ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter offers a discussion of the empirical explorations of current domestic experiences in Claremont Court illustrated in the previous chapters. In order to do that, this chapter uses the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 2 – linking architecture and sociology through paradigms on home and community – as a lens through which the empirical explorations are interpreted. This chapter engages with the wider (and still open) debate on social housing, from Coleman’s Utopia on Trial (1990) to Brindley’s Architecture of Exclusion (1999) and Ravetz’s Council Housing and Culture (2001), but from a novel intersectional perspective which brings human experience and the embodied aspects of architecture to the fore, and distances itself from the labelling of Modernist social housing as “failure.” The chapter’s approach broadens understandings of home and community; but most importantly, in challenging deterministic readings of housing design, it presents architecture as ephemeral, and subject to physical and social reconstruction. Hinging on the temporal dimension of architecture, this concluding chapter also offers lessons on the facilitating role of architecture to articulate domestic paradigms and the social values represented by them.
