Studio 26

Housing Home and Content(s)

Colby Vexler and Pricilla Heung | LIVING + PROCESS

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

Studio Description

From the banal and mundane, to tropes and concepts given 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 2020.

“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 pragmatic means, that is, to provide shelter and comfort for the physical human body. Rather, we will explore references usually considered outside our traditional disciplinary milieu to guide our architectural inquiries and re-consider their cultural relevance, limits and possibilities.

Here 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), users, and space. This is where new housing typologies emerge, carefully negotiating the real, ideal, fetishised, and/or romanticised territories of contemporary life(style).

Studio Outcome

Students will use philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural references to identify contemporary phenomena and consider how they affect aspects of the domestic realm. (P)Investigations will be guided through three stages:

1. Finding home in (site): Students will locate a set of contemporary phenomena that effect the domestic realm in an urban, suburban or rural environment. Here we will develop a theoretical position, and establish a contextual framework for the design to come.
2. Finding home for (contents): Students will develop a taxonomy of subjects that signify the elements, agents, and parties affected by the phenomena explored in task 1. These subjects will be housed in the design to come.
3. Designing Home: Here students will design a housing typology that reflects the research conducted in task 1 and 2. The project presented will teeter between philosophical prompt and speculative architectural proposal, challenging and re-describing what housing, home, lifestyle and domesticity might mean in 2020.

Studio Leaders

COLBY VEXLER is a graduate architect and writer with a long standing interest in various disciplinary references, spanning still life painting to post-structural philosophy. Colby is currently completing his MA thesis at the School of Culture and Communication, where he is writing about architecture's complex and paradoxical relationship with other disciplinary discourses.

PRICILLA HEUNG is a practising architect. Her current work is situated in the residential realm where her interests are oriented toward the socio-cultural implications of design, and its broader dialogue with cultural trends.

Both Colby and Pricilla have worked on the production of spatial installations, exhibitions designs, public programs 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.

A reading list will be provided to students in week 1.

Schedule 18:15-21:15 Mondays and Thursdays

Contact Handbook Key Dates