Nick Roseboro

In the 1970s, ideas of the commons focused on the separation of the public and private spaces through the notion of property—a capitalist tool leading to the continued commodification of land, site, and ground and furthering inequality and accessibility to resources. In the early 1980s, new positions began to envisage the city as “the commons.” This perspective conceived the city as a collection of shared resources within public spaces, where the public assembled for social interactions and decision-making guided by aspirations for a more equitable society. The architectural discourse focused less on the relational and architectural co-produced transformations promoted by “commoning” practices as a reaction to crisis and necessity. Therefore, a notion of trans-property is central to understanding how sharing in a capitalist regime can occur critically through modes of living. While the prevailing production structures are in motion and inadequate, their transformation is essential for the genuine advancement of the commons. A crucial aspect of this transformation involves identifying and situating the individual experience of “being in common” with others and redirecting society’s individualistic tendencies toward a more collective orientation. Without this initial point, the promotion of sharing structures transcends the existing ones; but this task proves to be a formidable and intricate challenge, which could result in increased division and disassociation and ultimately leading to fractured commoning practices. This course aims to reexamine the notion of housing through the lens of common practices and collective action. The current housing crisis echoes those of the past. Many solutions have been proposed to build more housing, which has led to homogenized designs in the name of efficiency, political tension, technology, and less focus on the people as a collective. Through reading, research, and designing this course, students will analyze architectural styles and movements; develop arguments; and propose new housing model understanding, buildability, aesthetics, affordability, sustainability, circularity, and collective action.

Traditionally, we refer to the house as the structure to protect the intimacy of the family. It provides shelter and separates us from work but also supports it. The house is the space that protects the biological life of the occupants and encompasses an envelope with subdivisions into smaller spaces—what we call rooms. Such rooms present a defined hierarchy—what we call privacy, set forth by the homeowner, allowing individuals to separate from the rest of the occupants—a value directly connected to the notion of the “traditional family.” The division of rooms and their functions reiterates the nuclear-family structure. It allows for the separation of the family from the outside world and of each individual within the house. This course explicates the house, home, and housing as a space we all inhabit and sometimes take for granted. We live in times of housing scarcity, climate adjustments, new family structures, and real-estate development that hinder architects, planners, and designers from proposing spaces for non-homogenized living based on the traditional family and the work-life paradigm that fuels our current housing. This course aims to question the house, its form, sustainability, temporality, production, and reproduction, as well as how to answer, propose, and study its elements for better living not only for “one family” but for all.

Work/labor are directly connected and drive reasoning for producing more commodities, people, and even art—extending our livelihoods further into the future. Leisure is a vital part of a system where labor is extracted from society and, in turn, yearns for time away from work or something in return. Some tensions lie in the decision-making process of wanting time from work and the rewards of that work that generate paradoxical circumstances. Workers give their labor and, in return, earn a conditioned status that is sought after and that perpetually feeds this cycle. The course looks at work typologies embedded within their leisure and the amenities used as a tool for greater work output. A question arises regarding the work/life vs. work/leisure paradigm and the blurred line between them. Counter examples include the festival as a site of leisure, the home, and more sites that function as a release for work—but is work still happening on these sites? Through drawing, collage, and mapping, students will identify the experiences in these spaces, how they function with or against the norms of society, and where the future of these spaces linked to “play” symbolizes for them. What aspects of leisure are necessity vs. desire, and what is the role of aesthetics in these places?

Defined by Ignacio Sola Morales as land in its exploitable state, urban voids have been a topic of discussion for quite some time. This course aims to reexamine the notion of the void not as land ripe for building real estate capital but, rather, as space for cultural expression. Students are given a list of different voids—infrastructural areas, parks, empty/unused buildings, and land that has transformed many times over with histories of erasure and dispossession. Exercises include visual representation via an exegetic collage of the assigned void. What are the colors of the voids? Do these colors and textures differ from their context? The project then would be to design an intervention as a response to the context of the chosen void. What does the context need? Who is it for, and why? Responses could interface with political, economic, and social concerns with the varying matter on our planet but also with an underlying conceptual underpinning of their interconnectedness of site, land, and the collective.