Housing Studio

Djordje Stojanovic

The kitchen alcove and table seen from outside - Upper Lawn Solar Pavilion design and built by Alison and Peter Smithson between 1959 and 1962. Retrieved from Guardian, 26 Oct 2023.

Studio Description

The studio engages with housing as a critical contemporary condition through an architectural project. Working at the scale of the building, students will design housing that questions dominant models of ownership, typology, and domestic life, positioning architecture as an active force in shaping how people live together today.

Rather than solving housing as a predefined problem, the studio invites students to interrogate its assumptions: how space is shared, how resources are distributed, and how everyday life is organised. Design is used to test spatial, material, and collective ideas, with social equity and environmental responsibility embedded as architectural questions rather than external constraints.

While housing shortage is a global concern, its causes and lived realities are always local. Students will therefore work with a site of their own choice, that they know well—somewhere they have lived, grown up, or spent meaningful time—and use cultural familiarity as a critical design resource. Sites may be urban, suburban, or rural, and should offer a meaningful context for investigation. Contextual research, including spatial, social, and environmental understanding, will support the development of each proposal, making the choice of place a foundational part of the architectural inquiry.

Studio embraces non-profit and cooperative housing provision and is set to explore different forms of collective living, without relying on prescribed typologies or outcomes. Projects may combine dwelling with shared spaces and collective facilities, to the extent identified in individually developed project briefs, ranging from minimal to those serving broader communities.

Studio Outcomes

Through design, drawing, and model-making, students will develop a speculative yet rigorous project and demonstrate:

• spatial thinking at the building scale
• architectural form and expression
• material and construction intelligence

Studio Leader

Dr Djordje Stojanovic is an Associate Professor in Architectural Design at the University of Melbourne. Born in Belgrade in 1974, he has been a registered architect in the UK for 23 years. His professional practice includes internationally published adaptive reuse projects of public significance and award-winning collective housing projects developed for international design competitions. His book, Architecture for Housing, is published by Birkhäuser. https://birkhauser.com/en/book/9783035627633

Readings & References

1. Francisco González de Canales. Experiments with Life Itself: Radical Domestic Architectures Between 1937 and 1959. Actar 2013.
2. Gustau Gili Galfetti. Model apartments: experimental domestic cells. GG 1997.
3. Beatriz Colomina. Domesticity at War. MIT Press 2007.
4. Sue Heath, et al. Shared housing, shared lives: Everyday experiences across the life course. Routledge 2018.
5. Paul-Antoine Lucas & Bui Quy Son (eds). Housing, Micropolitics, and Pedagogies. Ruby Press 2025.
6. Marta Poch. Housing in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona: Metropolitan Institute of Land Development and Property Management 2015-2024. Actar 2025.
7. El Croquis N.219 IBAVI 2019-2023. El Croquis 2023.
8. John F. C. Turner. Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. Pantheon Books 1976.
9. Colin Ward, Housing: an anarchist approach. Freedom Press 1976.
10. John Habraken. Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing. Architectural Press 1972.

Schedule:
Monday 10am-12pm
Thursday 10am-2pm

Contact Handbook