Housing as a Climate Caravan

RE-IMAGINING CENTRE AND PERIPHERAL DIALOGUE - HOUSING AS A CLIMATE CARAVAN

Work by Houwei Fu (MArch '24) for "Climate Caravan", a Research Studio taught by Heather Roberge and Lori Choi. In order to decouple home and land from its associated notions of permanence, this studio proposes prefabricated housing systems designed for future mobility and new organizations of community afforded by the aggregation of this housing. Each project considers how existing infrastructure and new housing systems might accommodate the inevitability of migration - our future climate caravan.

Project Statement:

This thesis proposes transformable mobile dwellings tailored for climate change, aiming to create a sustainable and transformable prototype that questions the invariable dependent interrelations between housing and land. The proposal envisions the social life within and between prefabricated housing, designed for durability, mobility, and flexibility. Informed by historical precedents of vernacular dwelling prototypes common in the West such as expandable caravans or manufactured houses, the dwelling is divided into different volumetric prefabrication components to organize its spatial order and social impact. Each individual unit is composited by 1-2 'centre' component(s), providing drainage, energy supply, and transformable structure, while several 'peripheral' components are mainly associated with domestic and entertainment programs. This conception further integrates the graphic-form-oriented aesthetic tradition with state-of-the-art technological considerations, presenting an overarching consolidation between structural integrity, spatial efficiency, passive design, and other sustainable strategies. Units are made of two or three volumes with a pitched roof to obscure the size and location of individual units. Roof organization affords daylighting from above and shaded terraces to either end.

The unit and its repetition combine the iconography of the single-family home with the linear array of the attached row house, adding density and the potential for collective living blocks while simplifying the future mobility of units. The spatial distribution form of the current Westcoast suburbia domestic prototypes proposes a more consolidating, compressing, and densified spatial distribution approach to aggregate the dwelling units. This unit aggregation was set upon the research of tessellation, graphic, and late structuralism and was essentially triggered by the testimony of the hierarchy theory of single-dwelling units. This approach aggregates the single sheds along the axis formed by the architectural profiles to honor their orthodox directionality and utilizes the space between linear arrays is further articulated by sliding, removing, and mirroring units. After that, the 'center-peripheral' spatial relationship can be seen from the graphic of the preliminary aggregation pattern, which enables the creation of a hierarchy layer to celebrate Westcoast regionalism and manifest the sense of collective living. Specifically, the 'center' clusters offer more variation while the 'periphery' dusters are more rigidly arranged to define blocks or smaller communities.

Conceptually, accessing from the critics of the current invariable alignment between housing property, urban infrastructure, and societal dynamics, the proposed thesis critically argues the future adaptivity of aesthetic, technology, and development approaches of domestic dwellings under deteriorating climate conditions. It carefully connects housing production and organization to community structure and climate resilience. Academically, this thesis presents the constructible forms and composition-oriented architectural education design in Southern California and explores its alignment with urban sustainability awareness. This study emphasizes the cultivation of a profound understanding and sense of responsibility toward future domestic environments producing housing infrastructure anticipating climate migration.

As Bruno Latour writes in Down to Earth, “What is certain is that all find themselves facing a universal lack of shareable space and inhabitable land... Migrations, explosions of inequality, and New Climate Regime: these are one and the same threat.” In this recent book, Latour makes a compelling case for the relationship of our bleak climate future to globalism, wealth disparity, political polarization, and nationalism and identity politics. Latour argues that climate change has already shifted the political landscape across the globe leading to migration, civil war and unrest, migrant detention, and political shifts. Given this incredibly dynamic planetary and national backdrop, this studio questions the expectation of permanence that accompanies our housing production. Housing is encumbered financially and environmentally by the private land to which it is tied. We question our collective desire to be rooted to privately held property, in cities we call home, even when such land is in peril. In order to decouple home and land from its associated notions of permanence, this studio proposes prefabricated housing systems designed for future mobility and new organizations of community afforded by the aggregation of this housing. Each proposal is tested on Los Angeles test bed sites (R-1, two R-1, and 64-acre Burbank site), cultivating critical stances toward prefabricated housing. We consider how existing infrastructure and new housing systems might accommodate the inevitability of migration - our future climate caravan.