Out of Home: Somewhere in a Collective Dwelling

Thesis Statement

Physical environment could affect people’s behavior; therefore architects carefully constructed it through buildings and infrastructures, to shape norms and codes in a society. In the case of a dwelling, it provides identity for the people. A home is a place where people get the sense of attachment and gives the foundations for people to lay their life upon.

But this provision is not taken as serious for some types of dwellings as the others. During my visits to a number of orphanages earlier, I had the feeling that these buildings are perceived merely as shelters. They are lacking the sense of attachment that the typology should provide to their inhabitants. For the child who is unable to settle down himself psychologically in the intimate world of the home, nor getting the sense of possession of their own private space within the collectiveness, he feels incapable to hold onto a foundation. “He remains an eternal stranger on earth, not bound to any particular place, always on his way, but never reaching his goal.” Otto Friedrich Bollnow writes, dwelling is “decisive with regard to man’s relationship with the world in general.”⁸

The thesis would therefore question the relationship between architecture and identity. In specific, when a person loses the place that he may claim to be his“Home”, and was allocated to a“Somewhere”,staying with a group of strangers, how would it be? And how should that “Collective Dwelling” be?

Through the study of human psychology and their relations with architecture, the project intends to theorize about the spatial and hierarchical qualities that the Collective Dwelling should possess. The rendering of such place out of home would not be a replication of a normal home, where “family” is the basic unit. It would be a place that attempts a new definition of the relationship between the group of strangers staying together and the space containing them. It is a “mutual relation between I and You” that Aldo van Eyck emphasized as well as a “therapeutic-mental relationship” that Richard Neutra suggested. Finding keys to retrieve the sense of attachment of people to a place, the thesis design should achieve a redefined hierarchy between individuality, micro-communities and the larger whole, as well as a refined space dealing with enclosures, exposures and transitions.

Annotated Bibliography & Precedents

1. Humanist Rebel: Inbetweening in a Postwar World, Aldo van Eyck, 1999
2. Aldo Van Eyck: Writing, Aldo van Eyck, 1947-1998
3. Architecture: Meaning and Place, Christopher Norberg-Schulz, 1986
4. Space & place: theories of identity and location, Edited by Erica Carter, James Donald & Judith Squires, 1993
5. The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch, 1972
6. Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture,Sylvia Lavin, 2004
7. Between buildings and people, Stephen Willats, 1996
8. The architecture of happiness, Alain de Botton,2006
9. Human space, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, 1963

Design Methodology

Contextual Theory Studies
– Studies of human psychology on sense of attachment and their relationship with space
– Studies of theories of identity and their relationship with spatial qualities
– Studies of theories of community and individuality

Case Studies and Comparisons
– Analysis on precedent projects about identity, community and psychology
– Compare and analyze different models of collective dwellings
– Interview and investigate current situation of orphanages

Spatial Testings
– Sort out and examine different spatial qualities found related to the issue of sense of attachment
– Make physical models to test out different concepts of spatial arrangements and hierarchical divisions

Site finding and orphanage design
– Identify a site (preferably in China)
– Analyze site context, both physical and psychological
– Design an orphanage that renders a true collective dwelling out of home through delicate spatial arrangements, volumetric divisions, tectonic forms, programmatic distribution and material selections