studio ambition.
housing conventions change slowly. more than any other architectural programme, domestic space is governed by consensus. conventions become habits, habits become standards, and standards become difficult to question. bedrooms remain bedrooms, corridors remain corridors, and domestic life continues to unfold within familiar arrangements. the studio begins with the suspicion that the house remains architecture’s most familiar, yet still least questioned territory.
the studio therefore refuses the generic. it refuses the catalogue of ready-made options — the standard plan, the default section, the room that exists because rooms like it have always existed. this refusal is not a provocation but a method: if the conventional answers are set aside, each project must construct its own understanding of what a good house might be. that understanding will be individual, argued, and tested; the studio will not provide it in advance.
designing houses and housing is more relevant than ever. it is a universally understood programme, but one increasingly confronted with new forms of living, new expectations, and new demands. despite its apparent familiarity, housing remains an open field for speculation, experimentation, and architectural expectation.
the studio will also attempt to reproduce, as closely as possible, the conditions of a real-world architectural practice. the classroom will operate as an atelier, where projects are discussed collectively, revised continuously, and developed with the seriousness of to- be-built works rather than that of academic exercises — with both pragmatism and optimism. drawings, models, conversations, deadlines, and decisions will all contribute to a working environment that reflects the realities of the profession. the projects may remain fictional, but we believe fiction to be a profound condition of architecture in any context, direct commissions and academia alike.
the ambition is neither innovation for its own sake nor nostalgia for lost models. rather, it is to ask a series of simple questions: if housing evolves so slowly, how much architecture can still happen inside the house? how can it happen? and why does it matter?
objectives
through individual projects, the studio aims to conceive, test and discuss possibilities for the house as an architectural question and, by extension, for housing itself. rather than treating the domestic realm as a fixed typology, the studio will approach it as a field of enquiry, where familiar conventions can be reconsidered, displaced and reassembled through design. the studio will not be searching for a consensual answer to a non-consensual question. instead, it will cultivate multiple positions, encouraging each project to construct its own architectural argument — its own definition of what a good (double) house is.
representation will accompany the work throughout the semester, deployed as a plural field: plans, sections, elevations, models, perspectives, collages and details will serve simultaneously as tools of analysis, speculation and design. representation will not simply document decisions already made, but actively participate in their production.
within this plurality, two instruments will hold the centre. the first is the drawing that gathers everything at once: a full plan or a full section carrying all the details of the project within a single document, from the general disposition of rooms to the profile of a handrail. by refusing the conventional division of labour between 1:100 and 1:5, these drawings will deliberately challenge notions of scale, forcing every decision — spatial, constructive, material — to coexist on the same surface. the second is the physical model, understood not as a miniature of the building but as an instrument for its space, atmosphere and materiality: colour, texture, light, weight, junctions and finishes, tested directly rather than described.
this double instrument will lead the studio into the material culture of architecture. colour, texture, junctions, finishes, furniture, fixtures and the smallest details of domestic life will all become architectural questions. every door, window, wall, stair or threshold will be treated as a project in itself. rather than treating details as the consequence of larger ideas, the studio will understand them as the place where architecture acquires character, atmosphere and meaning.
studio-wide discussions and desk critiques will be complemented by a field trip and a series of external contributions, bringing additional perspectives into the conversation.
brief
the semester is organised around a single, individual exercise: the design of a double house. neither entirely individual nor properly collective, the double house occupies a liminal position between autonomy and coexistence. it introduces questions of proximity, difference, sharing and reciprocity without relying on the repetition and institutional logic of larger housing developments. it is the smallest possible form of housing that is already more than a house — and, precisely for that reason, a territory where the conventions of both can be questioned at once.
the project will deliberately begin from the inside out. rather than conceiving the house as an external form to be subsequently subdivided, the design process will start with the room, its elements, its atmosphere, proportions and purpose, before progressively constructing relationships between rooms, between sequences of spaces, between the two halves of the house, and ultimately between the building as a whole and whatever circumstances might surround it. the house will emerge as the consequence of domestic life rather than as its container.
the exercise will be developed without a site. in 1964, kazuo shinohara proposed what he called ‘original houses’: houses conceived not as responses to a client or a plot, nor as ‘one size fits all’ solutions, but as autonomous works — limited editions, in the manner of artworks, waiting to be acquired. the studio adopts this attitude. each double house will be conceived as an original: complete, precise and specific, yet unattached. in some projects an ideal context may eventually emerge from the ideas of the house itself; but the context will follow the project, never the other way around.
rather than beginning from a blank page, students will work through the careful accumulation of architectural knowledge. throughout the semester, the studio will assemble a collective library of precedents drawn from two partially eclipsed bodies of work, from which ideas, plans, rooms, stairs, windows, columns, walls and attitudes will be extracted, catalogued and reinterpreted. projects will emerge through selection, editing, recomposition and refusal — understanding architectural design not as invention from nothing, but as the precise transformation of already existing intelligence into autonomous positions.
a double eclipse
instead of a site, the studio offers two universes. both will be encountered deliberately incomplete — each with one half of its body of work placed in shadow, hopefully revealing in the process things one couldn’t see in full light.
the first universe is textual. in the mid-1960s, kazuo shinohara theorised the house with a radicality that remains unmatched: the ‘house as a work of art’, the house as a potential for critique of society, the room as a space capable of carrying meaning on its own. the studio will read these texts closely and take them seriously as instructions for design. but shinohara’s buildings will remain outside the frame. his theorisation will be studied without the houses that accompanied it, so that his ideas can be tested against new architecture rather than illustrated by his own.
the second universe is built. robert venturi, denise Scott brown and their acolytes produced a body of constructed work — above all houses and buildings of comparable scale — of extraordinary density: plans of deceptive simplicity, facades that argue, ornament entangled with construction, ambiguity handled with precision. the studio will study these buildings closely, room by room and detail by detail. but their writings will remain outside the frame. the buildings will be encountered without the filter of the theories that made them famous, so that the architecture can speak before the argument does.
a double eclipse, then: a theory without its buildings, and buildings without their theory. the two universes are neither aligned nor opposed. they share unexpected coherences — the conviction that the house is a legitimate site for the most serious architectural thought, the refusal of the generic, the attention to the room and the element — and they diverge profoundly in temperament, language and method. the studio will learn from both, and equally from the misalignments between them.
the goal is not synthesis, and certainly not imitation. neither universe is to be inhabited. by working between two references that never quite meet, each project will be forced to construct its own standpoint — autonomous from both, yet informed by the coherence of each.