HOMES
our work in progress
Elements of the RM WORKS HOMES Project received an Honorable Mention as a part of Bee Breeders Modular Homes 2021 Competition. Check out our boards and our interview.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The home is a central tenet in architectural theory and practice, not the least because of its core to humanity’s relationship with both our natural and built environments.
Shelter, comfort, stability, joy—all are foundational to home.
Yet the ways by which our society delivers houses have become increasingly fractured from how they offer home. Efficient packaging of developer driven multifamily housing.1 Publicly supported housing typologies with under 20-year timespans.2 Predatory lending and selling.3 Crumbling existing stock.4 Rigid individual typologies—single, 1-4 unit, multifamily. Environmental degradation and loss of urban tree cover.5 Landscapes that reflect and reinforce unjust and illogical local zoning or bank lending practices.6
Yet there are elements of the human condition that are elevating us out of these limited structures. New frontiers that bleed the lines between markets, regulation, cities, even countries.
The spirit of adventure, innovation, and reclamation of both autonomy and community in spaces that at first glance appear too restrictive to claim as home.
The RM WORKS HOMES investigation seeks to explore the fertile (and arid) ground in interstitial spaces of traditional housing—both physically and politically—where people are redefining modes of living.
We undertake this research because of its timely importance.
In terms of housing supply, there is an immediate need for 6.8 million new homes in the United States alone. These houses must respond to the context of a changing climate and environmental context.7 In August 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deemed that humans have “unequivocally” warmed the planet, causing unprecedented climate impacts on shorter and shorter timescales.8 Many of the cascading changes are irreversible. Fire, drought, flooding, and environmental degradation—the landscape in which homes across the world will be sited—demands that our infrastructure respond to the existential threat of climate change and mitigate the forces that have given rise to it.
In terms of demand, the pandemic has shed light on both lack of access to traditional housing markets among the most marginalized, and lack of interest in traditional housing from broader populations. The Zeitgeist off-grid living, vaning, and digital nomadry are embodied in cultural artifacts from Burning Man to Nomadland. Flexible means of shelter that can be modified or moved at will offer a call for architectural exploration.
The following drawings and research are equally grounded and fantastic. We explicitly choose to explore the possible as a housing paradigm shift.
REFERENCES
1 Duo Dickinson (2018) Architecture without Architects: The Cut-Paste Typology Taking Over America. ArchDaily.
2 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2021) Public Housing.
3 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2019) Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.
4 Eileen Divringi, Eliza Wallace, Keith Wardrip, and Elizabeth Nash (2019) The Cost to Repair America’s Housing Stock—and Which Homes Need It the Most. Housing Matters.
5 Richard Conniff (2018) U.S. Cities Lose Tree Cover Just When They Need It Most. Scientific American.
6 Emi Okikawa and Tim Frank (2021) Deep Dive: Redlining, Racism and Urban Planning. Sierra Club.
7 Kenneth T. Rosen et. al. (2021) Housing is Critical Infrastructure: Social and Economic Benefits of Building More Housing. Rosen Consulting Group.
8 IPCC (2021) AR6 Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.
Project Impetus
The impetus for the RM WORKS HOMES project was inspired by our experience during the depths of the COVID 19 pandemic. America was getting a glimpse into people’s lives, homes, and neighborhoods as never before, highly visible on social media and highly captivating during the lock-down.
We had so much time to reflect on our limitations. We saw the immediate consequences that the lack of adequate housing has on our society. Across the country, families living in homes with poor efficiency and ventilation struggle to pay high energy bills in the face of an intense recession.1 New studies reveal the true toll of building quality issues—between 2,900 to 5,100 deaths annually before COVID.2
We thought of the regulations designed to protect and serve us—and how so often they also limit architectural responses to these issues. Zoning. Commercial real estate. Mortgage finance.
We also thought of the challenges of climate change and industrial deserts. Increasing temperature fluctuations and precipitation fluctuations. Land constraints from either contamination or increasing land values.
Traditional solutions no longer appear to address the fragility of housing tenure or housing sufficiency.
Project Design
Then, to ease our weary minds, we started to search instead for opportunities.
Inspired by work including living systems theory by James Grier Miller, The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion by Interboro, commoning over carbon form by Outside Development, and housing advocacy by groups like the Open Communities Alliance, we began to explore the interstitial spaces in both the physical and the policy realms to identify possibilities for exaltation in our built environment.
Our resulting approach is twofold. With reverence to the environment in which we all live, we begin our investigation by reflecting on PLACE. Our offices are based in the Fair Haven neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut. We only needed to walk down the block to engage with both the struggles of poverty and innovation in strong communities. Once again, we look to the identify the physical (urban heat island, flood risk, etc.) and nonmaterial (social infrastructure, Zillow insights, affordable housing finance, renewable energy incentives, flood insurance, past and present plans, etc.) that define our neighborhood. We use this as a platform to explore new modes of development, be they fluid, mobile, elevated, or temporary.
Secondly, we begin to think of how these new modes may lead to new methods of building. What ways of construction might mediate the decoupling of home from house? How can construction serve those in need of quality homes, those seeking to leave the typical housing market in favor of vanning or digital nomadry? How can we distil the desire to decouple the sense of home from the physical house itself into space and objects. We call this our reflection on PIECE—or how we may put our values and new understanding into physical form. Here, we ideate on one particular physical solution, deployed in a variety of formats...
REFERENCES
1 Joseph Daniel (2019) 6 Maps That Show How Bad Energy Poverty Is and Reveal 2 Ways to Make it Better. The Union of Concerned Scientists.
2 Sarah DeWeerdt (2021) Researchers calculated how many lives energy-efficient buildings could save. Anthropocene.
MAPS
TOXIC SITES U.S. EPA Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM).
REAL ESTATE Heat Map: The Hottest Real Estate Markets in 2021. Real Estate News, Spark Blog.
EXTREME HEAT Temperature changes over the past 22 years from Climate Change and Extreme Heat: What You Can Do to Prepare. EPA and CDC.
FLOODING New Data Reveals Hidden Flood Risk Across America. The New York Times.
Project Framework
Heavily influenced by James Grier Miller, we draw on his thinking about extraterrestrial living to bring value back down to earth…
Planning for nonterrestrial living requires a reorientation of the long range strategic purposes and shortrange tactical goals and objectives of contemporary space programs. The primary focus must be on the human beings who are to inhabit the projected settlements. This implies a shift in thinking by space scientists and administrators so that a satisfactory quality of human life becomes as important as safety...Planners are challenged not only to provide transportation, energy, food, and habitats but also to develop social and ecological systems that enhance human life.
The Miller study is interesting in 2021, in the face of missions to Mars for the 0.01%. The idea that our environment here on earth is too far gone to save, that an entirely new ecology must be designed and built elsewhere, is haunting in equal measure for its wide view of the possible as it is for the narrow view of the valuable.
What we take from Miller’s wealth of resources on systems science are notational and analytical tactics—which we bridge with continental notions of value.
We accept that our research is undertaken with inherent value given to our communities and our ecology. As designers, we seek to always remember that the objects that we love are only as valuable as they are tools to serve these systems.
This is, above all, a passion project.
All drawings in lower section from the publication James Grier Miller (1991) Applications of living systems theory to life in space. NASA.
PI Gioia Connell
Designers Gioia Connell, Sam Golini, Eamon Roche
Advisors Jerome Boryca, Steve Metzger, William Morris, Shamila Zubairi
Management and Media Gioia Connell