The ‘Urban Housing Lab’ studies answers to the pressing challenges for future urban habitation – shifting demographics, societal segregation, and climate change. It discusses strategies for inclusive, cohesive habitation and relational coexistence and caters to the proliferating tendencies towards civic engagement, participation and sharing. With its roots in practice the lab pursues a design-led approach on deeply intertwined tracks – design research, publication and curation, and education.
Anticipating multi-faceted uncertainties, the lab is deeply interested in investigating hybrid typologies open to responsive programming beyond housing and new agencies of decision-making. Seeing architecture as open-ended process, the lab aims for spatial and operational forms that are responsive to far-reaching demographic, technological, and societal transformations. Respective concepts for an exemplary ‘Future Hybrid High-Rise Commune’ will be shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021‘How will we live together’, as part of the Singapore Pavilion ‘to gather: The Architecture of Relationships’.
Drawing connections between social and environmental sustainability, the lab also investigates means to de-carbonize both construction and operation of buildings – with concepts for climate-responsive layouts, hybrid materiality, flexibility and circularity. Engaging with forward looking design thinking and decision-making processes the lab pursues the potentials afforded by computational tools – to simulate climatic comfort, to conduct life-cycle-analysis and to measure the resilience of designs to respond to changing requirements and urges for participation.
Conducting integrative typological research for seminal publications such as the ‘Floor Plan Manual Housing’ the ‘Urban Housing Lab’ analyses innovative design solutions and contextualizes them in a holistic narrative on the essential historic, technological, and societal shifts in urban habitation.
The ‘Urban Housing Lab’ seeks interdisciplinary cooperation to investigate integrative answers beyond thematic and institutional silos and collaborates with expertise in engineering, computation, and social design fields. Curating events like the ‘Future Urban Habitation Symposium’in Singapore and editing respective scholarly publications for Wiley, the lab pushes for cross-disciplinary debates on the transformative agendas it works on – ‘Inclusive Urbanism’, ‘Typology for Building Communities’, ‘Adaptive & Responsive Habitation’, and ‘New Tools, new Approaches’.