HOUSING

Home is where the heart is.
"...something that you say which means that your true home is with the person or in the place that you love most."
-Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms © Cambridge University Press 1998

Our most protected environment, treasure chest to our most important possessions, incubator for our highest aspirations, the beginning point of our dream world: This is our home. The complex stage that allows private roles to be played against one another: Aspirant and mentor, child and parent, husband and wife. All these activities achieved with one most important ingredient supplied by the home. Privacy. Privacy from the outside world, privacy from the city, privacy from each other

These notions are at the expense of the very reason we live in the city, to be the opposite of private, to be public. Thus the beautiful problem implicit in housing: To ease this abrupt condition, to allow a dignified progression from one world to another, to allow the individual to adjust gradually, to lessen the shock.

To be in the city, partaking of commerce, involved in communal activities, to be required to share, posits a way of being Public. This is a specific demand of the actor that each of us is. It is a unique role with specific protocols, it is a role with a specific stage necessary. All our apartments grouped together into a mass of private living is a large part of the raw material that makes up the city, this very specific stage.

As architects of housing we are doing double duty: We must create the public and private stage simultaneously. We are responsible for the cultural codes which have preceeded us: Each of these spheres is subject to an accumulation of collective memory. It is this collective memory in each of us that cues our behavior in each place.

Part of this collective knowledge involves a recognition of materials and their appropriateness or inappropriateness to the environment being made. Memory is not exclusively the provenance of the mind: We have, in our bodies as instruments, the memory of tactility, the memory of weight, strength, elasticity.

In every material resides its history of use, references it makes, values we associate with it. In every material resides its capacity to achieve a physical purpose: to enclose, to support, to isolate, to insulate, to span, to respire. Materials in use are true cultural artifacts, on the one hand used for very practical purposes, on the other, dense with man's predilections, prejudices, and most hopefully intuitions.

Or, in a more poetic world, in the words of Alvaro Malo:

The construction of things is an expenditure or, depending on how one thinks of it, an investment of force and energy. This investment of energy brings the material from its natural state to a new artificial state that bears the sign of human sensibility. If that sensibility has beauty as a dominant end its composition becomes regulated by taste; if it has the idea of force as a motive it opens into an intelligent process of thinking and making, and vice versa. The sign of intelligence thus proposed is to establish a reasonable diagram of forces, which are invisible to the eye and only grasped by the inner sense, and make t hem visible by placing the corresponding material on a tangent, outlining the contours of the diagram - that is an extraordinary event which makes the abstract concrete, using what is intelligible in things as a means to challenge and engage our own intelligence. If the diagram of force is the application of a pre-existing formula, the work is simply engineered and mechanistic; but i the diagram is known only as a logical intuition, as a quasi-mathematical concept, the motivating force becomes plastic and arranges the material at will, in the space available to the free and ordered play of the imagination, where a conservation of force as well as a conservation of material is realized - it is in this sense that the work establishes its true minimum, conceptually and aesthetically, and the fictitious borders between engineering and architecture are dismantled.

The contemplation of energy in contemporary practice has a new determinant: efficiency. A concept of efficiency that allows energy not to be wasted. This should be a motivation at both the levels of urban design and building design. At an urban scale it resonates with the theme of this year's housing studio: the efficiencies implicit in swift public transportation and the rise of intermodal centers, and the design of housing to be related to these centers. At the scale of building design it can correspond to a reduction in material used, an intuitive diminution without sacrificing performance.

Housing is subject to necessary laws by governmental agencies. The laws, (true cultural artifacts), are written to assure citizens that both their home and their city will be safe and habitable. The two agencies which have had the most effect on the form of housing have been those responsible for fire control and for massing in cities, (Zoning.) Fire spread laws have dictated the elimination of air shafts and small courts for light. This has led to the conglomeration of housing blocks into large undifferentiated masses which must remain unbroken along their street edges. New zoning resolutions, subject to capitalistic imperatives, allow property owners to sell the air space above their properties, magnifying the bulk of buildings, creating a new scale of vertical living.

METHOD

The aesthetic resolution of the housing projects for the semester will be subject to a critique based on the considerations outlined above.

The techniques used in studio to achieve these ends are indirect, and involve other topics and exercises. The degree to which each student pair becomes more or less invested in these topics is up to each team:

Density will be introduced as a conceptual variable. An exercise in close packing will be given. Topics included are unit/family relationships and the formulation of rules with the potential, and need for, exceptions. The need for housing typologies will be introduced.

The relationship between unit and module will be introduced. The concept of prototype will be introduced, with a focus on the conservation of energy and mass production.

There will be an exercise designed to raise the pertinent issues related to traditional urban design, with an emphasis on the theories of zoning.