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Sweat, Pant, Blush: Three Houses of Three Tomorrows

Part 2 Project 2020
Sam Davies
Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) | UK
The project explores the social and architectural stigmas that surround the notion of ‘comfort’ through the design of three houses for three clients with different attitudes to comfort.

In the face of climate change, professional discourse around comfort and the home centres around the use of innovations in construction and technology to maintain current comfort expectations while reducing emissions. This project instead contends that any attempt to amend the ways we make ourselves comfortable must simultaneously seek to amend our relationships with everyday domestic spaces and objects.

Drawing from the local history of experimental ‘Houses of Tomorrow’, a cul-de-sac of three houses of three alternative tomorrows is proposed at the edge of Palm Springs and the surrounding desert. Within each house, everyday domestic conventions are dismantled to suit a different attitude to comfort and the home. This exposes the power of these conventions in determining our understandings of what is comfortable, homely and safe.

A definitive solution to the issue of domestic sustainability is intentionally avoided. Instead, multiple futures hold the architect responsible, not for the development of new technologies, but of new ideas of what it means to be ‘at home.’




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2020
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