Housing Matters was the third studio in the undergraduate core sequence at the University of Virginia, introducing fundamental concepts, strategies, tactics, and practices associated with the design of domestic spaces in the mid-sized American city. The course is the first introduction, among the foundation studios, to the complexities of the urban condition, confronted through the design of a small housing development in Richmond, VA that creates new opportunities for individual users while accommodating a collective, meeting specific institutional pressures, and serving the city at large.
Departing from the studio’s title and play of words, Housing Matters, the studio asked students to rethink matters of housing and domesticity relative to the city, while making a larger claim that housing, indeed, matters to architecture today.
Housing is one of the most representative typologies of a city’s historical and cultural evolution. The aggregation of dwellings—from individual to collective, and from provisional to permanent—makes up the basic building blocks of the American city. As the country’s models of urban development continue to evolve and grow in scale, this studio acknowledges the agency of architects to operate in novel capacities and imagine a better future for living and functioning collectively. Students engaged contemporary modes of living, including our evolving relationship with open space (and nature), technology, mobility, and urban infrastructure.
The semester followed a series of exercises meant to defamiliarize, abstract, and transform existing conditions in the city through a collective housing proposition. The first three weeks of the course asked students to dissect domestic spaces in film and narrative, and scrutinize a series of pointed case studies that were aimed to situate ‘housing’ within the disciplinary milieu, while expanding architecture’s canon through a scrutiny of other spatial disciplines, such as cinema and stage design. Then, students formulated a hypothesis on collective living that launched their design for the rest of the semester, focusing on a small dwelling that served as an experiment and foray into new modes of living. The following eight weeks of the semester were devoted to the design of a housing development consisting of 18-24 units and sited in the intersection of Richmond’s The Fan District, Museum District, and Scott’s Addition Historic District. This complex provided temporary residences for visiting faculty at the Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Richmond. As such, the project will need to respond to the institutional needs of two schools and its faculty dwellers, all the while accommodating the civic needs of the city.
Ultimately, the studio asked: how can architecture strengthen our ways of living and working in cities through collective housing?
Course Type and Audience Core Undergraduate Studio
Institution University of Virginia
Location Charlottesville, VA
Faculty José Ibarra
Terms Spring 2021 Spring 2022
Works Displayed Credits Angeline Phan and Shannon Lawler Kennedy Carter DIllon McDowell Kendra Teator Rui Ma Nick Karayianis Alex Stengel Anna Nielsen
