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’.

RESEARCH: Floor Plan Manual Housing

Project compilation, case studies

Essays 

RESEARCH: Building Types online

RESEARCH:Future Urban Habitation (Wiley-Blackwell)

RESEARCH: Sustainable Design: Comparative LCA Modelling for Adaptive Housing Typologies

Design-based and Data-driven LCA

Resilience to Change/Participation 

Future Hybrid Highrise Commune (HHC)

Hybrid Construction / Circularity & Flexibility

Venice Biennale, 2021

 

Singapore Good Design / SG Mark Award 2019

RESEARCH:  Sustainable Design: Urban Residential High-Rise Typology    

Case Studies Circulation 

 

Case studies unit ribbon (samples) 

Design Study

‘Future Urban Habitation’ Symposium 2019

‘Open Building’ Bras Bash Complex

RESEARCH: Sustainable Design: Performative Typology

Case Studies (selection) 

TEACHING: Core Studio 3 Urban Living

Urban Housing Typologies

‘Jalan Kukoh Transformers’

2020 Digital FUTURES WORLD : “Decarbonisation at the Bund” 

Sustainable Design Option Studio 2 ‘Future Generic’

Sustainable Design Option Studio 2 ‘Future Generic’

Chinatown Chinese New Year Celebrations, Year of the Horse

Sunlove Marsiling Senior Activity Centre: Inside Out, Student project

TU Berlin – Teaching

SELECTED PRACTICE: Housing Coop Schliemannstrasse

Housing Coop Schliemannstrasse

Multi-Generational Housing Weisestrasse

Housing Coop Pappelallee

Multi-Generational Housing Ottersgraben

Urban Revitalization London-Southwark

Adaptive Re-use Bremen Granary

Rural Revitalization Camp Reinsehlen

Urban Revitalization/Adaptive Re-use Berlin-Ostbahnhof

Communal – Fremtidens Foreningshus

Communal – Townhall + Theatre Ijsselstein

Communal – Hamburger Bahnhof ‘Berlin North’

Urban Scale – Salzburg Unipark Nonntal

Urban Scale – Parkquartier Hamburg Friedrichsberg