A Well-Tempered Environment
Studio Theme
The studio focuses on housing and the critical and experimental study of domestic space from the private apartment to collective living from through the lenses of temperature, climate comfort, maintenance and repair. AWTE studio will examine what is the most familiar and yet difficult kind of architecture: the apartment building, investigating the conventions and codes and its basic architectural elements - both programmatic and tectonic. The aim of this studio will be to reappraise the spatial, social and ecological contracts of the apartment building. Reconsidering the housing building climate zones, private and public areas, light and ventilation, corridors and common spaces, courtyards and balconies will allow us to explore the potential in drafting a new contemporary model of living.
Based on the fundamental belief that “a good dwelling is a large dwelling” we shall explore alternative living models that go beyond the current standardization of living space in housing in Sweden. How do we provide space generosity within the limits of social housing? How do we think about maintenance as repair as architectural questions and not technical afterthoughts? We will study with special care how a building works, its maintenance and what can it produce spatially and energetically for its dwellers and the neighborhood. The aim of the studio is to revolutionize the current building culture by providing new programmatic solutions but also technological ones. Countercurrent, provocative, radical thinking is encouraged in the studio as well as the creation of individual manifestos for what living should be and stand for in this present times. We will both dwell in the cold aesthetics of technology and in the warm embrace of thinking about what a good life in a building is really about.
Studio Method
We will search for new public and domestic thresholds that can provide a space for both tradition and innovation with the human body and the building in mind. The studio will work on a project in a suburban setting of Stockholm. We shall test the project within a site-specific context that is ordinary rather than exceptional. The aims are social, spatial and natural but also technological and programmatic. Through modest means we will look at how architectural reinvention can turn the house into a regenerative social and environmental type, set somewhere between archetype and prototype. During the semester we will build a common archive. We will encourage iterative design, model-making and explorative modes of representation. Each project is expected to be rigorous in research and design, and realistically grounded within its context.
Competencies
• Investigate how climate comfort, maintenance, repair and space generosity can become the tools to define a new building culture.
• Gain a critical perspective on housing design and apartment layouts through literature studies, seminars, and lectures • Investigate new forms of living - both contemporary and experimental models from the past.
• Moving beyond the traditional concept of the nuclear family, we will design buildings that foster collectivity in various ways within the context of Stockholm.
• Encouraging independent thinking, we will experiment with architecture, developing a unique position in terms of program and composition. The students will be required to craft their own brief and manifesto within the topic of the studio.
Teachers: Anders Berensson, Michela Barone Lumaga