There is a potential to develop high performance housing in a densely populated location to enhance the quality of life of the occupants.
IDEALLY:
Home is a place that provides comfort for the occupants; it’s a place that closely relate to everyone’s daily life.
Home is a place for the younger generation to grow up and the older generation to retire, therefore, the health of the living environment is a crucial factor.
Home is a place that everyone is willing to go back to either to spent their time alone or with the family.
BUT:
If the housing is too dense, too cramp and too small, who wants to spent time in such a space?
If you can never see the natural daylight or feel the natural breeze from the outside, will you be willing to go back to such a place after work?
Social environments, the neighbors, are important to our everyday life, but conflicts will start when there is no personal space or privacy inside high density housing.
For many others, there is no choice but to stay in their house for most time of the day, therefore, it is important to have healthy living condition provide by the built environment.
THEREFORE:
Is it possible to design housing in a densely populated location that is fair to every unit and everyone who lives in it?
Is it possible to have the housing design goes beyond one singular design?
What if the design can be partially prefabricated but with potential to apply to many places?
The high performance housings should not only provide comfort and quality of life to the occupants, but also become part of the larger sustainable built environment.
Quality of living condition and high performance housing should not only be affordable by the rich or the ones who lives in less populated locations; it should be a common standard for everyone in everyone location.
An interesting topic and one that certainly has had its share of attempts in the past. I have an article that I can send you on the history of various attempts at prefabricated or modular housing from the early 1900s to the present that you may find helpful as a sort of precedent study. If you are interested in getting into the nuts and bolts of prefabrication or modularity as model for larger scale replication definitely read the rest of Refabricating Architecture and look at some of the houses by Kieran Timberlake. Also, when you say high-quality living conditions and high-performance housing should be available to all regardless of location, this might lead you to a sort of multi-pronged prototype design based on climate as we did in Vivan's IPD class. It could be interesting to look into greater detail at multiple sites in different climates so that you not only have to design for distinct climatic conditions, but you also have to deal with some of the issues of site-specificity that you seem to be interested as well.
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