2012S_Arch Design 3_Saunders Section
ARCH-2230 | Andrew Saunders, Assistant Professor
Architecture Design 3: Housing Complex[ity]
Selected Student Work:
Octavie Berendschot
Benjamin Schneiderman
One of major criticisms of modern housing projects has been the repetitive homogenous nature and the disregard for complexity and non-hierarchical heterogeneity. Much of this arises out of the closed compositional nature of many of the early projects resisting integration and or acknowledgement of the complex urban condition of cities and the individuals inhabiting them.
Through the use of contemporary computation and fabrication techniques, the studio challenges shortcomings of twentieth century housing strategies while building on and opening new opportunities afforded by collective housing. Original tropes of canonical modern houses are multiplied, transformed and amplified using parametric modeling techniques.
The new models are highly flexible and topological in nature allowing them to operate as open systems with specific intrinsic relationships that are simultaneously able to adapt to a number of extrinsic criteria. These new assemblages deploy repetition to generate difference formally and spatially through parametric and morphological transformations, chromatic and material sensation, and calibrated environmental responses. These new formations will operate as open systems capable of engendering difference by informing and being informed by the specific environment in which they evolve.