2022 Spring International Design Studio (Hirano Studio)

HOUSE OF IDEAL

Period: 2022 Spring Semester（2022 April – 2022 July）

Brief: House as a projected ideal
House as a building type has been treated as an object of ideal throughout history. Marc-Antoine Laugier’s primitive hut, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, and Peter Eisenman’s series of houses show how the house can be used as a medium to represent a specific architectural idea. Commercialized houses by housing manufacturers projected the ideal image of the family and lifestyle of the time such as the nuclear family in the postwar period. Gordon Matta-Clark sliced a suburban house with a chainsaw in “Splitting” which can be seen as a critique of the ideal image of the family and lifestyle of the consumer society projected onto the house.

Toy house as materialized ideals
Ideals projected onto the house have to undergo some level of compromises due to the functional, structural, budget, and site constraints when physicalized as buildings. Eisenman discusses this issue by coining the concepts of deep and surface structure.
Toy houses are also a projection of the ideals of family and lifestyle, however because they are materialized as toys rather than buildings, they are free from the constraints of architecture thus can be seen as direct representations of the ideals.

Renderporn as a purely visualized ideal
“Renderporn”, one of the recent trends on SNS, refers to a photorealistic CGI of an imaginary space, often with beds, sofas, tables, bathtubs, and other furnishings that alludes to residence space. As pointed out by critics, renderporn is characterized by a sense of weightlessness, silence, the absence of living things, and uncanny.
Becoming viral amidst the worldwide lockdown of the pandemic, renderporn can be seen as a pure visual imagery of the projection of the extremely purified ideal of residence space conceived by those who are confined in their physical houses during the lockdown.

This studio will explore a new aesthetic of house (and architecture) by investigating the ideal of house through looking at toy houses and renderporns.

Detail：Studio Biref

+2022 May 24th Midterm Review
Guest critic: TSUGAWA Eri (Tokyo University of Arts)