The synergies are prototypes designed out of context. They question the norms within the protagonist’s rituals in order to generate new ideas for the architecture a home can offer. However, in order to test the potential of these ideas, there has to be a site and a context.
The comfort trilogy houses are disruptors of the norm, in which we disrupt current standards, notions, and preconceptions of living.
The three dwellings use the obstacles of the home – the kitchen, the bathroom, and the sofa – as new protagonists which take over the architecture of these terraced houses.
In the Comfort Trilogy, we make use of public programmes in a domestic setting to create extreme scenarios and extract information that can be applied to the real world, such as forms, datums, materials and street treatment. By bringing in and embracing the communal counterparts of kitchens and bathrooms, we are able to re-think the meaning of “home”, and what these social, public, and private interfaces may be. By allowing the previously determined obstacles of the home, the kitchen, bathroom and sofa to become the protagonists, they take over the home, prompting new visions of what a home could be.
The power of designing through disruption allows us to re-imagine everything, driven by the core design triggers, then extract findings to use to lobby government to redefine standards. The stigma surrounding the term “social housing” in the UK places a mark of disgrace on the typology. Social and affordable housing is designed to minimum standards which, in the eyes of a developer, become maximum dimensions as the design driver is profit, not comfort. The terrace is the most prevalent house typology in the UK, therefore enables this thesis to become grounded in the translation to the real world.
Want to find out more about the design of The Comfort Trilogy?…
THE FEEDING HOUSE
THE WET HOUSE
THE SOFT HOUSE
