As housing shortage has to do with the insufficient supply of inexpensive houses and limited capacity for offering qualitative demands of the actual users, there is a discrepancy between what the current housing market provides and how new target groups want to live.
Especially, the existing post-war houses show how they were originally designed solely for the nuclear family, where the currently predominant target groups such as single-person households, young professional, the elderly, and student do not fit in.
One of the reasons is that the meaning of home during the twentieth century, when the post-war residential projects were realized, does not match with the one in the current housing situation.
For example, the meaning of home in the twentieth century was grounded to a physical unit of a ‘house’ where ‘home’ implied the (nuclear) family life apart from social, public, and working life. Consequently, the meaning of the home around the nuclear housing has been strictly divided by the dichotomous logic between home and work and set as the default setting around majority of domestic architecture.
Now, as the meaning of home has become less grounded in the physical space of a ‘house,’ ‘home’ can be defined by emotions, memories, and rituals. Therefore, the meaning of home today is more flexible and ambiguous, from where home can be a place to be productive as an integrated workspace. For instance, the kitchen and the balcony become improvised offices while simultaneously serving the traditional domestic functions. These new forms of productive home-life imply an indistinguishability between work and home.
Despite the radical changes over the last fifty years in living society, the traditional form of the home is still the most prevalent idea. Because the architecture in the housing market still reproduces the existing parameters of which the home is traditionally conceptualized, the architecture perpetuates the tradition in its spatial organization. Therefore, it is significant not only domestically but also societally to examine how this shift of the meaning of home has influenced the residential environment as it lost its initial characteristic as it had.
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Dictionaries often define “Megastructure” as “a very large multi-story building or complex” (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 2022). Somebody who first encounters the term must value such a definition; although it does not reflect the actual meaning that architects attach to the term. In the mid-twentieth century, the concept of Megastructure in architecture and urbanism has been developed into a much broader sense. Even though the idea of visionary mega-movements such as Japanese Metabolism and the British Archigram has been abandoned since mid-70’s, it has remained as a progressive concept in the field of architecture and urbanism. Integrating the two architecturally contrasting conditions together, such as large/small, permanent/transient, Megastructure transforms the uncertainty to architectural design. Thus, it raises the question of indeterminacy and adaptability over time. Therefore, the research asks how differently or similarly the ascent and decadence of the Megastructure trend is perceived back then and now. The final question to ask is: whether the concept of Megastructure is still relevant in the twenty-first century in the field of architecture and urbanism. ... Read more