“At Home He‘s A Tourist!” (1979) is the title of one of the most successful tracks of the British band Gang Of Four active since the end of the 1970s. By accident the name of this song, written now thirty years ago, anticipates the contemporary socio-cultural condition, which is, among others, related to phenomenon of the room-rental platforms. These are at the same time the product and the contributors to the establishment of new social and architectural conditions, which define for example the contemporary citizens as digital nomads. Among these platforms Airbnb, conceived by two flatmates as an improvised solution to round up the monthly income, is one of the most successful pioneers of these online marketplaces.

Thanks to these websites, with few clicks, we’re all, potentially, tourists in someone else’s home.

The architectural reality produced by short – term room rental platforms, is placed within different areas of discussion, which involve various socio-spatial, economical and political aspects, whose consequences affect the city and architecture on multi-scalar levels: from the neighborhood, to the apartment and to devices. Among these topics of interest, the relationship be-tween domestic space and digital media is a fundamental precondition for the emergence of these phenomena and is therefore the main topic discussed in this work. As already illustrated by various researches, since the first half of the 20th century, the way architects dealt with the conception and production of houses was strongly connected with the emergence of mass media.

This thesis aims to highlight some of the most significant issues related to the domestic space and its engagement, on multi-scalar levels, with the con-temporary digital media. The resulting of the encounter and mutual integration between domestic space and media is in fact not limited to an addition of technological elements into the environment of our homes, rather it induces a transformation of this space.

From the micro to the macro sphere, to the new relationships that are established between humans, devices and spaces, to the redefinition and re-functionalization of the city starting from the interior, the domestic space is going, again in its history, through a transitional phase, characterized by a spatial and ideal redefinition. Media resulted as some of the main contributors to these transformations.

Master Lecture: http://www.architecturaltheory.tv/?p=2442&lang=en