Studio 2.6 questioned the traditional family unit as a paradigm for the design of housing. We challenged the ideologies that characterise the single-family house – many of which support inequalities, hierarchies and gender divisions. Our projects proposed alternative models for housing, working, and making spaces for a diversity of groups in the New Town of Stevenage. Our proposals were informed by a variety of case studies worldwide that engage with questions of communal or shared work-living arrangements. These allowed us to reflect on possibilities to re-organise life patterns and spaces of various groups and their specific needs. We designed spaces for groups of woodworkers, women, gardeners, nurses, teachers, children and more. We disrupted the traditional house typology by reconsidering those that we design for; by introducing temporality and discouraging the idea of the house as private property for perpetuity; by proposing to socialise and share domestic activities amongst groups of households; and by introducing fabrication and production spaces where work activities can be shared. In the first semester, we did this by re-purposing a pair of semi-detached houses in the Mobbsbury Way estate in Stevenage. We reconsidered social divisions and associations between new residents and proposed shared spaces that reflected common habits dictated by the residents’ working life. In the second semester, we imagined how these relationships could be fostered in new buildings by organising spaces for alternative life practices, and without the pre-conceived form of the single-family house type.
Students
Siobhan Coker, Sherry Solomon-Miller, Daine Brighten, Taja Buchanan-Sewell, Alexa Trujillo Tubon, Ellie Redman, Jianhui Guan, Yuliang Yan, Lola Jones, Eva Hall, Ritika Sen, Angel Kunwar, Andy Dong, Rukeya Ali, Lauren Niven, Dana Almutairi, Sarah Almeida Abrao Jamel, Piotr Bubinski, Salman Al Salman, Anniston Francisco
Studio Tutors
Lola Lozano Lara and Elena Palacios Carral
