ARC3015Y F
Instructors: Aljosa Dekleva, Tina Gregoric
Meeting Section: L0101
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm; Friday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

Structures for dwelling make up the predominant part of our built environment and fulfil our most basic needs. It is our responsibility as architects to design more than spaces that enable mere survival, but to promote changes in spatial and social conditions necessary for a meaningful life. We will therefore continue to address the topics of home and dwelling as current critical social and environmental issues.

For the project [Home at Arsenale] at the Venice Biennale 2016 we invited 27 architects, artists, critics and designers from various backgrounds to share their experience and expertise and each select some 10 books addressing the notions of home and dwelling. In doing so, we built a curated library of collective knowledge comprising 300 books—including the works of Niklas Maak defining the new communal, and those of Lacaton Vassal, redefining the gradients between inside and outside, among others—that will serve as the starting point of the studio to explore and rethink collective living.

The curator of the forthcoming Venice Biennale 2020 Hashim Sarkis has recently titled the exhibition How will we live together?. The objective of the studio is an opportunity to further explore the central theme of the Biennale through the topic of shared collective living in order to rethink and design new socially, ecologically and economically viable collective housing providing identity and inclusion for the inhabitants of Toronto on several sites in the city center.

Studio participants will be challenged to design specific innovative dwelling prototypes intertwining existing and emerging household forms into new social and spatial collectives. The projects will investigate how new social realities and household organization in today’s highly individualised society influence, and in turn suggest, new and responsive forms of urban collective residential architecture. We will explore the definitions of private and public, testing the numerous potentials of sharing as an economic and ecological principle that allows for the inclusion of diverse lifestyles and multigenerational populations in order to avoid isolated urban enclaves, such as student housing, maternity homes or elderly residences. We will additionally explore the synergy of long-term residencies and short-term visits.

In-depth context research will lead to site-specific responses on spatial, social and material levels, seeking to upgrade their immediate social and built environments. Ultimately, the prototypes for new affordable collective housing will aim to propose new principles of merging environmental and human sustainability.

The semester will include a research trip to two of Europe’s capitals - Vienna (Austria) and Ljubljana (Slovenia) to visit relevant affordable housing projects and experimental collective housing typologies—from government-subsidized housing to co-housing or joint building venture projects—and meet the architectural practices behind these projects. Further details to follow.

Instructor Bios:

Aljoša Dekleva and Tina Gregorič are principals of Ljubljana-based architecture studio Dekleva Gregoric Architects pursuing the concept of ‘research by design’ with work spanning diverse scales, programs and localities, ranging from University Campus in Slovenia to Clifftop house on Hawaii. Their work has received numerous international awards including Architectural Review house award, Architizer and WALLPAPER* award, among others.

They started their research in participation, sharing, responsive environments and mass-customization of collective housing at the Architectural Association in London with their master thesis and well-received book titled Negotiate my boundary!. Since, they have further researched, designed and built several affordable collective housing projects.

In addition, they are intensively involved in reshaping architectural education. Aljoša runs AA nanotourism Visiting School at the Architectural Association and Tina is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Technology Vienna.

In 2016 they have curated Slovenian national pavilion at Venice Biennale addressing home and dwelling as critical, social and environmental issues through curated library titled Home at Arsenale.