This studio challenged the design and production of dominant types of domestic space in Sydney. Between the detached single-family home and strata-titled apartment unit, there is little diversity in housing choice for the rapidly growing population. In the face of the current housing affordability crisis (both local and global) there is an urgent need to rethink the homes we inhabit and their interdependent relationship to the city.
The studio’s intent was to take a typological approach to the rethinking of ‘home’ by imagining new organisations of space for inhabitation, starting the smallest spatial unit of the city: the room. Beginning with an interrogation of the basic dwelling condition of an individual, students considered the need and ownership of private space in the city and its relationship to spaces of collective use within a building envelope and the surrounding urban neighbourhood context.
Students developed schemes that aggregate and organise other spaces places of work, meeting, repose, reproductive labour, leisure and civic engagement in prototypical arrangements based on the contexts and inhabitants selected.
