RCA School of Architecture ResearchRCA SoA Research

In the brutal arena of the London the living room. Landlords, agents and tenants all play the game – to either stuff pockets or make ends meet – by packing homes quite literally to the rafters. In the process, what was originally the living room is often subsumed into an ‘everything‑room’: bedroom, store room, crash pad for undomiciled friends, office, bike shed and thoroughfare.

While sometimes accounted for by the correct HMO (housing for multiple
occupation) licensing, these rooms regularly house non‑contracted tenants. This is not only legally precarious, with no protection in case of eviction, it is also spatially unstable, with many needing to arrange their home in such a way that on inspection – often with only 24 hours’ notice – these rooms can be frantically upturned to look like living rooms after all.

The ex‑living room establishes a sociospatial hierarchy; while its occupiers rarely pay less rent, it has come to embody what a friend of mine in this predicament calls a ‘doormat subjectivity’. Compared with housemates with rooms upstairs or beyond communal spaces, and who therefore cross a staggered threshold into domesticity, housemates who sleep just off the entrance corridor experience high footfall, noise and a disproportionate level of door‑answering duty. Stuffed shoe shelves, overflowing coat racks and piles of bikes and parcels often block entry and exit. Being looked‑on from the street reduces privacy and safety, so blinds are often drawn and windows closed, meaning light goes and damp grows. The shape of the bed often clashes with the shape of the room, sitting against an alcove (in which it does not fit), in front of a fireplace or adjacent to the entrance with any remaining dead corners unable to fit furniture. In short, ‘feng shui is hard to come by,’ the same friend laments, ‘and you end up rattled and rotting in bed more than you would like.’

With the loss of the living room, kitchens and bedrooms also become everything‑rooms by default. Hospitality, creativity, being either retreat to the bedroom or stuff the shared kitchen, often stoking tension, around overlapping uses and conflicting schedules, in already adverse living conditions. This can infantilise adult tenants, involuntarily re‑enacting teenage tendencies where eating, sleeping, feeling and socialising happen in retreat from co‑inhabitants: a prolonged adolescence enforced by the contemporary metropolitan condition, where finding stability comes later in life, if at all.

In a family rental, the ex-living room often becomes a child’s room, leaving only an everything-kitchen-diner where children climb over counters and sit on cold floors underneath sharp objects and dangerous liquids. The loss of spatial distinction, not to mention floorspace, affects crawling, stretching and playing capacity, inevitably limiting imaginaries. (There is a reason why June Jordan’s plan for Harlem from the 1960s argued for a window for every child – so they were spatially afforded the capacity for imagination.) For anyone involved, the need to seek living room stand-ins – cafés, pubs – costs time, money and privacy as non-commodified ‘third spaces’ like libraries are becoming increasingly rare.

The contemporary western European living room has its roots in spaces such as the boudoir, which only more recently adopted erotic overtones. In an overheated rental market, living rooms are increasingly converted
into additional bedrooms, placing pressure on already inadequate living
conditions.

The living room typology emerged from a range of other rooms which proliferated in the western European bourgeois home between the 18th and 20th centuries, each designed to mediate public and private or leisure and (gendered) labour. The parlour and sitting room acted as buffer spaces dedicated to receiving guests, in contrast to the reading room or drawing room, to the rear and to be retreated to. The nursery and boudoir were assigned to informalised, reproductive and unwaged activity like childcare and dressing up, while the study was assigned to formalised, productive and breadwinning activity. These rooms were bridged – often physically – by the bedroom, itself newly defined as a space of private, heterosexual union. Directly – and misogynistically – translated as the ‘sulking room’, the boudoir only later took on erotic undertones, with earlier portrayals depicting it as a room for reading, contemplating, conversing or displaying foraged or gathered beautiful things.

With the mass production of housing in the 20th century, these functions were bundled together into an all-purpose ‘living room’. Here, social reproduction – and the technologies that mediate it like the TV, radio and the telephone – takes centre stage, informing and orienting the internal and external attitude of the emergent nuclear family. Programmatically loose compared with the bathroom, kitchen or bedroom, the living room is a place in which people show and present themselves as more than, but nevertheless often the result of, our productivity in the world. Free of ‘essential’ tools for living such as an oven, bed or toilet, the living room tends to host an accumulation of the objects and experiences that express who we are and what we care about. It is therefore deeply bound to the expression – and reproduction – of social standing and sense of self.

Designing for those caught at the sharpest end of sociospatial uncertainty and hostile environments demonstrates the sociospatial value of the living room the most. Architect Sandi Hilal’s 2018 project Al-Madhafah (Living Room) – semi-submerged into the walls of an apartment block housing refugees in Boden, Sweden – was designed for communal, self-organised, non-productive programming. This marks its use as precisely beyond survival, freeing users from conditioned dependency and isolation. Hilal emphasises the living room as facilitating the ‘right to host’ as much as to live, helping to reproduce a cultural memory and social subjectivity so often denied to those in exile. Back in London, the Magpie Project similarly offers a communal living room for young mothers in temporary accommodation, highlighting space for play and socialised leisure as essential to the physical and mental health of both child and parent. These projects emphasise the non-productive room as a totem of well-being and agency.

As both marker and agent of social reproduction, the living room speaks to a broader political context. In times of stability and abundance, it offers a space to breathe for those not suffocated by profitability and productivity metrics. In times of precarity and decline, it is squeezed into a Pandora’s box of social decline, where programmatic oversaturation is used to endure the rollback of rights. This spatial compression epitomises the social reproduction of overwhelm, instability and a neglected sense of self.
There are attempts to design within such conditions. Post-occupancy surveys of recent projects in Hackney by Adam Khan Architects and muf noted how (hard-fought-for) higher ceilings have provided new mothers with ‘breathing space’ above head height in purpose-built everything-rooms. In Suffolk, the Dora Brown Charity helps to alleviate overwhelmed everything-rooms to help families in crisis. While these efforts honourably make the best of a bad situation, designers must nevertheless recognise the risks of facilitating injustice by obscuring the material decimation of sociospatial rights.

The struggle for a life outside work calls spatial practitioners to rethink the living room precisely at the moment when it is being wiped out by a manufactured, ever-expanding housing crisis. Despite its origins in heteronormative and bourgeois aspiration, the living room should not be regarded as a luxury. It must be fought for as an essential apparatus of freedom for all, a room to be in and be with. Architects are also responsible for designing the conditions that make a living room possible. It is spatial practitioners’ duty to complement social struggles by fighting for the spatial resources that support them. Alongside campaigns for Four Day Weeks and Universal Basic Incomes, practitioners should refuse to spatially concede to the mechanisms which read labour and productivity as the only measure of a worthy existence. A more emancipatory vision of the home, whatever the social bonds that constitute it, should reimagine the living room as a space for the practice of freedom.