Mitigation The British architectural historian, critic and writer, Reyner Banham, formed the concept of ‘unhouse’ in a period of intense
technological transformation during the middle years of the twentieth century. His unhouse proposed the seemingly radical idea to dematerialize the walls and roof of a house, to remove the strictures that tie buildings, and thus people, to the encumbrances of what he termed: ‘the dead weight of domestic architecture’ (A Home is Not a House, 1965). This paper situates Banham’s unhouse within a category of dominant architectural and design theory that suppressed or diminished the importance of interior spaces and their relevance to human wellbeing and social relations. It suggests that in exploratory designs from contemporary projects, including Philips’ Microbial Home (2011) and Superflux’s of Shock (2017-19) the designers create immersive experiences in future interiors, pointing to the development of new theories of design and domesticity in the twenty-first century.