Housing Studio III: Fall 1997 Instructor: Wayne Berg Housing is extremely rich and interesting. Not as it is practiced. The system of production discourages experimentation. Generally it looks banal and it is. But there is the potential of much richness. Housing must be thought of from the most essential question of what it means to dwell (as explored by Heidegger and other philosophers); to issues of family structure and gender (through the work of Deloris Hayden and other sociologists and anthropologists). The study of typology is important because anything you design will fall into one of 4 or 5 typologies. Only through understanding the typology can you transform it. In his book, The Concept of Dwelling, Christopher Norbery-Schultz raises several issues, which I wish this studio to address among the most important are: - What does it mean to dwell? - What is the social agreement with others (the set of common values)? - What are the relationships between collective, public and private dwelling? - What is the genealogy of multifamily housing (the settlement)? - What is the spatial order that relates to the place and the patterns of human action? - What are the ideas of boundary? These larger philosophical issues will be applied to a specific urban condition, a series of complex sites in Hell's Kitchen, where you will engage simultaneously the scale of the City and the scale of the room. The team approach is an important factory. As housing is both collective and individual, the team fosters dialogue to discover what issues are held in common and which are not. This process allows the development of a richer design and the combined effort allows a deeper investigation into the making of architecture. This also introduces you to the collaborative nature of architecture as a social art. The core issues of community and privacy are at the heart of any understanding of dwelling. The occupants, the students, and their needs are seemingly much less diverse and more easily defined than the "typical" cross section of housing resident - or is, that so? The challenge of the studio is to examine what it means to dwell, to make place: to create an architecture that supports a diverse range of overlapping conditions of community and privacy that fosters dwelling, and promote s the individual and the community of individuals.