Whilst housing has long been a terrain of struggle in terms of its scale, provision, urban morphology and technological advancement, it often escapes a political critique of its interior logic. And yet, it is perhaps only from a political perspective that we might be able to see beyond the impasse we are witnessing. If most of the newly built stock conforms to models established more than a century ago, an increasing number of ‘experimental’ proposals reimagine domesticity with a chequered success that is surprising if we consider how ill-fitting the petit-bourgeois family flat is to our current conditions. In such a conjuncture the concept of type seems to be still a useful ground for debate as it helps us to read housing as a tool for the construction of subjects.

At the core of this mandate crisis lies a great unsaid non-said of western society, namely the role played by the house in the institutionalisation of reproductive labour. Reproductive labour is the care, education and actual production of the labour force from childbearing to housework to the care of the elderly—a form of labour that, before mature capitalism, was never seen as separate from other productive activities. In this sense, this paper assumes a feminist standpoint in that it re-reads modern housing as the place of women’s hidden, unwaged work, and typological discourse as the intellectual and technical arsenal that has allowed the fine tuning of such a labour system.

The hypothesis that will be explored is that reproductive labour itself is undergoing a large-scale shift that architecture is struggling to register. In order to understand this shift, we will look at the recent architectural production of three nations—the Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan—where a strong design culture has met an acute awareness of the recent changes in the organisation of work. Looking at work by MVRDV, Christian Kerez and SANAA, we will try to construct a map of possible solutions for housing beyond reproductive labour—and, perhaps, beyond type itself.