Academic Year 2021/2022

Architectural Association School of Architecture

DIPLOMA 14

Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Shéhérazade Giudici

A Kind of Loving
Rethinking the Architecture of Social Housing

Introduction 2

I. Use Value and Exchange Value 3

II. The Rise and the Fall of Social Housing 6

III. State and Market 10

IV. Type 13

V. City 15

VI. Construction 17

VII. Studio Structure 18

Essential Bibliography 20

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INTRODUCTION

In the last fifty years, housing ceased to be defined by its use value, to become exclusively
ruled by its exchange value. If use value lies in the capacity to satisfy needs, exchange value,
on the contrary, consists in the potential to generate profit. Since the decline of the welfare
state and the rise of Neoliberalism, housing has therefore become one of the most profitable
commodities; however, this situation is not simply a consequence of real estate greed. The
‘housing crisis’ is in fact the product of a class warfare waged by capitalists against the
working class with the support of state policies such as the privatization of housing stock and
incentives for homeownership.

This process of commodification has been paralleled by an attack on the architecture of social
housing, portrayed by most critics as the ‘failure of modernism’. Large-scale complexes all
over the world have become synonymous of alienation and social stigma, a reputation that
has encouraged both their downgrading and their consequent privatization as real estate
assets. And yet, if there was a problem with social housing in its original form it was not its
scale, but, rather, its typological organization which was strictly bespoke to the nuclear
heteronormative family.

Today, the need to build social housing is more pressing than ever; the challenge is therefore
to rethink it as a platform for forms of domestic commoning and collective ownership. This
requires a specific architectural project which would take the risk to rethink large-scale
design and its resolution as urban and architectural form. Diploma 14 asks students to
critically revisit the history of social housing and propose new models for the present
condition. The studio will therefore focus on the nexus between policy making, construction
systems and typological organization of domestic space. Our goal is to put forward scenarios
in which housing will be – again – defined by its use value; the question at stake is,
ultimately, what kind of architectural form could we imagine for a city freed from the
hegemony of exchange value?

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 I.

USE VALUE AND EXCHANGE VALUE

William Chambers and Capability Brown, Workers’ Cottages in Milton Abbas, Dorset, built 1780

Social housing is one of the most important legacies of the 20th century, but its visibility and
contested history obscure the fact it its meaning remains opaque. It has been noted that in
social discourse the term ‘social housing’ is a floating signifier, i.e. a term that has no agreed-
upon meaning. As remarked by Anna Granath Hansson and Bjorn Lundgren, the lack of
definition of the term social housing often leads to misunderstanding, rather than constructive
dialogue on the advantages and disadvantages of such system. While the Cambridge
dictionary describes it as “homes provided by the government for people with low incomes or
rent cheaply,” more recent definitions such as the one provided by the European Federation
of Public, Cooperative, and Social Housing, describes social housing as “homes for rent or
accession to ownership for which there are defined rules governing access to households with
difficulties in finding housing”. The difference between these two definitions emphasize how,
in the course of 20th century, the meaning of social housing has shifted from state-funded
homes to the broader category of ‘affordable housing’. Moreover, the very meaning of
affordable housing has proven to be elastic. If according to its original definition affordable

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means that housing price was commensurate to income, today affordability is measured in
terms of market parameters, which means that affordable housing is actually expensive in
cities with high real estate value (like London, New York, or Paris).

In our studio we maintain that social housing is a form of home defined by its use value,
implying that, no matter in which way social housing is funded, it has been removed from the
market. This means that the state can directly build social housing, subsidize it, or facilitate
other parties to build not-for-profit housing. Any other form of housing – housing that, in one
way or another, remains on the market – should be considered market housing.

This definition of social housing is rooted in the history of Western state-funded housing,
whose ideological origins are the early philanthropic projects of homes for labouring classes
initiated with the industrial revolution in Europe.

State-funded housing only emerged in the early 20th century, mainly after the 1st World War
when the return of veterans and the danger of socialist uprises convinced governments to take
the lead in building affordable housing. The reason for the relatively recent appearance of
social housing was the state’s reluctance to upset one of the pillars of capitalist market: the
house – and, more specifically, land on which houses are built. Before the state would finally
invest in social housing, there had been many attempts to build affordable housing for the
working class, dating back to the 16th century and including philanthropic and municipal
initiatives. Yet, the history of both affordable and social housing, its rise and demise, cannot
be understood without taking in consideration the politics of land ownership and the rise of
private property not as a mere economic phenomenon but as the quintessential form of
power.

Since the 16th century, starting in England, and subsequently in other countries, possession of
land shifted from customary use to property. This phenomenon, described by Karl Marx as
the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’, was the outcome of the class struggle between feudal
lords and peasants. Until the 15th century, in Europe, peasants had been able not only to
resist, but also to counter the landlord’s feudal power by bargaining unprecedented privileges
over land, especially in the aftermath of the 1348 plague, which had marked a sharp
population decrease and therefore a scarcity of labour power. In order regain control,
landlords, with the support of the state, became landowners; they evicted peasants and rented
their land to for-profit farmers. In England, this process of land privatization is known as

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‘Enclosures’ and it was advanced in several waves, of which the 18th century ‘Parliamentary
enclosures’ were the most decisive in destroying the peasants’ forms of self-subsistence. As it
is well known, eviction from land dispossessed peasants from their means of production,
making them ‘proletarians’ to be employed as wage labourers by capitalist enterprises.

Because the enclosures created huge masses of landless people, certain landowners became
concerned with the issue of housing their salaried workers. Early forms of philanthropic
housing in England were thus initiated as a way to control workers by offering them an
affordable abode. Such condescending and paternalistic logic of affordable housing remained
a fundamental character of the project of housing for the low-income classes.

A remarkable example of this kind of philanthropic form of housing is the village of Milton
Abbas in Dorset, which the Earl of Dorchester built in 1773 in order to house the workers of
his estate. Made of detached two-family homes, the village replicated the settlement structure
of the commoners’ village, but changed the relationship between house and land. In the
medieval village, households combined production and reproduction and were attached to a
productive garden; their subsistence was supported by parcels of arable land – the selions –
scattered in nearby fields. In Milton Abbas houses were conceived as autonomous entities,
bespoke to the family unit and devoted exclusively to reproductive activities. This state of
affairs was theorized in the first architectural treatise entirely devoted to housing for the
‘laboring classes’, composed by John Wood the Younger at the end of the 18th century. In
this book Wood the Younger proposed a catalogue of cottages that ranged from one-person
lodgings to multi-family house, in which the internal organization was clearly defined in
terms of function and number of inhabitants. What is remarkable about the house models
proposed by Wood the Younger is the ejection of any productive activity from the realm of
domesticity, and their spartan simplicity, which was meant to inspire a sense of frugality and
abnegation to work. In both the houses of Milton Abbas and the model houses proposed by
Wood the Younger we see the anticipation of the main characteristics of social housing: the
separation between production and reproduction, and the separation between houses and any
form of autonomous subsistence. The enclosure of common land was thus the trigger for a
radical redefinition of the house, which shifted from being a place of dwelling to an
infrastructure to support the reproduction of the salaried worker.

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 II.

THE RISE AND THE FALL OF SOCIAL HOUSING

Still from ‘A Kind of Loving’ by John Schlesinger, 1962

Early examples of paternalistic housing for waged labourers were inherently exploitative as
they ultimately aimed at making the worker dependent on his salary by severing him and his
family from other sources of livelihood like the traditional toft and croft, foraging, and home-
based crafts. However, the rise of salaried work would eventually lead to a further, equally
brutal form of exploitation, as industrialization and the migration of workers within cities
were used by speculators to increase land value and make housing the working class an
extremely lucrative business. This situation would cause the development of large inner-city
slums in many Western metropolises. While in several European countries the state supported
this form of speculation, with the rise of class conflict and the spread of diseases such as
cholera, in the mid 19th century bourgeois social reformers pushed for radical change in the
housing conditions of the working class. A notable example was the work of the Society for
Improving the Conditions of the Labouring Classes (SICLC) which distinguished itself by
formulating new typologies for dwellings which were created in collaboration with Henry
Roberts.

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Beside control and welfare, the goal of these early attempts at affordable housing was to
educate the working class to the virtues of bourgeois values.

This was the goal of one of the first large-scale housing initiatives that took place in London:
the Peabody Housing Trust, founded in 1867 by the banker George Peabody, one of the
founders of JP Morgan. Rather than building housing as individual blocks, the Peabody Trust
introduced the concept of the ‘Estate’ – an administrative entity made of groups of buildings
of family apartments. By buying land in large quantities and increasing density of housing,
the trust was able to reduce costs, making the building of affordable housing convenient for
wealthy investors. Yet the dramatic demand of affordable housing, and the risk of uprisings
or pandemics in cities like London, forced City authorities to take the lead in both planning
and building large quantities of housing, de facto introducing for the first time the idea of
social housing with the foundation of the London County Council (LCC) in 1889. The LCC
projects represents one of the first systematic attempt to de-commodify both land and housing
in order to build comprehensive housing estates. What is remarkable about the projects
initiated by the LCC – such as, for instance, the Boundary Estate – was the attempt to build a
coherent urban form which made the new housing an almost monumental presence within the
city. In projects like the Boundary Estate we see a fundamental and often overlooked aspect
of social housing, which is the relationship between architectural typology and urban
morphology. While in speculative housing the urban form is the direct result of commercial
parameters (think of the relentless subdivision and repetition of terraced housing), in social
housing there is an attempt to produce a coherent and legible relationship between the
housing unit and the overall form of the estate. In the Boundary Estate this is visible in the
relationship between housing blocks and streets, and especially in the way the entire urban
complex is anchored by the Circus, which becomes the formal and symbolic center of the
estate. Such coherent urban form was possible because the planning authority allowed the
LCC not only to build housing in large quantities, but also to acquire enough land in order to
build a coherent urban scheme.

A strong relationship between typology and morphology in social housing was at stake in
housing projects built in the Netherlands following the ‘Woningwet’, the 1901 Dutch
Housing Act which for the first time in history introduced the concept of sociale woningbouw
(social housing). Unlike previous initiatives on social housing, such as those of the LCC, the
Woningwet was a comprehensive policy that addressed the project of housing by focusing on

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all aspects of its production, from land acquisition to construction. The act provided financial
aid to companies that worked exclusively for social housing, while it obliged municipalities
to draw housing regulations to be complied with. Municipalities were thus forced to plan city
extensions by devising precise regulatory frameworks. Within this context, Hendrik Petrus
Berlage was able to plan the extension of Amsterdam Zuid in 1914 as a coherent urban
scheme in which social housing becomes the main fabric of the city. Defined by Berlage as
stedebouw (city-building), this approach combined architecture and planning as one project
where building regulations were immediately translated into a legible morphology made of
coherently planned blocks and generous green spaces.

Beside planning and construction, the Woningwet also empowered the state to provide strict
guidelines in terms of housing typologies through the Dutch Housing Institute. Against the
rather loose types of speculative tenements houses, within which the use of space was
flexible, the Institute promoted house typologies bespoke to the nuclear family. It is in this
aspect that the ‘dark side’ of social housing emerges, in the form of a rather prescriptive
approach to class and gender. Social housing was accessible only to married workers with
families who could rely on a steady job. These restrictions were legible in the plans provided
by the Dutch Housing Institute, which carefully subdivided the house into different rooms,
each devoted to specific functions and gender roles. In the intentions of the Institute’s, the
plans were meant not only to individuate the nuclear family, but also to encourage petit-
bourgeois habits such as a sense of ‘ownership’ of the house in spite of the fact that the flats
were actually for rent.

Social housing acquired momentum after the 2nd World War, when the combined effect of
urban reconstruction, economic development and welfare policies gave rise to the
opportunity for mass construction. In many countries such as Great Britain, The Netherlands,
Sweden and France, the sheer quantity of social housing being built partially de-commodified
residential space by taming land speculation. Yet the conditions through which the state
could build housing were not always favourable from the point of land acquisition. Scarcity
of land forced architects to adopt high-rise typologies such as towers and slabs. This tendency
was partially inspired by Le Corbusier’s experiments – such as his proposal for the Îlot
Insalubre in Paris, which became the starting point for his influential project of the Unité
d'Habitation – and by the CIAM principles of combining housing and green space. In reality,
the high-rise option proved to be convenient in situations where a large number of housing

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units had to fit into finite pieces of land. The implementation of high-rise social housing
increased many standards of housing in terms of view and light, but, with notable exceptions,
it often fragmented the morphology of the estate, making the ground an inhospitable terrain
vague. In many cases, the state was forced to buy land from private owners at market price, a
situation that pushed the location of new social housing very far from the centre. This was the
case in France, where the so-called ‘grands ensembles’ were built in locations deprived from
basic services and not well connected to major lines of transportation, a factor that
contributed to the sense of alienation and exclusion felt by the inhabitants.

Another inconvenient was construction, which in many European countries was delegated to
private companies whose profit-seeking logic forced them to reduce costs as much as
possible, with grave consequences on the building quality. Above all, in the long term, a
major issue for large-scale social housing was maintenance. Large-scale estates had to be
maintained in all their aspects, from taking care of the open spaces to repairing the elevators,
to cleaning its abundant public passages. And yet, in spite of all these challenges, social
housing represented the only moment in capitalist history in which the architecture of
housing was not completely subsumed by the market logic and was built, instead, to house
people in need.

In exposing the shortcomings and ‘hidden’ politics of social housing we have to be careful
not to align our critique to the more ideological claim that social housing, especially
modernist social housing, was a ‘failure’. When not motivated by an explicit classist
mentality, such claim is often founded on a crassly superficial idea of social housing as the
outcome of the hubris of architects and planners. Charles Jencks’s description of the 1972-76
demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe large-scale housing complex in St. Louis as “the day Modern
architecture died” – and, therefore, the ‘ground zero’ of postmodernism – is symptomatic of
the tendency to reduce the problem of social housing to a matter of architectural trend.
Things were far more complex: the demise of social housing started in the 1970s was part of
a larger economic restructuring in which the liberal democratic state started to withdraw from
its role of welfare provider. Today, after forty years of neoliberal economic policies, and in
the middle of a dramatic housing crisis, criticizing social housing for being alienating or the
outcome of architectural hubris is completely out of pace. A more interesting challenge is,
rather, how to imagine new and better forms of social housing that learn from past
vicissitudes but continue the tradition of providing housing for the largest number of people.

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 III.

STATE AND MARKET

Margaret Thatcher visits the Patterson family, 1980

This design studio starts from the assumption that a new project for social housing faces five
fundamental challenges: the role of the state, the acquisition of land, the inevitably
prescriptive character of housing types, the relationship between housing typology and urban
morphology, and the economy of construction. Regarding the first challenge, it is important
to keep in mind that liberal democratic states have always supported a property-owning
society, so while they built social housing they also encouraged market housing by
democratizing credit. We should keep in mind that social housing is an exception in the
history of capitalism, and, as we said previously, the state decided to commit to this project
not because of its generosity towards subaltern classes, but rather because of the threat of
working class revolution. With notable exceptions – and from the very beginning – liberal
democratic states like England built social housing with a long term view to residents
eventually shifting from rent to ownership. Margaret Thatcher’s infamous ‘right to buy’
policy was not a rabbit magically pulled from the hat, but, rather, the consequence of the way
in which social housing was built in the first place: as an encouragement to the low-income

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classes to become owners of their own house. This is evident from the way housing
typologies were conceived as private homes with a bare minimum of services to be shared.
The seemingly collateral effect of the ‘right to buy’, i.e. the disastrous commodification of
housing, was thus actually designed by the state as a way to valorise its assets and get rid of
its responsibility to take care of its citizens. This historical precedent demonstrates that the
state is not only the main responsible of housing commodification, but also that it is not
reliable in maintaining housing outside of the market. If the state builds social housing, on a
long term, depending on political circumstances, it will be destined to be privatized again.

Regarding the acquisition of land, we should keep in mind that this is the main obstacle to
building not only social housing but affordable housing in general. Today, 70% of the costs
involved in producing housing are related to land purchase. Yet, most states still remain the
most important landowners in their territories, and they have proved to be very ‘generous’ in
selling their land to private owners for cheap price. In countries like the UK, in the last
decades millions of acres of land have been privatized without much public notice. To society
at large, the politics of landownership are opaque because they are presented simply as
‘economic opportunity’ for investment and not as a vital asset for maintaining sustainable
cities. These two challenges are intimately linked, as, in the past, most social housing was
initiated by the state, on state land. However, today a series of new questions arise – first and
foremost, whether there can be social housing outside the framework of the state. Is it
possible, essentially, to imagine housing outside of the market and yet not initiated or owned
by the state?

Each unit participant will be able to take an autonomous position vis-à-vis this question,
ranging from complete state involvement – which we could term ‘public housing’ – to forms
of social housing that can be understood as fundamentally antagonistic to the state. In
between these two extremes there exists a range of options in which private actors can
establish partnerships with the public administration, or the state can actively support and
encourage the creation of social housing without actually being involved in it. What is
quintessential in all of these options is that the project at stake has to produce spaces that
cannot become the object of speculation, ie spaces with use value rather than exchange value.
This can be achieved in a number of ways by devising policies that challenge traditional
forms of private ownership.

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The main difference between ownership and possession is that they who possess something
are merely concretely using it; possession therefore indicates a physical condition rather than
a juridical status. To own something means to be able to exhaust, destroy, or alienate that
which is owned, which implies that the owner has the right to terminate or rather transfer the
relationship of ownership by selling their property to someone else. The key issue with
private property indeed is not the fact that it allows individuals and families to possess their
own dwelling – which is not inherently a negative thing – but, rather, that it raises the
possibility of ownership, and, therefore, of speculation and exploitation.

The most obvious answer to the threat of speculation has, until now, been for the state to be
the owner of social housing stock; while this response has proved, at times, highly effective –
such as in the case of the 1920s and 1930s ‘Red’ estates in Vienna – it is a potentially flawed
mechanism, as the state can, much like any other owner, eventually speculate on its
properties. While direct state involvement has been minimal in most contexts at least since
the 1980s, in our studio participants will be able to put forward scenarios in which ‘public
housing’ could again become a viable possibility. These scenarios are in fact increasingly
plausible today, due to the pressure caused by the several crises virtually all states are facing
right now: a massive environmental crisis, a sanitary emergency, economic instability, and
widespread social discontent, not to mention the urgency to deal with ongoing colonial
violence. So a new involvement of the state is not at all out of question, for the first time in
decades, and it will be up to the individual student whether to take up this line of inquiry.

On the other hand, social housing does not have to coincide with public housing, as there
have been many attempts to create housing-out-of-the-market developed and run by private
citizens. One of the most promising examples is the ‘Community Land Trust’ model (CLT),
which allows a group of individuals to collectively commit to a project where the downsides
of ownership (even shared ownership) are offset by the adoption of rules that prevent
speculation. This kind of experiment also has the potential of fostering forms of solidarity
between the members of the initiative – solidarity that was often missing in many top-down
state projects. CLTs can also operate together with public partners, so hybrid models are
indeed possible. Needless to say, CLTs are not the only example of community-led, or
private-led social housing, and in the studio we hope to see the development of other such
models. In all cases, however, the issue of ownership and state involvement is deeply
intertwined with that of land acquisition, since it constitutes the very basis of the condition of

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ownership. Who owns or acquires the land and under which conditions will be therefore
crucial to this year’s projects. Interestingly enough, this challenge is not only a matter of
policy, but also one of space. Most public housing has been built by the state on its own less
valuable land – often peripheral to cities; however, to quote again the case of ‘Red Vienna’,
in some cases public actors have used and even acquired central plots for the purpose of
building highly visible social projects. Therefore, the choice of site is both strategic – in that
it has to be economically sustainable – but also, potentially, ideological, as it can hide or
flaunt the presence of a political subject.

IV.

TYPE

Thomas Ruff, image from the ‘Interior’ series, 1979-present

The prescriptive nature of housing types is perhaps the most problematic legacy of social
housing. As said earlier, social housing was conceived to clearly separate reproduction from
production and individualize the nuclear family in its constitutive gender roles: husband,
housewife, siblings. Any other gender role or activity that was not strictly reproductive was

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banned from its space. Although domestic labour had already been codified and naturalized
by 19th century residential space, it is only with 20th century social housing that a normative
model becomes truly pervasive, and, from Europe and North America, spread in cities all
over the world. As such, the paternalistic intentions of Western social housing were exported
as crypto-colonial models virtually everywhere, standardizing the nuclear family; the
endlessly replicated layout of 1970s HDB social housing units in Singapore, for instance, is
essentially an improved and revised version of the Henry Roberts model which had been the
ur-type of all European working class flats.

Breaking this mold is, as of today, almost impossible, as the propagation of the model has, in
time, generated a self-reproducing subjectivity: users today actually expect that type of
layout, and are not at ease with different solutions. Moreover, the mass-produced furniture
one can find at affordable prices on the market is completely tailored to the scale and
functional distribution of the kitchen-living+1/2-bedroom flat. It is possible to read social
housing as a project of social engineering on a large scale, but what is ironic in this
predicament is that while it has become a cliché to hate social housings for its ambition to
homogenize its inhabitants, the actual flat types are seldom criticized. In fact, it is rather the
scale and repetitive character of social housing that is usually seen as ‘flattening’,
‘alienating’, and not open to adaptation, while a careful analysis can reveal how the real issue
at stake is the imposition of a daily choreography of gendered roles, achieved through the
standardization of the residential flat.

The unit’s participants will therefore be facing a fundamental challenge: is it possible to

reimagine forms of social housing that undo the ideological dichotomies constructed by two
centuries of standardized types? Can we imagine housing that opens up new relationships
between production and life, that rejects traditional gender roles, that caters to users beyond
the nuclear family? Depending on the context, this challenge might also have to do with
undoing colonial models and addressing cultural and climatic requirements that have been
repressed by the imposition of Eurocentric values such as privacy. This line of inquiry
contains, implicitly, another architectural question – that is to say, whether the most
promising response to type’s issues is to choose complete flexibility. Each student will be
able to argue for new types, or for post-typological solutions depending on the position of the
thesis; we encourage participants to explore a range of different options and hope that the
diversity of projects in the unit will foster the discussion on contemporary forms of life.

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 V.

CITY

Fernand Pouillon, Housing at Meudon-la-Forêt (Photo Jean Richer, 2014)

An extremely important feature of social housing is the relationship between housing types
and the estate as a whole, or what Aldo Rossi defined as the relationship between typology
and morphology. As noted before, certain types of social housing, such as the ‘Tower in the
Park’, brought an improvement of life conditions, but disrupted the relationship between the
form of the architecture and the form of the city. Moreover, when social housing is built on
residual pieces of land, there is very little possibility to conceive the estate as a coherent
urban form. So in the history of social housing the interaction between building and context
has not always been addressed productively, and yet, we believe this is perhaps the most
interesting challenge we have the opportunity of tackling this year. In fact, in the very history
of housing the issue of whether residential space should be designed ‘from the inside out’ or
‘from the outside in’ has been a major question for architects. There is, we believe, the
possibility to articulate both methods within the same project, reimagining housing as a
project for the city which is also typologically innovative.

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Social housing is not necessarily mass housing; each student will be able to choose the scale
that fits best the context that they are addressing.

However, we hope that all the unit members will engage in the effort of designing something
that contributes in a fundamental way to the urban environment. This is an urgent task for
architecture, which is both social and ecological at the same time. The form of the city has
immediate political but also environmental implications, and for a few decades now
architecture has struggled to address this question in meaningful terms.

We believe that the reason for architecture’s withdrawal from its citymaking capacity lies
precisely in the fact that exchange value has become the ruling parameter over use value. In
fact, as we have seen, most cases of social housing have not escaped the tyranny of exchange
value, as they were already planned with the intention to be eventually sold – in these cases
density and efficiency have created a bleak urban landscape with no form or consistency and
little regard for the quality of outdoor space. However, in many instances social housing has
also been the last locus where architects have experimented with the possibility of working
on urban form. In examples such as the Höfe of the Red Vienna, or Fernand Pouillon’s
blocks, we see an ambition to address use value questions that cannot be immediately
commodified: the provision of shared services, of green space, of legible city spaces that do
not shy away from a certain monumentality.

Whatever the scale of the individual project, the members of the unit will address this
fundamental issue: is it possible, in an age of fragmentation and pragmatism, to imagine
urban spaces that address the need for leisure, for aesthetic pleasure, and for social
representation? And, more importantly, can these spaces also move towards a more
environmentally sustainable attitude, creating specific climatic conditions and enhancing the
qualities of the context?

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 VI.

CONSTRUCTION

Aldo Rossi, Gallaratese Complex, Milan

Social housing has been an important terrain for technological experimentation in the past
century. Historically, the mass repetition of many residential units has represented a major
opportunity for architects and engineer to develop new technologies and test tectonic
solutions. This year, we seek to revisit critically this legacy by considering the labour and
ecological implications of the building of housing. For this reason we encourage students to
rethink the way in which architecture is physically produced – who builds it and how, but
also where the materials are sourced and how they are treated.

Starting from the conviction that environmental justice and social justice should go hand in
hand, we propose to look at methods of architectural production that challenge the status quo,
from recycling to the development of new materials, to the restructuring of the very
hierarchical chain through which space is designed, produced, and inhabited. Environmental
and Technical Studies will offer to 5th year students an ideal venue to further elaborate on
these themes, but all students will be invited to address this extremely crucial issue. Too often
architectural imagination stops at the stage of ideation; on the contrary, this year we will try

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to think backwards, and reimagine buildings essentially as processes, starting from the
endgame – inhabitation, maintenance, transformation – to go back to the construction
sequence and further back in the sourcing of materials.

It is critical for our social housing projects to be mindful of how they come into being, as
they will have to construct their own financial feasibility in order to eventually move the
housing stock out of the market, thus making homes into something that cannot be the object
of speculation.

VII.

STUDIO STRUCTURE

My Bloody Valentine

In term 1, students will be asked to choose a case-study to investigate; the choice is entirely
up to the individual. Each participant will engage in a bibliographic – and, where possible,
first-hand and archival – research, and conclude the term with the production of an essay
composed of text and images as well as redrawn architectural drawings.

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In term 2, the main architectural themes identified thanks to the previous term’s research will
become the basis for the development of an architectural brief, which will be then addressed
through the production of an actual proposal. By the end of the term each student will have
completed a set of 2-d drawings outlining the spatial character of the proposal. The site and
scale of the proposal will be chosen by each participant according to their own brief’s
argument and ambition. Note that the context of the proposal does not have to be the same as
that of the previous term’s research; the continuity between the two is conceptual rather than
physical.

In term 3, we will address issues of presentation, representation, and argument; this implies
the production of renderings of the proposal but also the development of an overall thesis
whose scope goes beyond the simple architectural project.

At all stages, although the project per se remains an individual pursuit, we encourage students
to cooperate and work together as much as possible.

We meet twice per week; one session is collective, and we’d kindly ask everyone to stay for
the whole session and engage with the work of their peers. The second session is individual
tutorials where group discussion is welcome, and students can arrange their own schedule
more autonomously.

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 ESSENTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pier Vittorio Aureli & Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, ‘Familiar Horror’ in Log n. 38 (Fall
2016), 105-109.

Ben Austen, High Risers: Cabrini Green and the Fate of American Public Housing (London:
Harper, 2019).

Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 (Cambridge, MA: The Mit Press,
1999).

John Boughton, Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (London: verson,
2019).

Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
(New York: Zone Books, 2017).

Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014).

Edward G. Goetz, New Deal Ruins: Economic Justice and Public Housing Policy (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2013).

Anna Granath Hanson and Bjorn Lundgren, “Defining Social Housing: A Discussion on the
Suitable Criteria” in Housing, Theory and Society 36, no. 2 (2019): 149- 170.

David Madden, Peter Marcuse, in Defense of Housing. The Politics of Crisis (London: Verso,
2016).

Lawrence J. Vale, From Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors
(Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Kathy Weeks, The Problem with Work. Feminism, Marxism, Anti-Work Politics, and Post-
Works Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

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