This article by Jaime Coll López was originally published in the 10th issue of revista rita_ under the title "Determination vs Indeterminacy in Domestic Space." It is a critique of flexibility in housing, one of the primary paradigms of 20th-century domestic architecture.
Flexibility as a modern ideology—one of the key paradigms of twentieth-century domestic architecture—is criticized by the philosopher José Luis Pardo, who characterizes it as a "process of fluidification." In his text "Turismo siniestro"[i], Pardo cites Michel Foucault’s essay *Discipline and Punish*[ii] to analyze how, from the Enlightenment onward, procedures were developed in various spheres of life (schools, the military, hospitals, prisons, churches) to control individuals and increase their efficiency and productivity. Consequently, the modern society emerging from the Enlightenment organized itself around strategies of control and discipline. This would ultimately impact early twentieth-century housing through the differentiation of functional spaces: "During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Foucault [...] 'analyzed' the interior space of working-class housing, creating differentiated rooms—the children's room, the conjugal bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the dining room, the living room—where previously there was only a single space in which all household tasks, people, and functions coexisted." [iii]
