House [verb]: A Zine Exhibition
House [verb], a zine exhibition concluding the fall 2025 edition of the elective ‘Everything is Housing’, opened on November 25th in the DAS atrium!
As part of AAHA’s cross-Canada ‘Superstudio’ (external link) , 48 MArch & fourth-year BArchSc students explored a series of self-selected ‘big questions’ about today’s world of housing over the semester, culminating in an intentional and thought-provoking show of their work.
Team Everything had four main tasks this term:
1. Questions on Housing: crafting precise, individual questions to investigate over the semester.
2. Meditations on Housing: a deep dive into scholarly and cultural research about their topics.
3. Arguments on Housing: taking a stance on their subject, in response to their chosen big question.
4. Illustrations on Housing: depicting their storylines and thesis statements visually, so that a first-year student can understand it and a long-time prof might learn something new.
Their questions included:
- How much space does a person need to live?
- How can we proactively plan for multi-generational living?
- How can we design buildings to be adaptively reused in the future?
- How can transitional housing be designed to foster dignity?
- Why build for resilience when housing demands are urgent?
In a housing crisis, climate crisis, homelessness crisis, and crisis of connection in an alienated world, their thesis statements interrogate the question: how should we approach the act of housing?
Housing is increasingly becoming a process: we as a people need to build more homes while also polluting less, all while supporting the most vulnerable among us, all while navigating an increasingly alienated world. In these circumstances, we have no option but to challenge the status quo. We designers and city builders must never shy away from asking the big questions.
Thanks to Ouroboros Deconstruction for sourcing the reclaimed wood for the display house [noun]. The house [verb] exhibition will return as part of DAS’s year-end show in May.