unit-code
It is estimated that most of the buildings that will exist in 2050 – the year of the UN’s net zero carbon emissions target – have already been built. With this in mind, Unit 4 focuses on adaptive reuse, retrofitting and reimagining existing building stock, and making use of the embodied carbon that has already been spent, while creatively engaging with heritage conversations.
This year students have been rethinking domesticity in the site of Can Ricart – a semi-abandoned complex of 19th-century industrial buildings in the neighbourhood of Poblenou, Barcelona. Students’ designs address not only future domestic lifestyles, but also how these environments will perform under climate change projections to ensure the resilience of these homes. Projects focus on bringing practices of care to the forefront of domestic design and developing a design ethos that regards housing for everyone as a field of high intellectual and design ambition.
The current housing crisis affects cities around the globe. What is remarkable, however, is that at a time of such intense discussion about housing, the tone of this discussion is for the most part quantitative. Conversations do not seem to question the design of these new homes, nor how they will respond to the diversity of lifestyles in future societies, nor whether the idea of the ‘family home’ needs rethinking entirely. Unit 4 proposes to move the entry point of our thinking on domesticity from numbers to lifestyles.
Across the West, the post-war decades were a golden age for mass housebuilding and, by extension, for housing standards such as the Parker Morris standards in Britain. In the years since, households have diversified significantly, whether in relation to gender roles, jobs or the environment and climate emergencies, yet our design standards remain stubbornly close to the post-war paradigm.
Care practice can be understood holistically as care for each other, but also for other species, our built heritage and the environment. The work of architects such as Izaskun Chinchilla or the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative has prompted designers to bring care practices to the centre of housing design. Unit 4 makes a case for alternative forms of collective living that break the normative confines of the apartment building and cater for current and future diversity in lifestyles and projected environmental needs.