This studio considered a change in housing as an architectural construct to living as a social framework. Accumulation of injustices in minority communities, including economic and environmental inequity, as well as divestment in cultural capital, are further exacerbated as the pandemic recedes and economic inflation ensues, forcing more populations into a state of deferred domesticity. With over ten thousand designations of ‘family,’ architects design with the narrow parameters of ISO standards, yet the reality of living is far more layered, colorful, unpredictable, blurred, mixed, and continuously evolving. This studio specifically examined the fluid, flexible, and hybrid nature of intergenerational housing as a case study for an inclusive, supportive, non-segregational approach to community and sharing. Students built a manifesto of human-focused values, informed by collective primary research and fieldwork, to design intergenerational housing of 200-500 units with the objective of ensuring specific qualities of living.

This studio embraced the productive equivalence and tension between different states of housing: house and landscape, indoor and outdoor living, space and infrastructure, and present and future armatures. This semester’s waterfront site called for competing interpretations and representations of water; as an opportunity to physically connect at a human scale; as a regulation to protect against flooding and sea level rise; as infrastructures that channel and distribute; as habitats and ecosystems; and as a civic amenity. The studio explored 50/50 through the conceptual allocation of building/nature, indoor/outdoor, space/infrastructure, and fixed/adaptable. 50/50 served as a provocation to bravely balance different modes of inhabitation and interactions with other people and a wider context. Drawing from urban relationships to material details, students explored modes of equally representing space, structure, experience, and time to create living drawings that captured change in relation to the operative determinants of each project.

The exhibition “This is Tomorrow” was on show at Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1956. Among its twelve proposals, architects Alison and Peter Smithson and artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson exhibited “Patio and Pavilion,” proposing fundamentals of human habitation in an act to counter the modern movement’s inability to address social demands of the everyday. The studio took this moment as a starting point, exploring the capacities of housing to shift perspectives from the object to the performance. With housing being the primary producer of daily routines, the studio explored how design can critically address industry standards and reevaluate our perception of comfort, space, program, and construction. Students examined a diverse set of case studies to create a repository of domestic approaches belonging to multiple geographical, climatic, and cultural contexts to unveil performative realities capable of providing user agency to eventually design proposals for altered housing standards with a focus on productive disagreements.

Since the advent of mechanical systems more than a century ago, a building’s façade has become a highly engineered, weather-tight wrapper that has allowed for the precise control of interior environments and become a key determinant in “efficient” building organization. In housing, that typology has largely become codified: with the core enabling predictable conditions inside, the façade has been burdened with keeping the unpredictable conditions of the exterior world out. But what if buildings could breathe rather than block the atmosphere? This studio centered on living skins, a burgeoning field of façade design, involving both cutting-edge technology and the wisdom of ancient ecology. Like biological skins, they can filter air, transpire water, and harness sunlight with technologies like intelligent microalgae, dynamic vapor curtains, and habitable vegetation walls. The studio’s site, on the Harlem River waterfront, provided fertile ground for students to invent living skins that are inspired by and responsive to the native ecology.

This studio examined the relationship between housing and the city; the central role housing plays in shaping urban context whilst, conversely, understanding the city as an extension of the home. Today, New York’s housing shortage needs to be addressed not only in its scale but also in its quality. Designing a new infrastructure for living is a generational opportunity to re-imagine parts of the city into more diverse, liveable, and sustainable urban environments, not only for those who are to live there but for those who won’t. The studio focused on designing housing to consciously shape the context of the city, not as a by-product of the process, but as an integral goal. Students designed proposals for collective housing as neighborhood infrastructure; active components of the social and spatial construct of the city, while using the private domain of the home to shape the most public part of urban life.

The origin of the word “apartment” derives from the Latin meaning “a part, piece, a division”—keeping certain people and activities in, and others out. In negotiating between the needs of the individual and collective, what if we viewed these partitions as malleable sites of connection instead of separation? This studio explored how adaptable, multi-use structures can create new models of connected living. Considering the contemporary challenges of social disconnection, aging populations, and unequal access to financial and health resources, the studio reimagined housing that can adapt to suit diverse and specifically multi-generational communities. Through personal interviews and research, the studio investigated generational commonalities and differences and created persona maps to identify the attributes, behaviors, motivations, and values for residents. Moving from the design of the small to large-scale, students worked through models, drawings, photography and graphic representations to bring to life the ways residents sleep, eat, play, and gather.

This studio researched and designed housing as it relates to gardens and courtyards. Through architect Clarence Stein, planner Henry Wright, and critic Lewis Mumford’s Sunnyside Gardens, housing was formed as a modernist and abstract set of parts built with limited integration with nature. Today, as a large number of people work from home, integration of public and private outdoor spaces through courtyards and gardens seems urgent. Collecting examples of gardens intersecting housing, this studio examined water related to care in living. A building’s material exterior confronts durability, weather proofing, and enclosure, yet the interior performs through an interface of private spaces and life supporting infrastructures. Working through concepts related to water to shed, collect, and conserve, the studio questioned how housing today can be transformed. Working with building systems, students designed efficient and forward thinking buildings, modeling and making drawings to reflect these design concerns around water and gardens.

The studio responded to human senses–touch, sight, smell, audition, taste–and considered “common sense” as a sixth sense as one that is collectively interpersonal. The studio centered on the belief that housing can reduce (or exacerbate) social inequalities in health, crime, climate vulnerability, and social well-being. Looking into design, construction, building costs, and finance, the studio considered stances on how to make better housing; offering more opportunities for more people with fewer resources. The early weeks of the semester followed a seminar format, where students read texts on the sharing economy, renting versus owning, cyber versus material currencies, and public versus private spheres, to construct arguments for the housing projects. Students focused on key considerations on outdoor access, natural light, cross-ventilation, and project costs, to refine a series of designs that created beautifully detailed housing connected to its surroundings.