Housing / SCHOOL LECTURE SERIES N°6

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Event details

Date 26.11.2024
Hour 18:30
Speaker Plan Comùn
Location
Foyer SG
Category Conferences - Seminars
Event Language English
PLAN COMÙN
Architecture of Commons. La 'Maison Commune’


Maison Commune is a self-commissioned project, a built manifesto and an open process with its inhabitants. A small housing project that defines and highlights a sequence of shared spaces and the joy of everyday life at all levels.

Founded in 2012, Plan Común provides strategies to maximize and reinforce public and collective space -understood as a key aspect of architecture, regardless of its scale or program- by means of simple architecture tools, through a critical discourse, research, design and building. They are convinced that radical, basic -even silent- forms are more likely to be relevant and universal, and serve as a support for collective use and imagination.



This lecture is part of the lecture series "Affordable Housing: Six Exemplary Projects"

For the Fall Lecture Series, the School of Architecture at the EPFL has gathered six housing projects that address affordable housing in an exemplary way. Each guest will present one project and explain in detail what it means to produce good and affordable housing from commission to inhabitation. The aim of these lectures is to not stare too romantically at affordable housing, but rather to show how building affordable housing is both difficult and possible. The lecture series will be inaugurated by philosopher Emanuele Coccia - author of the acclaimed book The Philosophy of Home - who will introduce the house as a place where to imagine new and unprecedented communities that can challenge the way in which we build and inhabit housing today.

In the last decade, housing is back in the architects’ agenda. Yet, renewed interest in housing corresponds to a historical moment in which, more than ever, housing is considered a commodity to be bought, sold and rented rather than a space to inhabit. While in the hey-day of the welfare state, legions of architects – often employed by the state – had the chance to develop large-scale housing complexes, and to experiment with unprecedented possibilities in terms of typology and technology, today affordable housing is reduced to few interventions in a desolate sea of commodified urbanization. Yet, in spite of these hostile conditions, some recent housing projects have managed to reformulate what affordable housing can be in the 21th century. Although these projects do not match (yet) the scale and quantity of their 20th century predecessors, they are innovative especially in terms of how people can live together more collectively and by allowing new types of households

Practical information

  • General public
  • Free

Organizer

  • EPL Architecture
    Pier Vittorio Aureli 
    Sophie Delhay 

Contact

  • Elena Chiavi

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