City form is dependent on housing patterns. Urbanity stems from tuning how services are allocated, distributed, and pooled. From the row house to the collective housing block, amassing dwellings around collective infrastructure is an effective and frugal approach for streamlining services while deploying less space to accommodate more people. Sharing a wall is the most elemental way to breed commonalities from single family houses.    The semi-detached house unites two dwellings that can be clustered to form larger tracts. The party wall divides and defines ownership while red ..read more

  Industrialization impacted the design of everything from cars to utensils. Once, artisanally produced objects were democratized by repetitive ingredients, flows, supply chains and mechanized fabrication. These ideas reduced costs per unit while stimulating similar organizing principles in all sectors; products were made up of manufactured subcomponents that played specific roles in their functions. In architecture, rationalization played out using rigorous grids, component cataloguing, assembly details along with zoning of served and service elements. The service core, an integrated un ..read more

Small generalizable dwellings like the Levittown bungalow made famous in the United States, make creative use of simple organizations that serve inhabitants’ most basic needs in an affordable and productive fashion. Small houses respond to vital needs that have been interpreted since ancient times to include four basic components: protective roof, dry earthworks, clear demarcation of space, and a distinction between common and private areas for cooking, socializing, and sleeping. No architectural prototypes celebrate these inspiring principles of dwelling construction quite like Japanese trad ..read more

  Standing, sprawling, expansive, and anchored to a picturesque setting, the villa connotes luxurious detached dwellings. In the countryside and usually articulated to its landscape by some type of monumental relationship, the villa is associated with architectural opulence. Axiality, symmetry and summits were used in classic architecture, sometimes referred to as Palladian architecture, to showcase this dwelling typology’s potency by dominating its environment. Modern architects implemented infinite horizontal free space to achieve a similar goal. Large panes of glass, continuous open s ..read more

  The characteristic difficulty with tying standardized planning principles with architecture’s site specificness has long been a challenge for prefabrication and building industrialization. Vernacular, classic and modern homes have this required connection to locus in common. Climate, topography, and traditions inform regional particularities that disavow normalized designs or so it would seem. Notwithstanding this required singularity, even the most regionally specific architectural canons carry some generalizable principles; from modularity in traditional Japanese building, to stacking ..read more

The automobile transformed territorial planning; leaving the city for its surrounding suburbs or countryside fostered demand for quickly built homes and subsequently for leisure dwellings. A by-product of Henry Ford’s assembly-line principles applied to housing, the small serially produced bungalow on site or in a factory suburbanized America and converted house building into a promoter-based commercial transaction. Tracts of flattened sites were seeded with small reproducible fully-furnished homes. The bungalow, a one floor dwelling designed for the nuclear family is the symbol and central fo ..read more

  XS houses are normally associated with mobility or at least transportability.  They can be fabricated from lightweight materials to be easily lifted, carried or built like trailers on a mobile chassis ready to be towed to any site. Their flexibility and diminutive size do not impede their more permanent anchorage with regards to views or according to site conditions; even if the structure you are anchoring was originally sized for movement. These tiny houses can also be made from repurposed volumes meant for other applications.   Adapted shipping containers are a ca ..read more

The ability to carry a home to any setting according to basic needs, employment opportunities, economic challenges, for leisure or simply to respond to a transient lifestyle is an enduring vernacular in architecture. Rational dimensions and ease of assembly/disassembly matters when it comes to moveable dwellings. Freedom will always be dependent on lugging capacity, trail accessibility and material constraints.    The trailer home is the icon of movability and minimal dwelling aspirations. As early twentieth century automobile manufacturing improved, it inspired many to use this new ..read more

  Extra-small housing encompasses any dwelling that is small enough to be labelled as a tiny house or a micro dwelling, usually between 10 to 40 m2, roughly the size of one or two rooms. XS housing archetypes can be set up as single family or multifamily dwellings when aggregated as kernels in patterns highlighted by Japanese Metabolist architecture. Geared for mobility, they abrogate permanent anchoring associated with conventional housing construction. Micro-dwellings can be both self-propelled and hitched. Today’s comprehensively commodified culture associated with intellige ..read more

The association of housing supply with offsite construction has been described as a union of reason. Notwithstanding prefab's potential considering the high levels of repeatability, the industry is still characterized by one-off projects - prototypes - even though details, components, arrangements, and materials affirm consistency. For varied scopes and scales the argument in favour of offsite is increased affordability, sustainability, productivity, and quality through systematized processes. Current design digitalization supplemented by democratized digital fabrication technologies sug ..read more