| Buying a home, as the recent sub-prime mortgage crisis illustrates, is no longer about providing a lifestyle for our families, but a game of trade. Houses are built to maximize the number of rooms and size of garage because those are first things appraisers evaluate. Space has become a commodity. Rooms are given definitions and names, square footages are filled with redundant purposes and intentions, boundaries are secured and defended, in order to give space a value. The whole, the idea of home, the sanctuary, is therefore fragmented into parts that can no longer be reconstituted.
Our goals for this semester will be to re-invent a value system for the American home, to rethink the role of economy and its relationship to ourselves, our cities, and our environment, density, communication and transportation technologies, construction and fabrication advancements…etc back into its core, such that the system can co-evolve and adapt.
We will be experimenting with an approach I am calling Parametric Regionalism. Through the use of new 3D modeling tools, architects have been able to understand space not as defined by Cartesian points, but as a series of folded and unfolded topological surfaces. Architectural elements such as windows, doors, walls, floors, and no longer discrete elements but can now be related as topological variations on a single surface. Since these variations exist in the same topological space, they can also be described cohesively in algebraic form. The advantage of algebraic geometry is its ability to translate external date to the 2-manifold space of the architecture. Parametric Regionalism is then an approach that seeks for unique local properties and converges them into the architecture’s topological space, making variations purposeful to its locale.
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