Dwellings in Focus
Designing Compact Cities: Exploring the Need for Transdisciplinarity When Designing for Miniaturization in the Built Environment
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paola Gavilanez, Erick Villagomez
We focus on the process—and challenges— of ‘miniaturization’ in the built environment and the resulting importance of transdisciplinary design towards finding innovative solutions that do not sacrifice quality of living. Although there have been drastic changes to the nature of settlements since the dawn of civilization, many recurring processes exist for these. One such process is the concentration of people and densification of use and space. Despite the growth in discourse around the latter over the past decades, little attention has been paid to resulting impacts of this cultural trajectory and the role that design, at all scales, can play in its transformation. Miniaturization—the act of making objects and spaces smaller in size—is an operation intimately related to the processes of concentration and densification. While the standard solution of creating and stacking smaller spaces on top of one another speaks to the initial stages of miniaturization, we have reached the point where a transdisciplinary, multi-scalar approach to design (urban design, landscape, architecture, interior design and industrial design) is necessary to continue the process in a meaningful way—ensuring that quality of life is not sacrificed in the miniaturization process. Our paper describes the process of miniaturization as it pertains to the built environment, contextualizes it historically, and highlights relevant case studies—focusing specifically on a winning proposal put forth for the Canadian-based Edmonton Infill Design Competition that explored living within a 300 square foot dwelling and that, ultimately, required a comprehensive transdisciplinary design approach.
The Laws of Settlements: A Summary Across Scale and Culture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Erick Villagomez
Are there fundamental laws that govern all settlements—from the smallest village to the largest cities? The Laws of Settlements paper highlights a handful of principles underlying human settlements of all sizes and across all cultures. These are based on a book titled The Laws of Settlements, which revives, updates and refreshes the work of Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis: taking the laws outlined in his seminal book Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements, and refreshing them in light of research done since its publication.
Phenomeknowlege in American Domesticity : From the Unsheltering Domus to The Fictive House
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joshua Jones
This single-family detached domicile is a quintessential building block of twenty-first century American urbanity. This dwelling unit never rests and marks each hour in a state of vulgar paradox. On one hand, the house is rife with the unfolding pathos of human activity, and on the other hand, it is bankrupt of its latent significance. The once chivalrous domicile of man now exists chiefly to support the lifestyles of its inhabitants. As a callous witness to the ever-alienating metropolis, this vernacular house has become a fashionable cenotaph to poetic dwelling. This research purports the apodictic necessity of nine rudiments of the house constructed in past, present, and future. The chief essential issues in domestic Architecture: hue, archetype, Braille, interpretation, tectonics, obeisance, natura, unfolding, and synthesis will be figuratively and culturally framed while more carefully locating their intended meanings. Through the tools of critical induction, the research presented contains interpretations, observations, and analyses of practical and theoretical precedents to effectively index a body of quintessential values. It culminates in proposing a generative design theory that examines the qualitative manifestation of these nine tenets (not to be viewed as formulaic or prescriptive) to resuscitate the culture of poetics in contemporary American single-family domiciles.
Envisioning Design Research: Understanding Co-Creation Dynamics and Situated Creativity for Sustainable Urban Living
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Isshin Sasaki
This paper explores a clue to create a spontaneous and sustainable city by enhancing design research strategies with the focus on spatial co-creation and situated creativity. We consider one particular way of design research in an experimental setting. First, with the hypothesis testing approach we analyzed the urban developmental process in a comparison between European and Asian cities. On the basis of these facts, we tried to design the experimental housing as a pilot project. The analysis of our experimental project revealed the difference not only in theoretical research concerning local roles in the co-creation process, but in empirical research concerning local activities with the situated creativity, namely the gap of the relationship between a top down approach and a bottom up approach in architectural design. Secondly, we understood as spatially embedded environments for the co-creation of knowledge and solutions by conducting local experiments through the design workshop where design practices of urban issues can be tested within the local context. Hence, I framed the idea to this result that the knowledge of co‐creation and the practice of situated creativity has been one of the substantial strategies for Sustainable Urban Living. We conclude with a discussion emphasizing social responsibility in sustainable urban cities.
