Prototype for Affordable Housing in Southampton exposes how zoning, infrastructure, and landscape maintenance quietly reproduce segregation. Lawn requirements, single-family zoning, and limited water infrastructure are treated not as neutral rules, but as spatial tools that make affordable housing seem incompatible with Southampton’s suburban image.
Rather than rejecting these codes, the project works through them. It adopts the familiar appearance of the single-family house to remain visually compatible with the neighborhood, while reorganizing its interior around collective living. Instead of assuming the nuclear family as the default occupant, the house supports migrant labor communities through shared amenities, flexible occupation, and incremental growth. What appears from the outside as a conventional suburban home becomes, internally, a vessel for adaptation, mutual care, and new domestic rituals.