ARCH 292
Design Studio
About
FALL 2022
2A Design Studio
Adrian Blackwell
Tura Cousins Wilson
Faye Sifei Mo
Samantha Eby
Monica Hutton
Val Rynnimeri
The concept of residential alienation has recently been used by sociologist David Madden and the late planner Peter Marcuse, in their book In defense of housing. They begin by arguing that alienation means “not feeling at home.” Growing numbers of people today do not feel at home in their housing. Overcrowding, displacement, dispossession, homelessness, harassment, disrepair, and other ordeals are increasingly common.... As a result, many people experience their housing as just another precarious place in an insecure world. There is a term for not feeling at home that has a long history in social science and critical theory: alienation.... If something is ‘alienable,’ it is exchangeable. It can be bought and sold. Alienation is thus the precondition of all private property.
The challenge is to design housing so it is decommodified and its inhabitants can connect to their environment, to community and to their own fundamental sense of creativity. Much of what passes for residential design in architecture, claims to do some of these things, but in fact deepens the commodification of space, compartmentalizing ecologies while consuming inordinate quantities of carbon intensive materials, isolating people of different incomes and cultures in private enclaves, and substituting acquisitiveness for the pleasure and meaning of human creativity.
Student Projects
