Jonathan Rule + Kathy Velikov

“Countryside Collectives” 

The Countryside Collectives studio focuses on the “new rural” exploring housing design that engages with models of post-familial living to create resilient communities that propose alternatives to extractive forms of real estate and aim toward community ownership, local self-sufficiency, and circularity as ways to form vibrant living housing propositions that co-exist with the land. The studio is set within the context of climate change and climate migration toward northern and rural locations. These areas are not prepared to accept a large population shift, and present a new opportunity to consider what tomorrow's countryside collectives might be. Can we develop alternative visions of rural living and “agricultural urbanism” where design supports living with the land as opposed to just on it? The studio aimed to move beyond idealized tropes of the countryside and develop architectural propositions that address the context of living in the time of climate uncertainty and societal change through strategies that intertwine and crossbreed housing with agriculture and forestry, with renewable water and energy systems, and with regional circular economies and ecologies. The idea of the collective is threaded throughout the studio pedagogy, including models of collective living, sharing of collective resources, and collective built form typologies.

The studio is sited in Port Austin, Michigan, a village of approximately 660 residents located on the shore of Lake Huron. Three formerly occupied/brownfield sites were identified as potential sites for student projects. The studio collaborated with local residents and business owners who helped to identify sites, hosted the students' site visit.