Damien Cresp

Supervisor: Professor Philip Goad

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'Good Grief' is a series of residential dwellings intended to reassess the way we approach domesticity through a lens of co-living and dealing with the grief of losing a life partner.

Responding to Australia's growing ageing population and Melbourne's suburban sprawl, the thesis pragmatically densifies the suburbs and aims to foster resident's informal support networks into old age. The sites are three typical Melbournian housing typologies: the detached house, the fringe new lot, and the terrace house. The designs interrogate how memories of human relationships are held within spaces, and how to facilitate the turbulent process of grieving in the everyday. In approaching designing for grief, a library of vital moments with key design responses was catalogued and applied to the existing or new build fabric of the suburbs.

The thesis argues that as our social priorities shift, so too should the housing that accommodates us, and that a refined domesticity can make the inevitably heavy task of grieving lost loved ones a little lighter.