Studio 2.6 - Uprooted

From nuclear family to nomadic group

The studio questions the traditional family unit as the typological paradigm for the design of housing. The significance of the family as the cell and foundation of all civil society, alongside the hierarchies and gender divisions that it supports, benefits a small sector of society only. Individuals, or groups that do not fit within this exclusive subjectivity lie outside the official planning and design guides of spaces for living and working.

Through our projects, our studio will aim to address the current reduction of everyday life into one single set of routines and rituals regardless of culture, sex, race or religion. To challenge such normalised patterns, our projects should offer alternative spaces that dispel hierarchies and strict definitions of spaces of living, working and leisure. We will do this by introducing other forms of grouping, beyond the traditional family; by designing spaces that address these alternative group forms; by introducing an element of temporality that discourages the idea of the house as private property for perpetuity; by considering that certain domestic activities and spaces – that are currently considered to be private - can be socialised and shared amongst groups or households (from kitchens and living rooms to gardens and housekeeping); and by introducing a space of production/fabrication where residents of a community can share work activities.

Inspired by careful analysis of seminal built and unbuilt case studies of collective housing, we will test our studio ambitions at the outset of the year by working with an existing housing project, originally designed for the traditional family unit. Sited in Stevenage – the first of 32 New Towns designated in the UK between 1946 and 1970 – students will work on the reconfiguration of a set of private houses into an alternative housing project that can accommodate a group or a series of groups of fabricators to share. Each proposal will introduce an element of temporality by imagining residents living in the transformed building for a minimum of six months to a maximum of three years. Continuing our work in Stevenage, and the temporary provision of working and living space for fabricators, our second semester project will involve a larger new build design of shared housing for 40-50 people. Drawing from the investigations undertaken at the beginning of the year, the project will continue to address groups alternative to the traditional family. The residents’ need for fabrication spaces such as workshops and making studios will allow projects to reflect on the possibility and extent at which living and working amenities can be shared, and the overlapping of these spaces into one another.