Studio 26

Housing Homes, and Content(s) V

Colby Vexler and Pricilla Heung | Living + Process Focus

This studio is available to students enrolled in ABPL90142 Studio C, ABPL90143 Studio D, and ABPL90115 Studio E.

Studio Description

A Dyson Cordless Vacuum leans on a plasterboard wall, serenaded by the faint sound of a neighbour’s UE Boom.

Two slack postures slumped over something from IKEA scroll lethargically.

Creases and folds in a pile of energy bills illuminated by the glow of a screen.

An UberEats delivery arrives.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in angels…it’s just that I don’t believe they bear the slightest message, and it is in that respect they are truly signifying.” - Jacques Lacan, Encore.

From banal and overlooked phenomena to tropes and concepts given a high value in contemporary culture, Housing Home and Content(s) critically re-evaluates architecture’s role in understanding what housing, home, lifestyle and domesticity might mean in 2019.

From the socio-political and economic dynamics of shared living to the proliferation of convenience culture, the romanticised, the real, the habitual, signifying objects and spatial arrangements is where a housing typology becomes home.

“Architecture houses. It is at home in - and provides a home for - philosophy, aesthetics and those discourses which are thought to describe it.” - Andrew Benjamin, Eisenman and the Housing of Tradition.

We are not interested in an architecture that only serves a pragmatic means, that is, to provide shelter and comfort for the physical human body. Rather, we will explore reference usually considered outside the traditional architectural milieu to guide our explorations, establishing a framework to find place, sustenance and content(s) for our designs.

In studio 26 architecture is considered as a mediator between the ideal and the existential, where it oscillates between two parallel states: the abstract and the material; revealing unexpected slippages, transitions and tension between ideas, content(s), user and space.

This is where architecture may be at home in - and provide a home for - the real, ideal, fetishised and/or romanticised contemporary life(style).

Studio Outcome

Students will use philosophical, aesthetic and cultural references to identify contemporary phenomena and consider how they affect the ideas, content(s), users and space of the domestic realm.

Investigations will be guided through three stages:

1. Finding home in (site): Students will identify and locate a set of contemporary phenomena that affect the domestic realm. Here we will develop theoretical positionings to frame and map such conditions, establishing a contextual framework for the design to come.
2. Finding home for (contents): Students will develop a taxonomy of content and subjects that signify the elements, agents and parties affected by the phenomena they choose to explore. These will be housed in the design to come.
3. Designing Home: Here students will design a speculative housing typology that reflects their critical evaluation of what housing, home, lifestyle and domesticity might mean in 2019 and how such notions are affected by certain contemporary phenomena.

Studio Leaders

COLBY VEXLER is a graduate architect, writer and creative consultant with a long standing interest in various disciplinary reference spanning still life painting to post-structural philosophy. His current work focuses on the surplus value drawn from aesthetic nuances latent in high and low forms of contemporary culture. Colby is also writing his MA thesis at the School of Culture and Communication on architecture's relationship with aesthetics, philosophy and poetics.

PRICILLA HEUNG is a practising architect, image maker and graphic designer. Pricilla's current work is situated in the residential realm where her interests are oriented toward the techno-performative and socio-cultural implications of design, and their respective application to cultural trends and ‘life-styles’.

Both Colby and Pricilla have worked on the production of spatial installations, exhibitions designs and built outcomes across domestic settings, institutional environments and commercial contexts.

Readings & References

This studio will involve a number of workshops, readings and lectures from philosophers, writers and artists. This studio draws reference from:

• Andrew Benjamin, Peter Eisenman and the Tradition of Housing
• Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the outside.
• John Rajchman, The Virtual House: A Description
• Chiara Briganti & Kathy Mezei (editors),The Domestic Space Reader
• Marcel Proust, Chardin: The Essences of Things

Students will be introduced to a number of philosophical references including:

• Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard
• Paranoiac Critical Method, Salvador Dali
• Rhizome, Gilles Deleuze
• Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida
• Plasticity, Catherine Malabou

Students will also be encouraged to explore a number of art, literature and spatial based references.

Schedule Mondays 18:15-21:15 and Thursdays 09:00-12:00 in MSD Room 142

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