For this special guest-edited issue, PIN–UP invited architect Frida Escobedo to curate an issue centered on domesticity. Escobedo’s research rethinks domestic norms across scales, from single-family homes to mixed-used residential towers across the United States and Mexico. In PIN–UP 39, Escobedo joins peers, collaborators, and designers and thinkers she admires to look at how homes are structured, how care and labor are organized, and how architecture might prompt better ways of living.

With the issue now out in the world, we’re excited to share her editor’s letter below.

Domesticity shifts according to each domestic being. And yet, no matter how individualized, underlying patterns emerge from it: aesthetic arrangements, labor distributions, structures of care, creativity, cohabitation, and safety—alongside patterns of exploitation, whether implicit or explicit. In my research, I’ve always returned to examine these dynamics with awe and curiosity, perhaps with the most depth in Domestic Orbits, a 2019 publication that maps how domestic spaces are organized around the exclusion and invisibilization of domestic workers, and the simultaneous pull of their trajectories toward that uninhabitable gravitational center. It is precisely because private domestic spaces often function as microcosms of broader social relations that seemingly trivial endeavors—like remodeling a kitchen, furnishing a living room, or designing a beach house — can reveal clues and configurations worth examining in the search for better forms of life. This issue brings together critical work by friends and colleagues and part of my own research archive on domesticity, its theoretical implications, and its material challenges, spanning intimate conversations about family rituals to beautiful interiors that defy how we think about comfort and luxury. The question remains: How do the larger structures that shape our world mirror themselves in our most intimate spaces? Who cooks? Who cleans? And what kind of sofa do we want to sit on?

— Frida Escobedo with Felix Burrichter