Students considered the idealized form of the city house, from ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, Baroque Paris, and early 20th-century Modernists. We explored unit types, looking at the ways that livability, efficiency, and market demographics compete with poetic ideas of placemaking, shelter and orientation. Students analyzed precedent housing projects for contextual approach, programmatic response, and architectural vocabulary. Aggregation of units and building massing on the site integrated ideas of place, orientation, and collective / individual experiences, from the scale of the city to the unit. Façades explored the vertical surface, including expression of wall or frame, skull or mask. What is revealed of the interior? How does the street wall participate in the public life of the street?
