Housing a Family: Designing for Multigenerational Urban Living

My interest in the study and practice of architecture is as a creative tool or solution to many of the challenges in our daily lives and communities.To not just create beautiful space that brings joy to be and exist in, but also space that, through design, addresses problems and helps make life easier and more livable. When exploring an idea for a thesis, I wanted to find design solutions for many of the problems associated with housing and the changing space needs or requirements throughout one's family life-cycle. For over a century the single family home with the nuclear family has been the quintessential American cultural housing ideal. (Think of all the suburban developments and houses with perfectly manicured lawns and identical rows of winding streets stretching for miles and miles out into the countryside). However, in my opinion, this form of housing is quite wasteful in terms of space, material, family, and community resources. It segregates and separates us from our extended family reserves, costing us money, time and most importantly the daily support we might otherwise have from those closest to us: family. I recognize that I am proposing rethinking longstanding cultural understandings about our most basic everyday functions: where and how we live. Part of my architectural exploration includes a question that I know I can never fully answer in these pages: can design lead culture? More specifically, can I or "we" as architects create a desire for something new in our culture through design? Not a new toy or gadget, but a new way of thinking about our future and how we want to live?

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Architecture

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Architecture

Department dc:contributor.department

Architecture

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Bruegger, Fletcher Cork

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Piedmont-Palladino, Susan C.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Lever, David G.
• Kelsch, Paul J.

• Architecture
• Design
• housing
• multigenerational
• living
• family
• row house

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:12308

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/79671