BRIEF

Our homes have historically served as an apparatus for physically rendering a society. From delineating the roles of different genders to reinforcing distinctions of class and race, domestic enclosures were instrumentalized beyond their function as dwellings. The four walls and gable roofs have become entangled with broader economic and political dynamics, perpetuating inequities rooted in established power structures.

Enclosures that generated the division of us/them were often extended beyond their scale. American suburbs were developed with the intensional exclusion of the non-Caucasian race, and the consequence still resonates. In emerging nations, commodified Ville Radieuses have dominated the economics of the real estate market, not only affecting the designs of our homes but also shaping social norms and values. Speculators of distorted utopia have secured the means for apprehending the system’s logic, dominating urban mechanisms and spatial ideologies.

Our studio aims to estrange everyday domestic architecture, narratives, and their surrounding implications. We will form ephemeral imaginaries that act as a mirror for questioning the perpetuated nonsense. Norms, as well as our empirical assumptions on housing and the urban fabric that derives from it, will be interrogated. Preconceived notions will be estranged, and questions in-between will be reconciled. Our works will not be considered as end products but as a collective set of inquiries that challenge the constructed reality.
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METHOD

We will explore the relationship between the architecture of domesticity and its production and representation. A series of exercises will encourage students to defamiliarize, manipulate, re-visit, and imagine the concept of domesticity. Students will be introduced to both traditional and emerging mediums including theater, photography, collage, bricolage, morphing 3D animations, augmented reality, and digital frottage. The series of estrangements, rendered via diverse mediums, will culminate in a speculative mixed-used project that becomes a backdrop for living, working, and sharing. We will strive to foster a non-hierarchical dialectic (or non-dialectics) in tackling the architecture of domesticity, as well as our everyday.
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TOOLS AND MEDIUM

Our studio sits in-between critical thinking and the culture of craft. The act of making and the artifacts on the table mediate dialogues and collaborations. Both analog and digital works entangle as a medium for discussing environmental, societal, and material issues. Students learn, speculate, and critique the contemporary discourse while making. We explore architecture as a backdrop, space-time, framework, cultural construct, collaboration, and social act.

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FINAL PROJECT

The series of defamiliarisation exercises will culminate in a speculative mixed-used project that becomes a backdrop for living, working, and sharing.