Craig Borum + Claudia Wigger 

“Untamed Dwelling” 

In the Untamed Dwelling, the studio's interest was in understanding housing as both an interior condition reflecting the life of the inhabitant as well as an exterior condition reflecting the values of the community, surrounding landscapes and urban wildlife. While the dwelling- the place where people live- creates a division between a controllable world inside and an uncertain world outside, dwelling-the phenomenon- takes place on both sides of this line of separation. Dwelling is implicitly contained in a social context, in a human society. The relationships between dwelling and other social activities are significantly linked to culture, local weather conditions, patterns of social behavior, traditions and economic interest. As an extension of this position we challenged the common western terms defining how and where people dwell: living room, bedroom, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, in favor of a more relational matrix of use and character, we attempted to rethink the boundary of the traditional dwelling to pursue a functional interaction between the dweller, the immediate physical context of a building, and the broader urban and landscape environments.

The studio worked in the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood of Detroit to develop high-dense, mid-rise housing proposals. We sought to understand landscape not only as an essential extension of the dwelling for human well-being but also as an element that needs to be actively designed to provide habitat for wildlife while addressing environmental concerns such as the urban heat island effect and storm water mitigation.