Studio 12 Brief: Dwelling as Social Condenser.
Studio 12 investigates the relationship between the spatial configurations of architecture and the way in which people inhabit, appropriate and transform them. This has been primarily examined through housing, both urban and suburban by focusing on the space between the neighbourhood or city and the front door. This space is seen as an important arena where the character of the architecture is set out and where we shift our personal identities from urban dwellers to home dwellers. This year we will be linking three emerging and ongoing research strands. The first is around the idea of ‘drawing the social’ in architectural and archaeological work. This strand questions the focus on the physical rather than social/societal content of architectural and archaeological drawings. The second relates to the ongoing studio focus on arrival sequences in housing as the interface between city/home, collective/individual, and physical/social. Early parts of this work have been recently published in Housing Solutions through Design (Libri Publishing, 2018) including student projects from Studio 12. The third is related to the university’s Radical Futures Housing research group which is focusing on the future of housing in Brighton.
The first strand will form the basis of term one work while the second and third will frame the major project in terms two and three. This will revolve around exploring new models of dense suburban housing with possible links to live projects in Brighton and Hove. Some of the themes being explored are the relationship between individual and collective or community space and the necessity to develop smaller footprint homes while maintaining decent space standards.