The single-family house has long been a laboratory for design experiment. To design a house is to touch on fundamental issues of public and private space, as well as key architectural questions of structure, circulation, envelope, and site. The designer must address questions of construction, detail, and materiality, as well as contemporary concerns such as media, communication, changing lifestyles, and alternative work patterns. For many architects, a house is one of the first projects they will build. The history of architecture is, in many ways, written through canonical houses.

But the single-family house is, more often than not, located on a rural or suburban lot. The anachronistic model of the villa in a pastoral landscape has had surprising longevity in the discipline. At a time when architects have an imperative to address the changing character of city and new concepts of family and social roles, the single-family house is often deemed irrelevant. But this is to ignore the facts on the ground, particularly in the context of the North American city.

While it is true that single-family homes make up a relatively small percentage of the housing stock in New York City (around 15%), in cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Toronto (not to mention Los Angeles), the majority of the housing stock consists of single-family houses. In Detroit, 70% of the population lives in single-family units, the majority of which are detached houses. Despite this, with a few notable exceptions, significant house designs, recent and historical, are almost all located outside of the city.

The house in the city, by contrast, has a strong contextual imperative, and the premise of this studio is that the program of the single-family house can be a powerful tool to work simultaneously at the architectural scale and at an urban scale.

The site for the studio is the borough of Queens, New York. Under-studied and often ignored, Queens is the most diverse borough of the city: 26% Asian, 28% Hispanic, 24% White, and 16% Black. The borough is experiencing rapid growth and new development and offers an extraordinarily wide range of urban and building types for individual exploration. An overnight site visit is planned.

The studio will result in realistic and fully developed proposals. The scale of the single-family house as a program allows (requires) highly resolved design development, and it is expected that the projects will be presented in detailed large-scale models and drawings. At the same time, our synthetic approach and the inherently typological character of the house means that drawings and diagrams of the urban implications are also a key requirement. The potential of the program is to leverage the architectural potential of the house as an urban instrument, and to encourage students to think architecturally at the scale of the city.

The instructor will be on campus for in-person teaching every other week at a minimum, and available for online critiques each week.