Rethinking the Author as an Open Field. The Dishwasher House by Frances Gabe

Starting from a dismissed history, the self-cleaning house designed byFrances Gabe in 1984 –conceived through separate patents – thiscontribution explores how patents both define and negate the role of thearchitect by enabling replication, complicating conventional notions ofintellectual authorship. Gabe proposes an autonomous and self-taught design researchmethodology focusing on a central question: does designing a houseusing patents equate to designing a space itself? The author develops a design process that is not the result of specificcontexts or concepts but rather emerges from a certain mathematicalsum of assembled parts. This contribution aims to investigate the trajectories suggested by thiscase study, namely, to open up the field of the author to undefined orindefinable instances, transforming methodological experimentation indesign. It does so by examining a one-of-a-kind house – on the edge ofepic – that merges the person-author with hypotheses of automatism,programmatic intents, and patents.