Dirty Laundry is an architectural and feminist inquiry into how washing reveals the spatial organisation of social life and environmental relations. From rivers and communal wash places to social housing laundries, domestic interiors, laundromats, industrial facilities, and global textile infrastructures, washing connects bodies, materials, water, labour, technologies, and landscapes. Yet despite its fundamental role in sustaining everyday life, laundry has rarely occupied a central place within architectural histories and theories. It has not been invisible; rather, the spaces, practices, and labour relations through which washing is organised have often been naturalised, feminised, displaced, or excluded from architectural narratives.
Moving from river to machine, this volume examines washing as a spatial practice through which social, political, and ecological relations are mediated by architecture and the built environment. It explores how relations of labour, gender, class, ownership, coloniality, welfare, public health, wealth, whiteness, hygiene, cleanliness, technology, water, detergents, chemicals, and waste systems become organised through space — shaping the distribution of bodies, resources, responsibilities, and forms of belonging. Washing reveals how ideas of modernity, health, respectability, domesticity, and care are not only social values and economic conditions but spatial arrangements, materialised through buildings, infrastructures, landscapes, and everyday environments.
While the Frankfurt Kitchen became an emblematic architectural response to domestic labour, efficiency, and the organisation of everyday life, it also generated feminist counter-imaginaries that challenged the spatial confinement and unequal distribution of domestic work. The kitchen became not only an object of architectural reform but a site from which feminist activists, artists, and practitioners reimagined relations between labour, care, and space. Laundry offers a different but equally significant field of inquiry. There is no equivalent canonical figure through which washing has entered architectural history. This absence raises questions about how laundry has been imagined, designed, and spatially organised, and what forms of architectural and feminist counter-planning might emerge when washing becomes the starting point. Dirty Laundry seeks to examine architects, designers, and practitioners who have engaged explicitly with spaces of washing — from rivers and communal wash places to collective laundries, domestic environments, laundromats, and industrial infrastructures — and to consider how these spaces have shaped both the realities and imaginaries of labour.
Rather than approaching laundry as merely a private domestic activity, Dirty Laundry considers washing as a spatial practice and a form of labour through which societies organise maintenance, social reproduction, and environmental relations. The volume examines communal washing places and rivers; welfare-state laundries and shared infrastructures within social housing across different political and historical contexts in a wide range of geographies; public washing facilities that continue to sustain everyday life in many parts of the world; laundromats as urban spaces of encounter, necessity, and visibility; and industrial systems through which washing becomes entangled with global economies, technologies, and ecological transformations. Dirty Laundry considers the hidden environmental cost in the form of detergent pollutants and microplastics entering water bodies and discarded in far away locations and also the weary and sick bodies of people who perform the often arduous labour.
Bringing together architectural history, feminist scholarship, spatial theory, decolonial approaches, and environmental humanities, the volume investigates the architectures and ecologies of washing across diverse geographical contexts and economic conditions. It asks how cleanliness and hygiene have shaped spatial practices, how ownership and access have structured relations between private and collective provision, and how colonial, capitalist and state socialist systems have organised the movement of water, textiles, labour, and waste. At the same time, it attends to situated forms of knowledge, collective practices, and alternative arrangements of care through which washing sustains communities and environments.
The volume invites contributions from scholars, architects, designers, and practitioners working across different regions, histories, and economies. It seeks to expand architectural discourse beyond canonical buildings and authorship toward the everyday spaces, infrastructures, landscapes, technologies, and labour practices through which worlds are maintained. By attending to laundry, Dirty Laundry examines architecture not only as the production of form, but as the mediation of relations among bodies, materials, environments, and the unequal conditions through which everyday life is sustained.
Dirty Laundry: Architecture, Labour, and the Spatial Politics of Washing
Edited by Chloé Darmon, Marianna Janowicz, and Elke Krasny
Abstract Submission: 1000 words
Deadline: October 15, 2026
Send to: dirtylaundry.arch@gmail.com
The project will culminate in a peer-reviewed edited volume featuring selected contributions.
Indicative timeline: Full chapters due Fall 2027;
manuscript submission Summer 2028.