Domestic Arrangements

Professor Mauricio Pacheco’s Housing Research Studio, HOMEGROWN Domestic Arrangements, asked its students to consider Toronto’s own housing typology through various diagrammatic lenses before expanding this study beyond our homegrown borders. What began as an introspective study of our own homes, quickly became an exhaustive study of 99 different residential buildings around the world. Information about each building’s structure, mechanical systems, circulation, and unit arrangements, as well as typical floor plan and axonometric drawings, were conveyed through a series of six simple diagrams. The resulting 594 drawings were compiled into a gallery exhibit and booklet.

Our individual research expanded upon the collective database that the studio had produced, challenging each of us to select one of the six diagrammatic studies and dissect it from a more creative angle. I chose to explore the residential unit, bringing it into three dimensions and assigning it a tactile quality based on the building’s structural system. Inspired by the work or Rachel Whiteread, these sculptural explorations sought to invert our understanding of the “unit” of space, instead conveying its space as an abstracted form of solid material.

Devoid of the constraints of the building’s architecture, these unit sculptures are a more accurate portrayal of the people that populate the building itself. They have quite literally become building blocks, lending a more playful and human experience than the architecture of the buildings themselves.