I Had Been There Twice: On Nostalgia and Space
Georgina Pantazopoulou
The family of Common Ground Practice consists of Georgina Pantazopoulou and Ilaria Palmieri. Georgina Pantazopoulou (GR, 1994) is an architect and designer based between Athens and Antwerp. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp, Faculty of Design Sciences and part of the Architecture and Interior Research Group. Her work critically examines contemporary domesticity, as well as the roles of gender, nostalgia, and memory, challenging the legacy of modernism through an intersectional feminist perspective. She has presented her research at conferences including Domesticity Under Siege (University of Brighton, 2025), Current Issues of Interiors (Izmir University, 2026), and the Design History Society Annual Conference (Brno, 2026). Her work has been exhibited at Milan Design Week (2023), SEA Foundation in Eindhoven (2023), among others. Ilaria Palmieri (IT, 1994) is a spatial designer and PhD candidate at Roma Tre University in the Faculty of Architecture, City and Landscape. Based between Rome and The Hague, she explores dwelling practices, in particular in contexts of migration, and participatory spatial politics through an intersectional feminist lens. Her research combines architectural analysis, ethnography, and participatory mapping to foreground migrants’ agency and inform housing policy. Her work has been exhibited at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and Dutch Design Week, among others.Together, Georgina and Ilaria work across research, writing, exhibition-making, and design. They are the editors and authors of They Asked Me to Design a House, I Asked Them to Design a Home (Set Margins’, 2025). Their practice has been supported by the Graham Foundation (2025) and the Creative Industries Fund NL (2023, 2026). They have presented their work at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City (2026) and have led workshops and given lectures at institutions including ETH Zurich, the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, and the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.
The proposal aims to examine how spaces become emotionally charged, destabilized, or transformed during life transitions such as grief, parenting, aging and migration, and how these shifts reshape our capacity to inhabit or re-inhabit familiar environments. While nostalgia is often associated with sorrow and longing for what can no longer be inhabited, the project approaches it through a queer lens, understanding it as a generative condition that opens alternative ways of relating to space, identity, and belonging. Where architectural and interior design discourse has traditionally prioritized functionality, aesthetics, and normative assumptions about dwelling, this publication foregrounds the emotional and sensory registers through which space is actually experienced. Drawing on feminist ethnographic and autoethnographic methods as well as embodied perception theory, it develops a critical and poetic framework for what we call spatial attunement. Through the integration of sensory diaries, atmospheric documentation, emotional cartographies, drawing-based practices, and dialogical formats within an intersectional framework, I Had Been There Twice proposes not only a body of research, but a set of operative strategies. These elements are not presented as fixed methods, but as adaptable tools that can be reinterpreted and applied within different design processes and contexts. In this sense, the publication operates at the intersection of reflection and application. It creates a space in which readers can recognize their own experiences of spatial dissonance and nostalgia, while also offering designers concrete ways to work with these conditions in practice, whether in research, pedagogy, or spatial design processes. Produced in collaboration with Set Margins’ Press and with the support of Creative Industries Fund NL, the book is conceived as a practical attunement tool for readers, architects, and spatial practitioners navigating the emotional complexity of dwelling.