This photo shows a group of people huddled around a wooden board, collaborating on a hands-on project. The image offers a perspective on gender in the Integral Urban House. Women and men, dressed in everyday clothes, were working side-by-side to carve joints into wood. The labor of building a house was no longer only for men. In a way, this redefined “running a household”, where traditional roles of domesticity for women and industry for men came together. “Homemaking” meant building the physical home and operating its daily functions.
In addition, this photo depicts the essence of the Integral Urban House as a ‘knowledge production commune’. People came together to learn skills and test the limits of what can be produced on the small plot of urban land. Many volunteers and residents came from the university and possessed that academic drive to research more about design, agriculture, and ecology. Unlike other communes, the IUH was closely linked to the urban, knowledge-producing university, and took advantage of this by having bright-eyed students assist with experiments and help with tasks.
