The Seven Houses of Man

Abstract

By considering the forces and events that cause individuals and families to move from one household to the next, between the city and the country, between one country and another, this project examines housing in Ireland, seeking to understand how these events feed back into the design and provision of housing. Seven key moments are identified in the Ireland's housing- past, present, future. This is narrated through the story of an extended fictionalized Irish family and is explained through the drawing of a family tree across seven generations. Seven house types are identified to discuss significant changes.
The first four house types, moments are historical– the agrarian cottage, the Anglo-Irish big house, Suburban semi-detached house and the one-off. The survey of these first four moments results in the territorial artifact of the rural Irish village, consisting of a mix of these types. The project specifically addresses such villages along the Atlantic corridor and speculates new forms of communality through the three new types introduced. The fifth house is reactivated as productive space for working. Within a new social reality where individuals work from home this new type creates a large enclosed village green with a perimeter of single houses. The sixth house is a self-build house within a dense allotment system, designed to contain sprawl and protect agricultural activities. The seventh moment re-designs vacant houses around a cul-de-sac within the existing suburban estates converting them into sheltered housing and co-working spaces.
It is within these house types – past, present and future that the story of the family operates in. Projective designs will be layered within this framework and subject to the same analyses and presentation techniques as their historical precedents. Placed alongside one another, the method of the project seeks to collapse, or at least interrogate, traditional divisions within the production and representation of architecture: technical and narrative; as-built and as-used; historical and contemporary etc.