A Framework for Domestic Possibility
Jessica Chang
2025
In Plain Sight investigates the contested domestic spaces of cortiços in the city center of São Paulo—densely inhabited, multi-family, collective living spaces hidden behind ornamented façades. Over the past century, the large influx of migrants and immigrants triggered a housing crisis, during which cortiços proliferated within the city center. Cortiços provides a lens into the spatial negotiations, tensions, and care practices that sustain everyday life. Though often overlooked, these spaces have stood the test of time, through maintenance, adaptation, and shared domestic routines by their residents. The recurring element in almost all cortiços is the extensive and narrow corridor/patio as a common space, the threshold between public and private. Rather than offering a solution, this proposal extrudes and reclaims the space vertically through a scaffold structure that acts as a framework for domestic possibility, monumentalizing the every day, leaving room for celebration, memory, and resistance within the city’s relentless growth.