HOUSING AS HOUSING

Simply put, ‘housing-as-housing’ claims that housing is not real estate; that housing is meant to be used and not held as property or exchanged for profit.

The declaration goes beyond the conventional call for the provision of more affordable dwellings. Instead, it demands for the decommodification of housing and the advancement of domestic models beyond the single-family home. In addition to making this statement in words, this book presents the concept of “housing-as-housing” through architectural drawing and design. The mantra like refrain is announced in the plans, elevations, sections, and axonometric projections that describe a series of housing prototypes that explicate domestic space not bound by the dictates of real estate.

The title of this book refers to “art-as-art”, an adage coined by the painter Ad Reinhardt. He elaborated this ideology in a series of poems, which repeat the phrase “art-as-art” relentlessly, and through painting. For the final 30 years of his career, Reinhardt painted deeply saturated, almost monochrome, gridded black canvases. Made to contest the violation of art by forces of capital, the ‘Black Paintings’ could not be mechanically reproduced and were unflinchingly abstract.

The method of paint application also imbued the canvases with a corporeality that challenged the viewer to withdraw from the temporality of the everyday and engage in concentrated observation. Translating Reinhardt’s maxim into the language of architecture is not an effort to reclaim a false disciplinary autonomy. Rather, the intention is to make an unequivocable, full-throated statement from within architecture against real estate power. Within a broader array of strategies, the project acknowledges that orthographic drawing and design are necessary tools of dissent and sites for the excavation of possibility, given the grip that private property and real estate hold over architecture. The book suggests different ways to relate to housing and hopefully encourages others to join in the chorus of ‘housing-as-housing’.