COLLECTIVES
GRADUATE STUDIO
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN2G2/3G5 - ARCH 562 - WINTER 2024COORDINATOR
Sharon HaarPROFESSORS
Sharon Haar + Adam Smith, Lars Gräbner + Christina Hansen, Craig Borum + Claudia Wigger, Jonathan Rule, Laura Marie Peterson, Kit McCullough, Gariel Cuéllar
COLLECTIVES: How do we live together?
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.