This book brings together a collection of essays reflecting on the spaces women inhabit at the intersection — and the term is especially fitting here — of home, work, and society, which also form the book’s three thematic sections.

These are spaces inhabited not only by physical bodies, but also by mental and virtual ones: spaces in which women move independently or come together to form communities. It is precisely within this collective dimension that these spaces become vehicles for a force capable of affirming women’s cultural, social, and political agency.

Among these various forms of space, the home perhaps remains the most central, for historically it has been not only the domain of the family, but also the site of women’s labour, both productive and reproductive. It is also the space that, over time, has been most rigorously regulated — the one that has most persistently controlled and constrained women at a personal, familial, and social level.

As Imma Forino reminds us, the social inequality embedded within the structure of the family is mirrored in the home — the fundamental unit of state organization — where boundaries are imposed upon bodies and their spheres of action circumscribed. If the home functions as an apparatus that orchestrates relations of power, what instruments can we, as architects, deploy in order to subvert these axioms?

The book ultimately raises a series of questions that deserve to play a far more decisive role in shaping our discipline.