The Public Life of Home - Architectures of Belonging
The Architecture Fringe launches its Festival 2027 theme and provocation.
Register to take part here, and read our how to take part guide here.
What makes a home?
Home is often imagined as the most private of spaces, a retreat from public life, a shelter, and a place to rest. It’s a place of connection, too - of meaning, of lore; somewhere to return to, and somewhere to belong.
Few homes exist alone, with most dwellings dependent upon the communal infrastructures of streets, energy, water and systems of ownership that enable collective public life. Home is sustained by the society around it, in a long-term relationship, with its architecture both intimate and open, and its boundaries both porous and fuzzy. It is personal, and political.
Where and how we live has always been shaped by climate, culture, and circumstance. Today, who gets to live where depends on a great many things, and the architectures of belonging are as varied and diverse as we are. Across the world this most fundamental of our needs faces challenges in supply, affordability, access, tenure, design and conviviality, affecting villages, towns and cities in every continent.
In Scotland we have a right to roam, but what about a right to home? Housing emergencies have been declared by the Scottish Government and 14 local authorities across the country, with our own domestic affairs fully reflective of global struggles around land, resources and capital. Public housing is a national priority, its provision acute across urban, island and rural areas.
‘A house is not a machine to live in, it is the shell of a person, their extension, their release, their spiritual emanation.’
– Eileen Gray
In the 21st Century, the creative reconfiguration of where and how we live is one of the defining architectural challenges of our time. In Scotland and further afield, people are coming together to explore inspiring yet necessary ideas such as housing as social infrastructure, new relationships between home and the public realm, concepts of repair over replacement, and reconnections of domestic life with the land that sustains it.
Learning from inspiring examples of progressive practice from around the world, the Architecture Fringe Festival 2027 will feature a vibrant and dynamic Open Programme of self-directed work, alongside a Core Programme of exhibitions, talks, events and a new international conference. The Core Programme will be structured around three key lines of enquiry: Home - how we dwell, care, and belong; Land - how we occupy, steward and transform territory; and Publics - how we collectively organise, participate, and exercise social agency.
At heart, The Public Life of Home asks what architecture might become if its starting point was not the production of property, but the building of belonging?
We hope you’ll join us.
The Architecture Fringe Festival 2027 will take place 04-20 June 2027 across Scotland. Our Open Call is now open! and closes for confirmed submissions on 06 April 2027. Come along to one of our Open Meet-Ups to be inspired and meet other people - all welcome.
