This article is a reflection on the relationship between space and the body of its inhabitants through furniture. It explores the ways in which the furniture arranged in space shows a social or family structure and a time. A review of housing projects is made, from the spatial structure in the nineteenth-century bourgeois house, through modern housing, and to sophisticated contemporary Japanese housing proposals. Using the concept of ‘structures of placement”, coined by Jean Baudrillard in his book The system of objects (2003), we propose here a look from which architecture is understood as incomplete without furniture, since it is precisely through furniture that the ways of life which occupy it are defined.