In recent years, we have witnessed as large-scale investment of global financial corporations increasingly dominates the real estate market, what avoids citizens, particularly younger demographics, to access affordable housing. The post-Covid-19 economic deceleration will worsen this situation, and therefore as architects we must consider alternative, even more affordable, models of inhabitation, such as co-operative and resilient residences.
Barcelona city is not unfamiliar to this problem, in fact it also suffers the consequences of an economy based on tourism with an exponential increase of residences transformed into touristic apartments reducing even more housing offer.
Under this question, a specific investigation on housing and new forms for living for future generations will be developed individually by students in EXP 8. This investigation will be developed in two ways: first, as social structures that are able to survive in the ever-changing contemporary city through networks of shared interests, association, co-operation, and care; and second, as urban artifacts that can articulate these relations in meaningful ways.
All documents will be compiled in a small booklet focus on how different intensities and times of usage can reshape the arrangement of the domestic realm that will define the programmatic brief of the block.
After defining the specific housing programmatic brief of the block, understanding it as the basic unit to provide interpersonal relations between temporary occupants, the proposal will be interrogated under various questions. Firstly, permeability, porosity and accessibility of the block in relation to the immediate context will be evaluated when looking to different time residents.
Then, relationships established between different spaces will be questioned by looking to interior connections, transits and different levels of privacy. These scenarios will be expressed through sections, views and conceptual drawings by taking into consideration different building users, interior environments, circulation main trajectories and sensual perceptions.
Workshop: VRay and Photoshop
Readings:
– Karel Teige & E Dluhosch: The minimum dwelling, Cambridge, Mass. : Chicago, Ill: MIT Press, 2002. Ebook.
– Robin Evans, 1997, “Figures, doors and Passages” in Translation from drawings to buildings and other essays, London : AA.
– Hannah Arendt, 1998, “The Public and the Private Realm” in The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
– Klaus Domer, Hans Drexler & Joachim Schultz-Granberg (Ed), 2014, Affordable living : housing for everyone, Berlin : Jovis.
– Richard Sennet, 2013, Together: The Rituals Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, London : Penguin.
– Richard Sennet, 2018, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, London: Allen Lane.
– Mateo Kries, 2017, Together: the new architecture of the collective, Ruby Press.
– Susanne Schmid, 2019, A history of collective living: forms of shared housing, Basel: Birkhauser Verlag. Ebook.
