More than most building types, housing is defined and conditioned by bureaucratic regulations, strict economic parameters, and complex social considerations that could be viewed as restrictions to innovative design solutions. Innovations in any one of these regulatory conditions often do not flow over to the others (innovative financing strategies to encourage home ownership do not necessarily lead to innovative design). One of the essential working strategies in this studio will be to research and analyze the conditions that surround housing production and frame them as opportunities to initiate responsive design proposals. The term responsive is intended to emphasize finding new relationships or organizations rather than the invention of new program or visually complex form. This process of working through a rigorous analysis of hard facts and material conditions will demand searching for implications, suggestions, and opportunities to reconsider assumed relationships that often exclude and mask other viable options.

The studio outlined issues and themes which establish relationships between two types of production - material production (understood as the physical environment and the means of creating this environment) and spatial production (a set of social relationships which evolve out of a given spatial structure and simultaneously a production of its own spatial structure). The studio considered both the methods of a planner/architect carrying out the traditional role of proposing spatial, material and formal organizations in the form of a building with certain projected results (material production); and the implications of such organizations as they evolve and become redefined over time offering possibilities of social activities both projected and unanticipated (spatial production).

Michael Chiat
I-Shin Chow
Shari Feibusch
Steven Herzberg
Brendan Kelly
John Kim
Sangmok Kim
Justin Molloy
Tai Ming Moy
Allen Post
William Robertson
Nicholas Sabatini