceived as nomadic units, would allow users either to isolate themselves or expose themselves to their surroundings by inflating a customizable bubble. Transparent plastic both protects and exposes: from the bed, the inhabitant looks outward while remaining a visible body in public space, erasing the boundary between intimacy and display (Webb 1964, 1967).
Figure 2_ Michael Webb, Archigram, Suitaloon, 1967. Sequence illustrating the transformation of the suit into a minimal habitable unit: from a body wrapped in and protected by a plastic membrane to an inflatable capsule capable of housing an individual. The bed and the bubble function as complementary devices for rest, isolation, and connection with the surrounding environment. Source: Archigram.
Published in Archigram 8 under the title Comfort for Two, these capsules condense dwelling into its minimal form: a portable, prefabricated habitat tailored to the body, in which inhabitant and shelter form an inseparable unit without territorial anchorage. With sleep and rest at their center and the city serving as an extension of social life, the capsules give inhabitants control over their environment, enabling them to modulate intimacy and public exposure. Half a century before the emergence of social media, Webb anticipated technologically mediated socialization, in which intimacy is displayed while remaining encapsulated within collective spaces (Cheatle 2023).
By conceiving a mobile, adaptable, and autonomous refuge, Webb crystallized a persistent aspiration: to control the relationship with the exterior, modulate intimacy, and sustain the enduring dimensions of domestic experience. The nomadic imaginary presents housing as a technological prosthesis that “is not only a place of rest but also a political field where body, memory, and public life intersect” (Cheatle 2023). From this perspective, Archigram’s capsules can be understood as a laboratory in which intimacy—marked by care, vulnerability, and femininity—is inscribed within the public sphere, opening an ongoing debate over who inhabits, how, and from which embodied positions.
The rooms—and the building—have no envelope other than those of the rooms themselves; there is no box or overall enclosure. In this case, the building consists of the rooms themselves, with no envelope beyond that of each individual unit.
— Javier Monteys, La habitación (2014).
Conceived for a solitary resident who would stay in Tokyo temporarily or during the workweek, the Nakagin Capsule Tower (fig. 3) explores whether mass production could generate new forms of diversity. At the same time, it sought to establish a space for the individual as a critique of postwar Japanese modernization, which had proceeded without a concept of individual “being” (Koolhaas and Obrist 2011, 382-391). Yet the capsule as an individual habitat also reveals underlying biases: the technological ideal of the solitary inhabitant renders the labor of social reproduction invisible and reinforces postwar gender inequality by privileging housing modules designed around male occupants (Whaley 2023).
Figure 3_ Interior of a capsule in the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Kisho Kurokawa, Tokyo, 1972. In this minimal space, the bed functions as the core of a dwelling reduced to its essential elements: rest, storage, hygiene, communication, and a visual connection to the city. It materializes the modern ideal of the autonomous, mobile individual. Its organization around the “solitary man,” however, reveals the limitations of this conception of minimal housing. Source: Photograph by Wikimedia user Wiiii, license don Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Here, the minimal dwelling is conceived as a temporary refuge from work rather than a place of permanent residence. It directly questions the ways of life associated with Tokyo’s postwar reconstruction and accelerated technological development, thereby recasting dwelling as a temporary condition. Each approximately 9 m² unit was conceived as a compact living appliance, complete with a bathroom modeled on an aircraft lavatory. The solitary man is imagined as a technologically connected individual who develops his social relationships in the city rather than within his dwelling. Yet this vision remains incomplete because it overlooks the ways in which femininity and practices of care reconfigure the scope of minimal housing (Orzechowska 2021).
Its construction system embodies impermanence and perpetual regeneration, drawing on a Japanese tradition that, often contrasted with the European association of beauty with permanence, locates beauty in continual change. Conceived as a “reaction to the adoption of Western domestic forms during postwar reconstruction,” (Koolhaas and Obrist 2011, 382) the capsule expresses a Japanese ideal of continuous renewal. This ideal is visible in sites such as the Katsura Imperial Villa or the Ise Shrine, the latter of which is ritually reconstructed every 20 years. The capsules were designed to become obsolete and be replaced periodically; yet occupants often remained, turning temporary single occupancy into a normalized long-term tradition, or retained their capsules as offices or storage spaces.
This gap between regeneration and permanence demonstrates that even a project conceived for change can become stable and acquire value as a fixed form. In Kurokawa’s work, the solitary inhabitant moves within an accelerated urban flow while contained inside a minimal technical artifact. In Pivovarov’s work, the scale is reversed: there is neither serial repetition nor replacement, but rather a space drawn for a solitary biography, in which physical limits enter into dialogue with existential experience.
In 1975, Russian conceptual artist Viktor Pivovarov defined32 m² as the domestic area required by a man living alone in Projects for a Lonely Man, a work composed of six panels (fig. 4) that examine daily routine, dreams, domestic space, and the condition of “being alone.” The sequence passes through four stages before reaching the penultimate panel: the plan of the ideal dwelling, which must provide a view of the sky and a terrace or balcony. A living room, kitchen, bathroom, vestibule, electric stove, and sink organize daily life. The living room also serves as a bedroom, while a generously sized kitchen opens through a window onto the terrace or balcony. Adapted to the individual, this minimal arrangement reproduces constants of dwelling: sleeping, eating, and connecting with the outside world (Pivovarov 2008).
Figure 4_ Six panels from Viktor Pivovarov’s series: Projects for a Lonely Man (1975). Enamel on fiberboard. 171 × 130 × 4 cm each. Source: Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection, Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Panel titles, from left to right: 1. Plan for the Everyday Objects of a Lonely Man; 2. The Daily Regime of a Lonely Man; 3. Plan for the Dreams for a Lonely Man; 4. Plan for the Sky of a Lonely Man; 5. Plan for the Living Space of a Lonely Man; 6. Plan for the Biography of the Lonely Man.
In the final panel, titled Project of a Biography for a Lonely Man, a text describes a conventional life trajectory: childhood and adolescence, marriage, infidelity, the birth of a child, attempts at social integration, and the acquisition of a home. Only after passing through these stages can a person experience conscious solitude:
The schemes presented here, which propose an extreme lack of freedom at the level of real, objective existence, will lead to the attainment of the fourth level of solitude. Although this coincides with the physical death of the lonely person, it in fact entails the conquest of authentic freedom and union with the infinite (Pivovarov 2008, 132).
This return to being suggests, as in The Death of Virgil (Broch 2019), that conscious solitude is itself a form of plenitude: a passage through which the loss of the material opens a path toward union with the eternal. The typology of the “lonely person” compels us to question the cultural and social association of women with caring “not only for themselves, but for others” (Muxí, Cireddu, and Hinojosa 2024). By presenting the intentional rupture of bonds as the result of a profound existential reassessment, it places men and women on equal existential footing.
Architecturally, the space accommodating the individual retains certain constants: openness to the sky, a core of rest, and a threshold connecting interior and exterior. This recurring configuration suggests that the essential aspects of individual dwelling transcend periods, genders, and circumstances, thereby establishing minimal structural conditions that sustain human experience and enable a return to being.
In 1985, Toyo Ito designed the Pao for the Tokyo Nomad Girl as a speculative response to the question of housing in the city. In his text Dismantling and Reconstituting “The House” in a Disordered City (Ito 2015), he asks what precisely constitutes a house and concludes that traditional domestic lifestyles no longer correspond to the urban dynamics of a metropolis such as Tokyo: “interiors everywhere continue to be assembled with a furniture scheme that increasingly constitutes fictional spaces, reflecting an aspiration to a type of family life that has become obsolete” (Ito 2015, 69-71).
According to Ito, a family might experience a greater sense of “family” in a restaurant than at home; the vitality of the contemporary city has reduced the need for a domestic kitchen and, with it, much traditional domestic work. He argues that the great transformation in urban life arises from women living alone, “completely liberated from the conventional house,” who enjoy the city most fully because they extend urban social life until it becomes a continuation of the home: “The solitary urban woman is the happiest of creatures,” although she still needs a place to “eventually return” to rest (Ito 2015, 70-71).
For this woman, it designs the Pao, a tent inspired by Mongolian yurts, “as if these women’s clothing were inflated,” with the bed at its center and its perimeter defined by three indispensable pieces of furniture: a wardrobe, a unit for acquiring knowledge and communicating, and a unit for eating alone (Ito 2015). This configuration reaffirms the basic elements of dwelling—rest, self-care, and nourishment—which persist even in radical models of temporary or portable housing.
The city is a fascinating setting for this woman. “Returning to this basic Pao, having a coffee alone, eating instant noodles, should be for her a small awakening from her dreams for a brief moment of reality,” in which she experiences “very brief moments of boredom” (Ito 2015, 71). This image would reappear just over a decade later in the American television series Sex and the City (Star 1998-2004), whose protagonist describes herself as being “in a relationship with New York.” She symbolizes a generation of urban women at the end of the twentieth century who conquered the metropolis, expanded their presence in professional spaces, and gained public recognition; ambition, once considered a masculine virtue, became feminine territory.
Yet even within this framework of freedom, the need for a minimal refuge persists: a place to sleep, dress, and eat continues to constitute the core of dwelling, demonstrating that certain structures do not disappear even under conditions of radical change. The Tokyo nomad woman, Pivovarov’s lonely man, the inhabitant of a Metabolist capsule, and Webb’s technological inhabitant share a mode of being-in-the-world constructed through minimal spaces that sustain identity and relationships. Across different contexts and periods, the individual dwells between the ephemeral and the permanent: mobility and adaptation on the one hand, and permanence and rootedness on the other. This tension redefines housing as a flexible mediator between being and the city while preserving the constants of dwelling (Orzechowska 2021; Gutiérrez-Mozó et al. 2024; Webb 1964, 1967; Pivovarov 2008; Koolhaas and Obrist 2011).
The cases reviewed show that the postwar recognition of individual dwelling as a legitimate way of inhabiting and being in the city introduced formal changes in housing models and prompted profound reflection on contemporary dwelling and its relationship to time. Housing was no longer conceived solely as fixed support for a predetermined way of life but was reimagined as a device mediating the relationship between being and the world—whether minimal or nomadic, a fold of fabric, a suspended capsule, or even a bed transformed into an artistic statement.
The works analyzed—from Michael Webb’s Suitaloon and Toyo Ito’s Pao for the Tokyo Nomad Girl to the Nakagin capsules, Viktor Pivovarov’s Projects for a Lonely Man, and Tracey Emin’s My Bed—explore the individual’s being-in-the-world in relation to the self, surrounding objects, and a city that may receive or expel them. In every case, the individual appears in a dynamic relationship with the environment and the forms of life that shape their existence. This challenges the rigidity of inherited domestic structures and requires a reconsideration of the spatial configurations that sustain contemporary dwelling.
However, the cases also reveal a significant asymmetry: femininity is unevenly represented in architectural reflections on minimal housing. While Tracey Emin’s work transforms the bed into a scene of vulnerability, memory, and identity, and Toyo Ito’s Pao presents the solitary urban woman as an autonomous subject of contemporary dwelling, many of the architectural proposals reviewed—from Metabolist capsules to Archigram’s portable models—imagine the individual inhabitant as an implicitly masculine figure. Modern minimal housing is thus conceived for the “lonely man,” worker, or nomad, while women’s experiences of individual dwelling remain largely invisible or confined to the realms of care and domestic life.
This asymmetry reveals that, even though architecture has extensively explored spatial reduction and the inhabitant’s mobility, it has paid less attention to the implications of gender for the configuration of individual life. The typologies reviewed frequently privilege mobility over stability, thereby overlooking needs such as intimacy, rootedness, and memory, which also require a degree of material permanence. With the exception of Pivovarov’s work, which grants solitary life a foundational character, most of these proposals continue to interpret solitude as a transitional stage on the way to a family ideal rather than as a stable condition of urban dwelling.
In this context, the spatial devices analyzed—from the Metabolist capsule to the textile refuge of the Pao—show how minimal dwelling is reconfigured in response to new forms of urban life. Yet these models do not eliminate the need for housing that recognizes solitude as a persistent urban phenomenon and explicitly incorporates diverse experiences of individual dwelling, including those associated with women’s autonomy in the contemporary city (Beecher 1869/2002).
Ultimately, what is perennial in the architecture of minimal dwelling resides not necessarily in the stability of its forms but in their capacity to respond to constants of human experience. These constants—shelter, rest, identity, and relationships with others—may appear in the replaceable capsule of a Metabolist building, the fold of a nomadic tent, the bubble of a wearable habitat, or Emin’s unmade bed. Despite their apparent ephemerality, these devices show how contemporary architecture, by recognizing the individual as the center of dwelling, can redefine minimal space as a core of life, memory, and experience. In doing so, it opens the possibility of reconsidering the place of femininity in how dwelling is conceived and designed.