The Digital Living Room

Sammanfattning

Architecture, as a discipline, is often understood as what is yet to be built. This thesis shifts attention to what is already lived. The Digital Living Room studies the domestic interior as a site of architectural knowledge. Through interviews, photography, and LiDAR scanning, four living rooms in Southern Sweden are documented as they were found: occupied, accumulated, and shaped by the habits and histories of the people who live there. The thesis foregrounds these spaces, arguing that the interior holds a sensitivity that architectural practice has largely overlooked and has much to learn from. The collected material is investigated through two distinct registers. The first presents each room through interviews, photographs, and scan data, treating the interior as a portrait of its inhabitant. The second processes the scanned data through a series of digital studies, moving from standard architectural drawing to point cloud accumulation, and topoanalysis – a concept drawn from Bachelard’s phenomenology of domestic space, which treats particular rooms as sites where memory, imagination, and identity meet. The digital manipulations are interpretative acts, each motivated by something specific observed in a room or heard in conversation. Together, they ask what becomes visible when an interior is translated into digital form, and where that translation falls short. The thesis concludes that this process acts as both an act of care and a form of inquiry, though always partial and always honest about its limits. The gaps in the data are not faults of the method. They mark where the interior exceeds what any representation can contain. For architecture, that is not a dead end – it is a starting point. To document space as it is inhabited is to expand what the discipline can know and, therefore, what it can do.