Home/ Flux

Abstract

Successive 20th-century New Zealand Governments promoted the detached singlefamily house on a quarter acre section in a garden suburb as the basic unit of town planning, and the nuclear family as the basic unit of our society. This normative suburban vision of house and home persists as a popular collective aspiration, despite its practical failure. We find ourselves in a housing crisis, with increased levels of homelessness and overcrowding, alongside declining rates of home ownership and rent affordability. Those who do not already own property are progressively more vulnerable to sudden changes in address, contributing to a widespread diasporic condition. Such precariousness – previously reserved for the marginalized and displaced – is now the millennial generation’s new normal. For refugees and millennials alike, ‘home’ is not necessarily localized to the house, but increasingly dispersed as a series of sites and objects scattered across physical and digital space. What opportunities does this ‘crisis’ provide to reassess the meaning of ‘home’, and the role that architecture plays in a more distributed definition of homemaking? Taking an Auckland site in transition, where 82 state houses are being sold and relocated to make way for a private development, I explore the political and ideological foundations upon which these houses were built, along with the pressures contributing to their imminent un-building. Rather than a radical rejection of the old, I adopt a durational approach to domestic occupation that enables multiple ideals to coexist. Avoiding a tabula rasa approach – both architecturally and ideologically – I ask what vestiges of state housing remain useful and relevant? Built in, and from the residue of, a garden suburb, is a series of personal and shared domestic spaces scattered through private, commercial and communal space. Considered as an experimental housing development funded by Housing New Zealand, the project celebrates State houses as enduring icons while challenging and reconfiguring their ideological foundations. The proposition designs specifically for transience, fragmentation and distributed homemaking, but acknowledges nostalgia, familiarity and DIY culture as enduring ‘homely’ values.