Studio 1 / Studio XX
Remedial Housing for Architects (Or, a manifesto for doing housing differently) Hazel Cowie, Jess Davidson and Claire Harper ”The built form of housing has always been seen as a tangible, visual reflection if the organization of society. It reveals the existing class structure and power relationships. But it has also long been a vehicle for imagining alternative social orders. Every emancipatory movement must deal with the housing question in one form or another. This capacity to spur the political imagination is part of housing’s social value as well.”
In 2014/15 Newcastle revised its greenbelt boundaries releasing 400ha of greenbelt land for residential development on the edge of the city. Much of this is now under development, characterised by the pervasive expansion of generic, detached peripheral estates. The familiarity of these landscapes has rendered them uninteresting, rarely studied closely and even more seldom taken as sites of architectural enquiry. In the context of the declared climate emergency, however, the housing typologies, landscape of diffuse suburban detachment and troubling car dependency is ripe for further scrutiny. Taking the position that housing is not only a manifestation of power relations within society, but a vehicle through which an alternative social order can be imagined, the studio will work towards developing a new housing landscape for Newcastle. We will explore ideas about homogeneity, taste, anonymity and placelessness and question the conformist and compliant role that architecture is often seen to have in the production of housing. Our theoretical approach will also extend to material and tectonic thinking and in semester two we will explore creative uses of prefabrication and off-site manufacture and the effect these might have on the shape of architectural practice in the future.
Madden, D. J. and Marcuse, P. (2016) In Defense of Housing: the Politics of Crisis, p 12
“Architecture or, more precisely, space affects and effects social relations in the most profound ways, from the very personal (in a phenomenological engagement with stuff, space, light, materials) to the very political (in the way that the dynamics of power are played out in space). Adopting the feminist maxim (“the personal is political”) buildings conjoin personal space and political space. ... The key political responsibility of the architect lies not in the refinement of the building as static visual commodity, but as a contributor to the creation of empowering spatial, and hence social, relationships in the name of others.”
Awan, N., Schneider , T., and Till, J., (2011) Spatial Agency, p59
Image: Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi, from “Learning from Levittown” (1970)
A m t m
“ k u u v d i m