ABSTRACT
At its most basic, an urban house is a private space that can be separated and secured from the outside space of the city. This space might be a single volume, but it usually comprises a series of rooms and connecting spaces, some ‘wet’ containing services and some ‘dry’. Rooms and doors are devices within the house for separating activities that may be incompatible with each other, such as those that produce noise or mess and those requiring quiet or darkness.
The single detached house will always have a role within the types of suburb we are investigating, so interrogating possible alternative organisations and living arrangements is a necessary part of our equation and a vehicle for recognising more diversity within what is sometimes categorised uniformly and generically. We have started with the ‘room’ as the base unit to allow a different scale of thinking to influence the whole. Our categorisation focuses on operation and spatial concept, rather than stylistic expression, construction method, material use or other contextual or cultural factors, all of which influence the final result. A series of design projects introduce a level of redundancy and ambiguity in order to provide long-term flexibility and opportunities for occupant-led personalisation and adaptation.
