Digital Nightfall on 13/9/2007 at 15:37

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This is my 10th year of college. My only disclaimer is that I "took two years off" though my transcripts tell a slightly different story. I hide them. It's also my 3rd year in grad school (though only my 2nd as a grad student; gotta love bureaucracy) and my final 'regular' design class before Thesis. It will be my first semester-long design project (and last, as Thesis is one year, from January to December, with an obligatory "summer off") and maybe my most awesome one. No, I don't mean "I will do the most awesome on this one!" but rather, this is a really awesome design project the professor has given us.

Vicas (Imagine: middle aged, balding Indian man (that's as in a man from India, not native American) with a PhD or two.)

He has essentially charged us with designing our "dream home" - the stubborn cliche of the architecture student before they actually go to school, but with an added layer of "this should take you at least four months" ... It's the dream home of you and your 25-30 best friends and their families. <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohousing>Cohousing</a>. Or not. Cohousing is just a suggestion; I can take it or leave it. But the crux of the concept, something which I think many of my classmates are failing to grasp, is that he really wants us to personalize this project; we're not designing a neat place for several dozen typical demographics to occupy which meets their basic statistical and expected needs based on occupational and recreational tendencies of the area. I started to fall into that hole at first too, but when I made an about-face, Vicas became much more interested in what I had to say.

Here's what I had to say ...

This is a place I am designing for me and my closest friends. I don't have 30 closest friends, but it's a start. As different as we all are, we have one common thread, and it's a strong one: we're all complete geeks. It's impossible for us to have a get-together without us all bringing our laptops and having a mini-lan-party, watching some form of geeky entertainment, be it Battlestar Galactica or Robot Chicken, or the Team Fortress 2 videos over and over. We cover our walls with geeky posters, we all collect random "cool things" and half of us are into some form of martial art, half of us spend way too much time working on our cars, and half of us have some form of "studio" where we spend most of our day. This should be the model for our co-housing home. I outlined several "key points" that the design should revolve around for him. There's alot of overlap between these, and all are kept fairly vague. Things like movies, games, books, music, cars, and kung fu all fall into one or more of these categories.

Technology. Entertainment. Collections. Creativity. Obsession. Introversion.

Like I said, he became very interested in what I was explaining. So, I am definitely going ahead with this. But so far that's just a worm's eye view of a very small group of very old friends. I'm going to be designing for about 30 families. This is not some type of super-dorm or anything like that; this is a place where one would expect to live for the rest of their life. People will come and go, but with a core group that always remains the same.

And what if these 30 families were all people from TTLG? What do you guys think of this? What if we all lived together? What would it be like? How should I design it? What would be in it? How would it be laid out? What would day to day life be like? How would it be for our littlest children, and our most wizened elderly sages? How about the occasional stubborn spouse who "just doesn't get it" but we love them anyway?

And no, I am not putting it on the bottom of the sea; though that would be cool.

Digital Nightfall on 13/9/2007 at 15:58

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Stitch gets the award for the absurdly hilarious typo detection. ;)

Digital Nightfall on 13/9/2007 at 16:23

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<i>Hahahaha</i>, yes ... but the good news is that this place will be in a part of town where it really doesn't matter how much noise we make. It's pretty much surrounded by warehouses and vacant lots.

Annakis on 13/9/2007 at 16:44

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very interesting project

To what extend design could or should dictate how privacy vs. communal experience is balanced? And how about different life styles, different sleeping habits? Sounds sort of eutopian project. I guess design itself can't create harmony between people, but it could give breathing space when needed.

I'd imagine this might be first and last time you have absolute creative freedom so better make best use of it. What was the latin term for this architectures ideal btw?

super-ttlg-dorm, haha, that'd be fun to see. go wild

SubJeff on 13/9/2007 at 17:15

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It'd be Lord of the Flies!