Complete Houses, Designing Non-Fragmented Landscapes of Beds

In this Studio, we will take further the concept of “Complete Streets” (safe, accessible to all, multi-program, sustainable, and context conscious), to reimagine the relationship between buildings, persons, and the environment through the design of “Complete Houses”, considering housing not as the multiplication of private universes, but as centers of production, consumption, education, socialization, and health. Houses account for the largest major built space on the planet but are still designed based on individual desires that disregard collective implications. For that reason, students will design landscapes with places to sleep, bathe, cook, eat, work, learn, exercise, and play…, where people, materials, and food are part of the same network. Each student will choose their own site in the area known as the Pacific Rim of Fire, and will decide on a crisis to respond to (a predictable disaster, flooding, earthquakes, pandemics, droughts, migration emergencies…). The intention is to work in geographies with radical conditions that demand deep engagement in environmental and social urgencies.
 
The course will be divided into two units: during the first unit, each student will create their own manifesto of what a “Complete House” should be and design a landscape of 1.000 beds (with what should be linked to them). After mid-term review, the second unit will provide the opportunity to take that concept further, considering the design of a territory of 10.000 beds. The intention is to foster designs that redefine the relationships between the individual and the collective, the urban and the rural.