| dc.description.abstract | The North American suburban house is continually changing, a byproduct of cultural and technological development. Within the past hundred years, the house has experienced countless iterations in design as new technologies and cultural desires persisted. In 2017, the suburban house is largely constructed from principles absorbed from the ‘baby boomer’ generation, when larger houses were required to accommodate distinct generational behaviour, privacy, and security. A new generation consisting of ‘Gen Y’ and the ‘Millennials’ are currently transforming the housing market, and becoming the dominant group of property owners. These generations were raised in a global society; they are constantly connected with new technologies and social media. This has not only begun to impact the design of the house and its internal facets, but also the expectations regarding the location, transportation, and connectedness of communities. This ever-changing reality of the house, will cause preexisting suburban neighbourhoods to be less desirable compared to inner-city neighbourhoods and give rise to suburban developments marketed for these new generations.
Given these realities, this thesis explores how to create a series of tactical interventions to repurpose the suburban house for a connected generation. New technologies are used create homebased economies and services, shifting the programmatic and zoning mono-functionality into a more complex and self-suffcient system. These interventions are situated in underused spaces, designed to add needed program and activity to homogeneous cul-de-sac blocks that will allow for a more connected physical and digital community. These iterations will serve as an initial experiment, thereby showing the possibilities of how these houses can be adapted while encouraging conversation on how we can improve the habitation of existing communities constructed on archaic principles. | en |
