Dwelling on the Platform: Housing Access and Equity in the Digital Society

The exhibition featured a range of content including screen-based work, pamphlets, large-scale images, and architectural drawings. The work was arranged within the distributed domestic spaces most aligned with its content. For example, video footage documenting a new 18-bed house, purpose built for Airbnb in an inner Melbourne suburb played on a ‘hotel-like’ wall-mounted TV in the bedroom.

The exhibition deployed platforms to provide an immersive experience of their role in reshaping domestic space. Each of the rooms in the show were listed on a space-sharing platform pertaining to their use: Airbnb (bedroom), Swimply (bathroom), Peerspace (kitchen) and Creative Spaces (media room). Available rooms were implied through their distinctive electric blue block colour which hugged the corners of the gallery, demarcating zones for use through paint and vinyl that subsumed all furniture arranged within them. The central circular space – “occupied’ by Anthony Clarke’s exhibition “Architecture of Care” – was articulated in grey and delineated a sheer silver curtain to signal its enclosure. In other words, Clarke’s exhibition was treated as a permanent exhibition nested within the overall exhibition, further demonstrating the performative and programmatic possibilities of the platform.

The exhibition design for ”Dwelling on the Platform” and ”Architecture of Care” was, in actuality, a highly integrative concept co-designed by Alexander & Sheridan and BLOXAS, in collaboration with Warren Taylor and U–P who designed the accompanying publications respectively, as well as printed take-aways. Dwelling on the Platform’s blue vinyl datum references the blue dust jacket of the publication, and adopts a common design language. In this way, the architectural and graphic components work cohesively together to deliver the content across a range of formats to engage different audiences.

The question of audience was central to this exhibition’s agenda, and indeed its content. Housing affordability is a topic that concerns most Australians. Likewise, the smartphone is a product of popular culture that has become vital to our daily functioning. By telling the story of the financialization of housing via the smartphone, both the exhibition content and its form becomes relatable for audiences who may not be familiar with these structural issues. Through the listing of the spaces online, the impacts of digital cultures on physical space are enacted, live, for exhibition-goers. This “embodied” approach is a more direct way to communicate these spatio-temporal ideas – which are difficult to represent through static architectural drawings alone – and enables conversations with communities who may not be familiar with reading plans. In this way, the exhibition demonstrates design excellence through the variety of physical and digital media that it engages in tandem – digital platforms, screens, prints, books, takeaways, and the 1:1 maquette – to speak to architectural, academic, cultural and popular audiences at once.

The exhibition also demonstrates design excellence through its approach to interdisciplinary collaboration. It successfully interweaves the distinct visual identities of both “Dwelling on the Platform” and “Architecture of Care” into a holistic exhibition concept. This seamlessness is evidenced by the embedded “exhibition within an exhibition” approach, as well as the mirroring of architectural and graphic treatments across the exhibition and associated publications. A central argument within this exhibition is that to effectively address the housing crisis, architects must form sympathetic alliances with other actors involved in the production of housing, but also develop coalitions with other creative disciplines to build cultures of solidarity across audiences and genres. The exhibition design itself adopts this ethos, making housing a project of collective action through collaboration.

The impacts of digital economies and technologies on urban environments is still understudied and the effects are playing out in real time. The reframing of these gps spatial technologies as a design tool with the potential for global scalability is highly original and inventive and has resulted from a sustained, peer-reviewed design research project developed over many years. Australia has enough bedrooms to house all citizens, but these are locked away in private homes. The exhibition takes the position that platforms are not inherently capitalistic, but at present, are mainly operated by Silicon Valley tech companies who prioritise shareholder profits and extract and monopolise data. However, by redesigning the platform to distribute economic benefits among its communities, the platform could provide a tool for addressing the corruption of housing-as-commodity and unlock underutilised supply. The exhibition frames a number of speculative scenarios for how space and city makers, in collaboration with technologists, governments, artists, lawyers, economists and indeed everyday citizens can reinvisage platforms and the data they produce to serve the public interest.

Through the listing of spaces online, the exhibition is a live demonstration that it is possible to use these tools beyond a market framework to orchestrate complimentary programs, synchronicities and encounters that help intensify latent spaces in socially responsible ways. The originality of content in the exhibition is mirrored by the experimental integration of these technologies within its design. The show’s digital interactivity, as well as its 1:1 replication of a domestic environment, places the user at the centre of its approach, and engages audiences in a playful, imaginative manner with these complex issues.

The architect Arno Brandlehuber claims that in the digital age, the ownership of land and the ownership of data is becoming increasingly intertwined. Dwelling on the Platform tries to empower audiences to reclaim the internet (and the cities that it increasingly regulates) as a project for people rather than profit. Central to this body of work is its potential to make a positive social impact, and to recast housing a common good, rather than a tradable commodity. The de-localisation and monopolisation of housing that is resulting from extractive short-term rental economies is causing significant injury to the housing ecosystem and addressing these cultures is of vital importance to the ongoing livability of our cities. Yet, this exhibition demonstrates that with intelligence and creativity, platforms could be put to use in strategic and socially responsible ways to make housing more equitable and accessible.

The exhibition was conceptualised as a touring exhibition, and therefore many of its elements will be reused in its next iteration, extending the lifecycle of the show and minimising waste. The exhibition is both timely and highly relevant given the urgency of the housing crisis in Australia and the recent reports in Victoria that allege 1 in 20 homes are currently vacant. Yet, the amplification of speculative cultures via platforms is hardly unique to Australian cities and is repeating itself all over the world. Indeed, the exhibition has already garnered interest interstate and overseas, which is testament to the significance and applicability of this work elsewhere.