Life Is Messy
I think that good housing is essential to quality of life. However, in most housing cases, efficiency is the major driving factor. Developers and laws surrounding low-income housing are more concerned with how many people they can fit into an area. They are less concerned about the needs and daily lives of the people living there. Taking into consideration climate and social needs is more important than just providing shelter for a group of people. In cases such as Frank Harmon’s Seven Sisters Houses, he creates the porch as a central location for people to be able to gather and communicate while providing shade and a breeze during the humid summer months. The Mulhouse Housing Development also gives people a space to claim as their own. I believe that both of these projects are successful because life is messy. No one person’s home is the same. Letting people customize a space to fit their needs while also providing them with daylight and access to an outdoor space where they can gather is vital.
I found these projects to be interesting as well and got me thinking about how, as architects, we simply supply the basics and then allow the user to customize their experience living in their home. Providing access to nature, daylight, and natural air flow and pairing that with the user adapting a space based on their idea of the quality of life and daily routine is an interesting way to potentially design spaces.
ReplyDeleteThe complexities of life are often too hard for us to pin down in a single design. I also think that those projects do a good job of letting life fill in the voids that we (the architect) set up.
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