This semester we will look for a new architecture of the home and the city through ideas of spatial and elemental use and misuse.

The modernist notion of function has in part contributed towards the development of universalist and mono-functional domestic spaces. A reductive mono-functionality is now utilised by investor-led urban developments, in partnership with technocratic governmental planning and guidance. This has created an architecture of social isolation, inflexibility and indifference to environment: life is forced to fit within an architecture incapable in itself of modulating the environment to pleasure, or social potential. The machine serves and solves all, objects produced by monopolies are ultimately beyond our control except passively for consumption, a dependency we have not fully seen play out yet.

By shifting focus away from mono-function to use and misuse we will look at what social and constructional layering is possible where each space and element has multiple uses.

Encompassing scenario design, overlaps of realms from social to artificial, the relationship between public and private, readymades, system creation, subversion of technical systems, and reuse. We will look at processes and time rather than detail per se. We will look at building on a small site in the UK, to create shared places for intentional communities in partnership with local government. Rituals around resources and community will be key. Misuse will be considered as a form of both pleasure and agency. 

In the domestic setting, we have seen the results of mono-functionalism demonstrated by the last 40 years of UK housing production, which forms the context for both this semester’s and last semester’s work. The current process of designing and delivering housing in the UK results in substandard homes that at their worst, are life-threatening to the occupants, and in almost all cases limit social potential. Even working at home, carrying out domestic labour, growing plants, seeing friends, and playing, become either explicit or de facto forms of misuse in the contemporary UK housing context, either through contractual bans or through design that fails to permit anything beyond a narrow range of activities. 

The UK government has made building 1.5 million new homes part of their election manifesto but little is known about if and how they will be delivered. The current UK methods of delivery will result in the unaffordable consumption of carbon and land, and homes that overheat, and target social separation while the country is suffering from crises in youth mental health, loneliness, and social care. In the light of multiple overlapping emergencies, a new architecture of the home is needed, in which material, construction, environment, and human potential are equally represented.