My final semester project is an amalgamation of the ideals of custom build housing and realising the idea of ‘suburbia’. I’ve got a 12 hectare site, set in an old quarry and have to design 267 dwellings to fit in. I’m not interested in designing something that’s ‘nice and fancy’. I don’t do nice and fancy. This is about me figuring out down to the scale of the individual resident, how I can design a residential development that benefits, and doesn’t just house. It needs to be more than a house.
I spent the first semester looking at the idea of the home at a much smaller scale – specifically in the form of the good old ‘semi-detached house’. Given a character site nearby to pull threads from and influence us, we (as in my studio and I) each designed a ‘semi’ that extracted elements of life within our site both physically and anthropologically.
I designed ‘The Tower and The Warehouse’, my site was littered with the form of the tower, office buildings, lighthouses, water towers, churches – you name it, it was there. I took this initial concept and delved straight in. What can the form of a tower (at the scale of a single dwelling) offer that a bog-standard home can’t? I then clashed this form (due to one interesting photograph I took of two adjacent elements of a factory building meeting) with the form of the ‘warehouse’.
So it was high-rise vs the low rise at the scale of a semi-detached dwellings. And it was a pretty tricky challenge. One that I spectacularly haven’t nailed yet (but that’s for final portfolio).
Moving on to this next project with the proposal of mass housing, I will carry this notion forward. Making 267 dwellings into a beautifully complex and worked out Tower and a Warehouse. Or many lots of Tower and Warehouses. Easy right?
Well, at the time I am writing this – I have absolutely no idea how this will turn out. I have three months. This blog is my journey – so I hope you enjoy it as much as I will.
Roses & Bricks 