COLLECTIVES

GRADUATE STUDIO
ARCH 562 (2G2/3G5)  -  WINTER 2023

COORDINATOR

Sharon Haar

PROFESSORS

Within the discipline of architecture, the house has been the primary vehicle through which architects have explored formal innovation. Housing too is a project of architecture, but it is also a project of urbanism. It is where the space of the city meets the procedures and protocols produced by economics, politics, culture, race, and gender. Its fundamental question is: “How do we live together?” Housing exists in the blurry boundary between the domestic and collective. It is defined equally by universals such as the need for shelter, specifics such as location, and subjective decisions such as the desired degree of privacy or control over space and property. Housing is also a typology, but there is no agreement about its schema: density, shape or height, access and/or orientation, numbers or population housed, governance or finance models, etc.

As a studio, “Collectives” posits that there is no such thing as a house without housing. In the twenty-first century, our dwellings are spaces of negotiation, not just among individuals living together, be they families, collectives of families, or collectives of individuals who live together by choice, but also within larger publics both physical and virtual. Housing defines degrees of sociality and—in how we design and build it—says who we are as a society.

Through the study of typology and precedents (historic and contemporary), domestic arrangements, and new opportunities for collective life, each studio section will posit its own proposition on what it means to live together today, choosing its own site and approach. Students will work collaboratively in teams, developing their projects programmatically, spatially, and urbanistically.