Iowa State Urban Housing Studio, Spring ’23

EVERYBODY’S FAULT: Inhabiting the Quake

The pandemic has challenged the separation of work and home to a remarkable degree, exposing fissures in age-old assumptions at multiple scales, from daily routines to urban planning. Multi-family housing offers a way into the current tectonic slippage between ‘life’ and ‘work’ in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the housing crisis is most palpable. Single family zoning, which makes up 40% of San Francisco’s land area, has reached a boiling point of contention among urban planners, architects, residents, and local authorities. Meanwhile, new architectural typologies and urban infrastructures are needed to support the Bay Area’s technology-intensive industries; a key component of what has been termed the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution.’

Architects are trained to develop formal strategies for an idealized world. Yet the conditions out of which buildings develop are complicated and messy. These ‘defining’ circumstances evolve, if not wholly transform, during a building’s life. For architecture to survive and contribute to the world as we find it, architects need a design sensibility that marries the ideal, the circumstantial, and the inevitable. We need agility to address collective ambition with informed solutions. We need to be less concerned with how things look and more focused on what they do.

The studio will take cues from the recently released Plan Bay Area 2050, a $1.4 trillion vision for a more equitable and resilient future that outlines strategies targeting housing, the economy, transportation, and the environment. We will proceed along strands of Infrastructural, Industrial, and Landscape Urbanisms, engaging the spatial implications of deeper environmental systems to weave architecture and locale into an adaptable metropolis. These issues are freshly relevant in the contemporary collision of urban growth and ecological responsibility.