Branner, Stump & Beckerman Returning Fellows Exhibition

Collective Changes: Self-building and co-design in multi-family housing

Unlike single family housing, apartment buildings juxtapose the most personal domestic space with the larger building that houses a diversity of people with tangled timelines and changing circumstances. These tensions exponentially complicate the synthesis of a single design that continually meets all the needs of the individuals living there.

To address this, in some buildings residents transform standardized units after they are completed, whereas in others, the traditional design team included residents in the process from the beginning or intentionally left the building open for future change. This research analyzes the methods and effectiveness of resident participation in the design and construction of their own apartments in a variety of sites located in Germany, Belgium, the UK, France, Italy, Finland, Chile, and Argentina.

By spending a week at each location and engaging in on-site weavings and conversations, this study seeks to understand the architectural manifestations of resident participation, how or if it enables people to live better, whether the balance between the various stakeholders practically and aesthetically “works” or not, and how it impacts the lifespan and sustainability of the housing.

Grounding the Highrise Dwelling

We talk of finding ‘ground’ and feeling ‘grounded’ as shorthands to express our rootedness to a certain place, a sentiment central to the concept of ‘home.’ It is in this regard that multifamily housing, as a typology of ‘home’ which tends to detach the dweller from ground, presents a curious dilemma. Architects have arrived at a height-driven housing formula which increases the number of houses but decreases easy connections to ground like sidewalks, stoops, and porches, which modulate the relationship between the individual and the world at large. Instead these spaces have become replaced with barren hallways and tight elevator boxes, made just wide enough for occupants to retreat into their own cells. This research travel was undertaken in search of multifamily architectural projects that have attempted alternative design strategies for these often neglected spaces.

Reimagining Residual Spaces of Conflict

War and mass social conflict have shaped the built environment and contributed to our relationships with public space. Spaces that represent conflict are often approached through either erasure or preservation; removed from the collective memory, or suspended in it. This project will explore an alternate approach: the potential for residual structures of conflict to be repurposed through adaptive reuse, imagining a better future.

Each project visited will be evaluated through four lenses: the site’s relationship to historical conflict, utilization of adaptive reuse, acknowledgment of the site’s historical context, and the extent to which the project creates publicly accessible, community-oriented spaces. The intersection of these strategies for reuse, commemoration, and programming reveal crucial boundaries in how we as a culture engage with our history, and the spaces that emulate this history. A place of learning, expression or recreation may also be a place for reflection or mourning. In allowing and examining this sometimes uncomfortable confluence, we can better understand how to move forward.