STUDIO OVERVIEW
A Flourishing Communities Collaborative Studio in partnership with HKS and Gate Precast. Professional Partners: HKS; Gate Precast; Uzun + Case; Brasfield & Gorrie; FRONT; JE Dunn; Architectural Polymers.
Cul-tur-al; adjective: Relating to the ideas, customs, and social behaviors of a society.
Tec-ton-ic; adjective: Relating to building or construction AND Relating to a (change or development) very significant or considerable.
Plas-tic-i-ty; noun: The quality of being easily shaped or molded AND The adaptability of an organism to changes in its environment or differences between its various habitats.
Dwelling is a “means to meet others for exchange of products, ideas, and feelings; that is, to experience life as a multitude of possibilities… second, it means to come to an agreement with others; that is, to accept a common set of values .... We may call these modes collective, public, and private dwelling.... Settlement, urban space, institution and house constitute a total environment, where natural, collective, public, and private dwelling take place.”- Christian Norberg- Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling
Our cities have expanded and changed at rapid rates over the past several decades. While this necessary real estate growth affords amazing opportunities for innovation in building technologies, most of the real estate industry has remained idle and, in extreme cases, rolled back their creative and innovative mindsets. This is due to both to the speed with which the growth is accelerating and to the need to obtain financing at a favorable rate by capital investment markets. In the United States, the largest percentage of real estate we invest in (by building and by area) is dedicated to housing. Within the housing use, single family homes are, by a large stretch, the single greatest volume of product and provide the greatest possible influence for innovation. Yet, we still construct single family homes the same way we have since the 1940s when platform framing replaced balloon framing for wood construction. In the following decades, multifamily homes quickly followed suit. One need only take a brief US interstate road trip near any major or minor US city to see the uninspiring copy-paste nature of housing development we’ve deployed, marked by row upon row of identical, or nearly identical, single family, townhome and 5 over 2 wrapped apartments.
Why did this happen?
Because of the rapid exponential growth of the US population, the higher skilled labor which was associated with masonry construction was not as readily available, or able, to meet the demand. Therefore, the local technical knowledge base of masons and associated trades fell out of favor, again, due to the necessary evils of speed and cost. The direct effect of this speed to market led to most of our single-family neighborhoods losing their character as well. Innovations in multifamily housing soon followed suit and for similar reasons. Welcome the, now ubiquitous, ‘5 over’ model; a multi-family signature concept consisting of 5 floors of wood construction (Type V) over a ground floor of concrete or steel (Type I). This is America’s solution to alleviate the growing housing crisis stemming from population increases through immigration and urbanization, coupled with a need to increase density in our cities with rapidly depleting development land area. Local jurisdictions updated their zoning and codes to allow for this type of housing to proliferate, and real estate developers rapidly “cut and paste” these developments throughout the country, devoid of any desire or intent to tie a development’s aesthetic character to its locale. A building in Arizona, now looks the same as a building in New Hampshire, though each climate and socio-cultural histories are vastly different. Real Estate developers capture and amplify this by branding their 5/1 developments identically throughout the country.
The unfortunate side effect of this growth is that the historical and cultural character of our cities is disappearing at an alarming rate and being replaced by “cookie cutter” buildings whose aesthetics are defined by dollar signs rather than driven by the history or culture of a place. Throughout the semester, we will consider interrelated issues of community, place, memory, culture and identity across scales.
History is context. Cultural memory is context. Climate is context. Politics is context. Economics is context. Demographic is context. Identity is context.