Studio 2.4 - Home, Sweet Work

There is no place like home (anymore) 

When the tune “Home, Sweet Home” was first sung in 1823, most of its audience lived near their workplace, or even lived and worked in the same place. A century later, in 1939, when Judy Garland performed the song in "The Wizard of Oz", people had begun to commute to workplaces far away from home. By 1974, when Lynyrd Skynyrd sang Sweet Home Alabama, his audience travelled ever-longer distances in trains or cars to reach work. In yet another, more recent shift, the digital revolution made it possible to work from anywhere, in cafes and social spaces, while cheap air travel gave rise to international commutes.

Today, geographical distance between home and work is imploding. Covid19 has not caused but accelerated this implosion and is further eradicating already brittle boundaries between “bitter work” and “sweet home”. Much of this drastic change will outlast Covid19.

Bedrooms are hastily transformed to makeshift offices, making the private sphere a public embarrassment. Pavements marked with instructions for social distancing choreograph public space. Studio 2.4 will harness the poetry of surreal encounters and the dynamics of change, in order to develop innovative ideas of home, new spatial typologies combining life and work whilst achieving novel experiences and qualities of life.

Program and Methodology

Over the last three years, studio 2.4 has explored architecture as a collaboration between professionals and habitants. This year, we will begin by precisely mapping activities in our own rooms, and explore how homes might be inhabited otherwise, how juxtaposition of programs might unlock new poetic freedoms for architecture. Through a series of precedents we will study strategies for adaptability as well as flexibility.

Your semester 1 design project will be sited inside an office building in Shoreditch – now obsolete – that you will be asked to transform in response to new rhythms of life and labour, new forms of living together. The second semester brief will shift in scale and focus, asking you to propose a place for a community to live and work together; a building that addresses and transforms its Central London context, mobilising opportunities triggered by the impending demise of the still ubiquitous mono-functional office building typology.

Studio 2.4 will employ drawings and models as instruments of precise observation, as well as thinking tools to imagine and materialise futures that have yet to take shape.